Proud Partners

Two of New Zealand's most cherished articles of national pride are her champion rugby football team and the amity with which her 2,000,000-plus white settlers and the archipelago's 150,000 brown-skinned Maori (rhymes roughly with dowry) people live side by side. In a world deep in a turmoil, from Rhodesia to Indonesia, New Zealand's two prides combined last week in a heartening spectacle.

New Zealand holds the rugby crown, symbol of supremacy in the rugger playing world. Perennial challenger for the title is the Union of South Africa's all-white Springbok team. The Springboks journeyed to New Zealand in 1956, cheerfully played--and were soundly beaten--by the All-Blacks, as New Zealand's national team composed of both whites and Maoris is ironically called. This year the All-Blacks are due to play the Springboks in South Africa. When New Zealand's Rugby Union announced that, to spare Maori players embarrassment from apartheid policies, only white members of the All-Blacks would make the trip, all New Zealand was aroused.

White Protests. Spokesmen for eight religious denominations urged that the tour be abandoned if Maoris could not go. Students protest-marched, white Wellingtonian surgeon Rolland organized protest committees all over the islands, and 100,000 people signed petitions.

Significantly, the bulk of the outcry has come from white New Zealanders, a fact reflecting how much the Maoris themselves have done to create in New Zealand perhaps the happiest multiracial situation anywhere on the globe. Handsome, intelligent Polynesians who settled in New Zealand long before Dutch Navigator Abel Tasman discovered the islands in 1642, the Maoris seemed well on the way to extinction in the late 19th century. Exploitation, Western diseases, above all a disastrous series of frontier wars in the 1860s, had reduced their population by 1901 to 45,000.

Explicit Equality. But about that time a group of mission-educated Maoris formed the Young Maori party, led by Apirana Ngata, later to be knighted by King George V. Ngata's land reforms contributed to a spectacular Maori comeback that continues to the present day. The Maori population tripled within 60 years.

Maori soldiers distinguished themselves in two world wars, and the long list of able Maoris in the professions and public life ranges from sometime Yale Anthropologist Sir Peter Buck to Oxford-educated Charles Bennett, New Zealand's current envoy to Malaya. By nature a friendly, winning and athletic people, the Maoris, in the process of pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, so won the affection and respect of New Zealand whites that equality is not only explicit in law but exists in fact.

Isolated examples of discrimination do crop up. A year ago when a hotel manager near Papakura refused to serve a beer to a Maori, he was not only soundly criticized in the nation's press but got a stiff reprimand from the hotel-chain owner, Sir Ernest Davis. Last week, caught between his near-fanatical devotion to rugby and what amounts to a national dishonor if Maori footballers are excluded, New Zealand's man-in-the-street was making his choice plain: no Maoris, no match.

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