Dance for the dead

The first time I ever saw a haka performed it was during a change of command ceremony for UNPROFOR in Bosnia in the 1990s. The fierce Māori ritual always gets me, partly because of that association and partly because it intrinsically projects warrior power.

New Zealand sports teams—especially the All Blacks—have made it famous, and I’ve even seen videos of wedding parties performing it. It seems appropriate that Kiwis have deployed it in multiple instances to honor those who were murdered at two mosques in Christchurch last Friday.

Here’s one of the many performed by schoolchildren around the city:

And here’s one by a biker gang, in front of the Al Noor mosque: