Tsunami a reminder of what really matters

Tui Atua says as the nation's highest leader he was traditionally entitled to the most valuable gifts when he attended a funeral. Photo / Steven McNicholl

The tsunami that hit Samoa in September killing 149 people may change the country's tradition of extravagant gift-giving at funerals, says the nation's highest leader.

Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Ta'isi Efi, a former Prime Minister who was elected head of state by the Samoan Parliament in 2007, said in Auckland yesterday that the sheer number of people who needed to be buried quickly had forced families to cut back on the usual lavish scale of funerals.

"The paraphernalia that we have become accustomed to seeing at a Samoan funeral, especially one held in the villages, was so scaled down that one could not help but ask: how much of it do we really need?" he said.

He said tradition had always demanded that bereaved families should put all the resources at their disposal, including borrowed funds, into cash and other gifts for the chiefs, pastors and villagers who attended a funeral.

"The social stigma of losing face if family resources are found wanting is so great that family heads are willing to do almost anything to avoid it, including creating inter-generational debt," he told a Families Commission conference on Pacific families.

"The seeming ordinariness of the tsunami funerals, with the minimum fuss and bother that surrounded them, did not, however, lose any face by their simplicity. Instead, they gained in that they reminded us of what really mattered. In this instance, rather than raging menace, the tsunami chastened and cleansed."

Tui Atua, a scholar who has written three books, said that as the nation's highest leader he was traditionally entitled to the most valuable gifts when he attended a funeral and would be the biggest loser if the country followed his call for more modest giving. He said the gift-giving custom arose from the basic cultural value of reciprocity.

"The village provides you with succour and support, and they are therefore entitled to some recognition of that support. This is all part of reciprocity," he said.

"If we were honest, this has been allowed to go off the rails and has created a burden, not only an uneasy burden but a very heavy burden, so that in fact now at someone's funeral it militates against the very core reasoning behind it, which is relief [for the bereaved]. It provides anything but relief!

"I don't know whether what I am saying is going to impact on people, but right now, particularly in the environment of crisis, it calls for leadership to say this is a problem."

He said he had spoken about the problem several times before the tsunami and had written about it in one of his books, but in his current position he felt that he could not simply refuse to accept gifts.

"It reflects on the face of the family, it means that they can't afford to do it or they have got it wrong. So what is grace and good finesse in the situation is to accept it," he said.

But he asked: "Will our funerals and their cultural imperatives lose meaning and substance if we gave to the grieving and demanded nothing, or only accepted the bare minimum, in return? Would the dignity of the deceased and his or her family be undermined by simple but true gestures of reciprocity?"