Anticolonialism and the politics of friendship in New Zealand’s Pacific

Abstract

Leela Gandhi demonstrates that friendship is the lost trope in anticolonial thought. Following Gandhi, this article highlights a series of cross-cultural friendships between mostly Pākehā metropolitan dissidents in New Zealand and Pacific Island anticolonial actors in the early to mid-twentieth century. In doing so, this article sheds new light on the well-trodden histories of interwar resistance in Sāmoa (the Mau) and post-World War II agitation in the Cook Islands (the CIPA). While the symbolic act of cross-cultural, anticolonial friendship may have done much to undermine New Zealand’s colonial artifice, it was not enough to guarantee that disaffected Indigenous voices would be adequately heard.