The French team stood at their end of the field, not quite sure what to make of the spectacle before them. Their rivals, knees bent, eyes rolling, tongues protruding, were beating their chests in unison to an ear-splitting roar—a blood curdling challenge. The French, arms hanging limply over each other’s shoulders, could only stare. This is no rugby match—not to the New Zealand team, anyway. This is war.
At least that’s what it looks like. The truth is, this particular haka—Kamate, Kamate (‘Tis Death, ‘Tis Death)—is more a symbol of national pride by those who perform it and just as equally by the spectators.
The haka, or posturing dance, was used in days of old as a way to psyche up and prepare warriors before going into battle. But contrary to popular opinion, Kamate, Kamate is not haka. Kamate, Kamate is a legend of a great Ngati Toa warrior chief, Te Rauparaha—strategist second to none.
Te Rauparaha was fleeing from battle, chased by a war party out to kill him. He chanced upon a relative in her garden digging kumara, or Maori sweet potato.
The story goes that he hid inside a kumara pit while she sat astride covering the chief with her skirt. To the Maori, a man’s head is most sacred and it never dawned on the warriors that any man, let alone a great chief, would place himself beneath female genitals.
He lived to tell his story, forever commemorated in New Zealand’s history books, on the Internet and retold over and over in thousands of performances all over the world.
It is so popular, toddlers cut their teeth on it and the hearts of parents well with pride as the young ones open up their lungs, eyes protruding and tongues lunged in an effort to impress.
Oh, how proud the Maori nation must have been when the haka was first performed overseas by fresh-off-the-boat first time travellers.
When they played a first test against Wales in the early 1900s, the Littleton Times wrote, “The war cry went well, and the crowd listened and watched in pleased silence, and thundered their approval at its close. Then the Welsh team started their national anthem. Forty thousand Welsh voices caught up the noble strain, and from every corner of the ground rose the deep, swelling, heart-stirring chorus, Mae henwlad fy nhadau—Land of my Fathers.”
On tour in America in 1913, the New Zealand rugby team, the All Blacks, gave a haka before disembarking to a crowd yelling approval.
By the time World War I began in 1914, Kamate, Kamate, was firmly established as part of New Zealand rugby in test matches and through the ferocity of the mighty All Blacks rugby matches, Kamate, Kamate, rose to the ranks of a war.
