Where did Tohu Kākahi grow up and live?

📍Parihaka, Taranaki, New Zealand

1828 – 1907

“Ko au ko Tohu Kākahi. I was born around 1828 of Te Ātiawa descent, and I stood alongside Te Whiti-o-Rongomai at Parihaka as the co-leader of a movement that chose peace as its weapon. We were not the same — Te Whiti was the prophet, the visionary; I was the teacher, the one who explained and prepared. Together we built Parihaka into a community of over two thousand people, a place of extraordinary agriculture and arts and spiritual life on the confiscated lands of Taranaki. When the Crown's forces came on the 5th of November 1881, I stood with Te Whiti and we offered no resistance. I was arrested and held for years without trial. I returned and continued teaching. The ploughmen who ploughed the survey lines, the fencers who pulled down the fences — these were my students, and I was proud of every one of them.”

👍 LovedThe Parihaka community at its height — the agriculture, the arts, the spiritual life, the sense of a people building something extraordinary on confiscated land. The teaching role that gave the movement its intellectual foundation.

👎 DislikedThe Crown's invasion and the years of imprisonment without trial. The destruction of the community we had built. The long injustice of the Taranaki land confiscations that preceded everything.

Map showing where Tohu Kākahi lived — Parihaka, Taranaki, New Zealand

🗺️ Approximate location today

Satellite view of Tohu Kākahi's home at Parihaka, Taranaki, New Zealand

Sources: Scott, D. Ask That Mountain: The Story of Parihaka (1975), Heinemann; Riseborough, H. Days of Darkness: Taranaki 1878-1884 (1989), Allen & Unwin