Shirley Baker is Actually a Person You Should Know

For over a year and a half, the Shirley Baker Memorial was just a cheap property on our Ha’apai Monopoly board.  I didn't even know where the memorial was. None of us took enough interest in Tongan history to have learned about him, so it wasn’t until I picked up a Tongan history book that I realized that Shirley Baker was a fascinating historical figure (and actually a man instead of a woman -- isn't Shirley a girl's name?).  The truly masculine Shirley Baker was in fact a British Wesleyan missionary and prime minister of Tonga during the reign of Tonga’s first modern king, Taufa’ahau Tupou I.

The memorial below his monument

Baker arrived in Tonga in 1860 as a missionary-medical practitioner.  He grew to know King Taufa’ahau as he treated the monarch’s ailing wife, and by 1862 he was asked for advice on a proposal of reforms for the country.  Baker kept the interests of the king and country above those of the missionaries, who sought to increase foreign control over Tonga.  This earned Taufa’ahau’s trust.  By 1864 he was helping to write laws, and by 1875 he wrote the Tongan constitution that designed the form of government, explicitly stated rights and duties, disempowered Tonga’s powerful nobility, and set the commoners free from their pseudo-slavery. 

Baker’s independence from the Wesleyan missionaries got him expelled back to Tonga, against the wishes of the king.  He returned a few years later on his own, no longer a missionary, and was quickly appointed Premier, Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Minister of Land Affairs.

In 1885 Taufa’ahau and Baker created the Free Wesleyan Church of Tonga, to be completely independent of the Australian Wesleyan Commission.  Priestly Tongans resented both the (1) amount of locally raised church funds leaving their country to the Wesleyan headquarters and (2) their inability to appoint their own ministers.  Not everyone was happy about the change, however, and after an assassination attempt on Baker’s life, the new Free Wesleyans commenced a brutal forced conversion of the population to the new faith, having instructed marauding mobs to “flog and torture the Wesleyans until they turned over to the so called Free Church.” 

Tonga’s foreign policy became increasingly antagonistic towards the foreign High Commission, and with fiscal issues resulting from a drop in copra prices, the British High Commissioner convinced Taufa’ahau to remove Baker from his high positions in 1890.  He retired to Hihifo, Ha’apai, and is now buried under his monument on the northern outskirts of Pangai.

Tonga is often known as one of the few South Pacific nations to resist European colonialism, and much of that is due to Shirley Baker’s stubborn independence from foreign missionaries and commissioners.  His monument is not spectacular, but it is worth talking a short walk north to see the former Premier’s cast-metal pose in the European Cemetery.  Across the street is also a colorful Tongan cemetery.