Learning to swim

At 80, one of our most celebrated authors, Witi Ihimaera, threw himself in the deep end: a year-long commitment to a full-time Māori language immersion class.

- ADAM DUDDING

It was May 2024, and Witi Ihimaera was meant to be at a noho marae in Port Waikato, flexing his growing vocabulary in kōrerorero with his fellow students; maybe even risking a moe on the wharenui floor overnight, snorers allowing.

Instead, the eminent writer was 18,000km away, zipping between appearances in Paris for the launch of his sixth book translated into French, then over to Saint-Malo for an international indigenous peoples' conference. There was a flying visit to Tahiti in there somewhere, too.

But kei te pai. Ihimaera might have missed a noho and a bit of akomanga (class) time during his fortnight away, but he took his homework with him. Everywhere he travelled, he'd ask people to hold up his whakapuaki workbook (which he nicknamed "Puaki"). “I sent back these wonderful photos of Puaki being held by all these French people who came to my events. So I never really left the class, and the class never really left me.”

Ihimaera relayed this to me and my podcast co-producer Eugene Bingham a few days after his return to Aotearoa. We were hovering with our microphones and recorders in the corridor of Te Wānanga Takiura o Ngā Kura Kaupapa Māori o Aotearoa, a language school in Ōwairaka Mt Albert in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.

We had just finished recording another fly-on-the-wall session from inside the language course that, book tours permitting, Ihimaera would attend 9am to 3pm, Monday to Friday, February to November: a course called “Rumaki Reo”. This is a language immersion course where lessons are conducted solely in te reo Māori, without using any explanatory English.