In recent years the Kingdom of Tonga has featured prominently in news reports as a rather sad joke. In Tonga, where political authority is dependent on inherited rank rather than on talent and achievement, criticism of the government has been officially deemed to smack of disloyalty to the nation and to its traditions. In a reversal of noblesse oblige, the favoured few blatantly enjoy privileges on behalf of the many. This is an arrangement ready-made to support an administrative system that seems to be reconciled to charges of corruption, cronyism and inefficiency, yet which is putatively sanctioned by faka Tonga (indigenous custom). Hence the indignant opposition of the oligarchy to the pro-democracy movement and the fiasco over the banning of the Taimi’o Tonga newspaper.
The reasons for this state of affairs are deep-seated but readily discernable. The main one is that power resides with Taufa’ahau Tupou IV (king since 1965) and that he exercises it in association with a small class of hereditary nobles. None of these people is accountable to the 130,000 commoners who tenant their lands and who supply food for feasts—and who constitute the bulk of the population. Thus it is that wild notions (like making money by storing nuclear waste or by incinerating other countries’ used car tyres) and misguided policies (like selling passports and appointing a Court Jester) can be countenanced without embarrassment.
There was a time when things were very different, when Tonga could be looked to for setting worthy examples rather than for offering cautionary tales. Taufa’ahau Tupou I, commonly known as King George I, unified Tonga under his rule in 1852. Well before Italy (in 1870) and Germany (in 1871) were fashioned from collections of principalities into nation states, Tonga had shown the way. Then, in his law code of 1862, King George not only freed commoners from serfdom and curbed the power of the chiefs but made education compulsory for all children. That was eight years ahead of England, ten years ahead of the State of Victoria and 15 years before it became so in New Zealand. In 1875 George enacted a written constitution which entrenched ‘freedom of speech and newspaper for ever’ (sect.7). By such means and by international diplomacy the king (who lived till 1893) worked successfully to ensure that Tonga, alone among the Pacific Islands, maintained its political independence.
It also prospered. In 1909 one commentator calculated that with an annual