‘Tī is coffee’: Mangaya revisits the past of coffee houses

If you think drinking lattes is a sign of Ponsonby-style modernity – you’d be wrong. Mangaia was doing it a century ago, writes Rod Dixon.

From the late 1800s until the 1940s, every Mangaian village had its own tī house, except that tī meant coffee.

Author Edwin Gold, who traded on Mangaia in the 1940s and 1950s and was a frequent contributor to Pacific Islands Monthly, explains: “The Mangaians have only one word for any kind of hot drink. Tī-house coffee is locally grown and processed. Curiously, they call it kāōpe on the tree; it is not tī until it is brewed… No coffee is under threepence. But look what you get for threepence. A half-pint bowl of aromatic local Java coffee, sweetened almost to syrupy sweetness with sugar, just the way the Mangaians like it. With it comes a six-ounce portion of quite good bread rolls. This bread is not unlike the soft rolls of Rarotonga. It is made from imported flour. These light rolls are baked in four ‘trays’ in a beehive-shaped oven made from the sides of a biscuit tin. A whole ‘tray’ costs a shilling, four rolls for one.”

The beehive oven or umu varāoa is built of coral stone or coral cement, and “the bread is baked on the upper rack inside the beehive, with an orange wood fire burning in the bottom. After baking, the opening must be sealed with a wet bag using a long ‘skin'”. The ‘skin’ is a long wooden tool that the baker uses to slide the bread in and out of the oven. On Mangaia, it is replaced by a canoe paddle.

Tava’enga Mangaian Beehive Oven in Pukumaru, formerly Tareke’s Bakery. 24062502

“In amazingly quick time, the steaming hot bread is ‘peeled’ out again to make room for the next batch. The bread, white, light, and crunchy, comes from a five-foot-high hive…” When the bread is ready, usually around 4 a.m., the village tī shop announces the news by the sound of a pū, or large conch shell. “The bread of Mangaya is ready.”

Back at the tī store, “You have a can of tī. You just need to find that can! If not, two pounds of beef will work just fine.”

Coffee was poured into real porcelain bowls from China. “These things were brought to the group from Tahiti…Butter was the ultimate continental luxury, only available in cans, sometimes, (and) expensive…The communal spoon was used in turns to scoop it out, and sugar was shoveled into the bowl from the communal supply (in the wash basin).”

Meanwhile, “the latest news from Coconut Radio is spread by word of mouth through browsing and sharing, unhindered by coffee and bread.”

There were no daily newspapers. Instead, there were “quarto papers in English and Maori posted on the aitikara, the official notice board of the seaside post office” by “Makoni” (or Marconi) as the generic name for wireless operators. News then spread by word of mouth, as it does in coffee houses around the world. In the process, tī shop owners, like bartenders and taxi drivers, knew everything about everyone and everything.

Mangaya baristas (left) Faith and (right) Tuaine Papatua. Supplied/24062103

Gold recalls a Christian shop owner named Keke in the village of Timakatia who, when the local pastor came for coffee, “was able to assert that there were no Christians among the pastor’s followers. The pastor was taken aback. ‘Judge not, lest you be judged,’ the pastor said. Keke gave a wry smile. ‘Oh, Orometua,’ he said. ‘When you run a Christian shop, you don’t have to judge. Surely you know!'”

At the time, Mangaia’s coffee society was in full swing, while few people in New Zealand had ever seen coffee, except for instant powdered Strong Coffee (New Zealand claims to have invented “instant coffee” in 1899) or the sweetened, bottled chicory essence known as Camp Coffee (mō’ina kāōpe) sold throughout the British Empire. In fact, coffee culture came to New Zealand relatively late – in the 1940s, under the influence of American servicemen – while Mangaia had been producing coffee since the late 1800s.^day century, is already a large consumer and exporter of Java and is considered the leader in the group.

However, the Tī shops were not established simply to satisfy the Mangaia people’s thirst for coffee and sugar. They were a form of rebellion against the increasing presence of European trading shops on the island. These shops accumulated kaio’u, or debt, among the islanders and forced them to supply coffee beans at low prices to repay the debts. From an economic perspective, the European traders were the price setters and the Mangaia were the ones who grudgingly accepted the prices.

To reverse this situation, the Mangaia established tī shops as cooperative enterprises, owned by shareholders called “kumpani”. In addition to offering coffee and fresh bread, tī shops sold matches, soap, fish hooks, and canned goods, and exchanged coffee and copra for goods in kind. The price of coffee was set by the Mangaia’s aronga mana (as in the old market days) and enforced by a ra’ui levy on coffee picking. Thus, the picking and selling of coffee was prohibited until European traders were willing to pay the price set by the chiefs.

Needless to say, European traders did not like this arrangement and protested to the colonial authorities – “What a horrible and un-British thing this ra’ui power is,” they complained. They said they were “being tyrannized by the teahouses… The teahouses forbid (ra’ui-ed) anyone to sell coffee to any shop for less than 30 cents a pound on pain of a fine of five pounds… Business has been at a standstill for weeks. The people have enough coffee to pay their debts, which they are willing and anxious to do, because these debts have been given to them out of sympathy… But Governor Mangaia will not allow them to sell or pay their debts, because he wants the product to pass through his own hands”.

A wealthy Oneroa tī store manager – Ngatama Numangatini, brother of ariki John Trego and his wife Raimate Porotata, 1901. Supplied/24062104

The tī-shop, called the Mangaian Co-operative Society, is a Oneroa conglomerate with 68 shareholders and is managed by Ngatama Numangatini, the brother of John Trego Ariki.

An official inquiry established that the ra’ui had been “implemented in order to obtain an impossible price (30 cents per pound of coffee)”. As a result, the colonial authorities ruled that “the ra’ui should not be implemented at any price … per pound fixed”. The power to declare the ra’ui was subsequently taken away from the traditional leaders and given to the island councils.

The Mangai people completely ignored colonial laws and continued to practice traditional ra’ui, now modified to regulate the growing cash economy. According to Edwin Gold, the New Zealand colonial authorities then sought to shut down the tī shops by “imposing on these small shops a licence of £5, the same as that imposed by the Trade Act on CITC with a capital of £1 million”. The tī shops responded by launching new lines of goods that rivaled those of European shops in the local trade. Their economic power was enhanced by the formation of village boats, kumpanis, which set prices for transporting goods across the reef, redistributing the profits to the shareholders (the villages).

Today, wild coffee bushes grow across the island, providing beans for the few coffee lovers willing to forage for the trees, husk the cherries (a laborious task) and roast the beans. But for busy Mangayans, T’s recently opened cafe in the heart of Tawaenga village, complete with a gleaming Breville machine, offers a more convenient way to get their daily caffeine fix.