Tahupotiki Wiremu Ratana

The influenza pandemic of 1918 killed Maori at something like seven times the rate it killed Pakeha. It was in that season, on his farm near Whanganui, that Ratana reported a vision: cloud coming in off the sea, a voice naming him as the mouthpiece, and an instruction to unite the Maori people and to turn them to God alone.

What followed was not what a farmer with a vision would ordinarily produce. People came to be healed, first in dozens and then in thousands, camping around the farm until a township grew there. Contemporary newspapers reported the crowds; the Anglican and Methodist churches, which had expected to absorb the movement, found they could not.

The teaching had a hard edge that is easy to miss under the healings. Ratana attacked the use of charms, of tohunga practice and of anything he regarded as an intermediary, and he pressed a strict monotheism expressed as the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit and the faithful angels. His own title, the mangai, means mouthpiece: he claimed to speak for God rather than to possess power himself, and he consistently deflected requests to heal onto faith rather than onto his own hands.

By 1921 the gatherings were enormous. In 1925 the movement was constituted as a church, and the healing years gave way to an institution with a creed, a register of adherents and a settlement of its own.

Ratana divided his own mission in two. The first half was the spiritual work, te ture wairua, the healing and the turning of people to God. The second was the bodily or temporal work, te ture tangata, and its object was the Treaty of Waitangi.

In 1924 he travelled with a party to Geneva to put a petition before the League of Nations, and to England seeking an audience with the King. He was received by neither. A petition bearing tens of thousands of signatures asking that the Treaty be given legal force was presented to the New Zealand parliament and made no progress.

The conclusion he drew was that the Treaty would be honoured only by whoever held the four Maori seats in parliament, and the movement turned to electoral politics. The first Ratana member was elected in 1932; by the early 1940s the movement held all four seats, in a formal alliance with the Labour Party made in 1936. That alliance lasted, with strains, for the rest of the century, and it made the Ratana Church a permanent element of New Zealand public life rather than a religious movement alone.

He died in 1939. The church he founded continues, with congregations across New Zealand and among Maori in Australia, and the January gathering at Ratana Pa remains the fixed point of its year and of the country's political calendar. It is a living church and is described here rather than assessed.