Tefolaha

Tefolaha is the founder of the community on Nanumea and its principal ancestor. Nanumean oral tradition describes him as a teanti-ma-aomata, a being part spirit and part human, and as a great warrior born in Tonga but raised in Samoa, where he used his spear Kaumaile in battle before voyaging out to find new land. Arriving at Nanumea he found it already held by two women, the spirits Pai and Vau, and proposed that whoever could name the other should keep the island. Climbing a coconut palm and dangling a wooden hook on a line to startle them, he tricked the women into shouting their names; he named them correctly while they could not name him, and so they were obliged to leave, sand spilling from their baskets to form the small islets off Nanumea. Tefolaha's sons and daughters are reckoned the ancestors of the leading families and chiefly lineages of Nanumea, and his memory is honoured when Nanumeans pour out the last of a coconut drink to the ground with the words 'Tefolaha tou hoa'.

Domains

• founding and settlement
• war and warriors
• spirit beings

Powers

• to guess the hidden names of the spirit-women and so win the island

Epithets

• teanti-ma-aomataKeith S. Chambers, Heirs of Tefolaha (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1984). (secondary)

Relations

• enemy: PaiTefolaha contends with Pai for possession of Nanumea and drives her from the island after the contest of names.Keith S. Chambers and Anne Chambers, Tuu mo Iloga: The Nanumea Ethnographic Archive. (secondary)
• enemy: VauTefolaha contends with Vau for possession of Nanumea and drives her from the island after the contest of names.Keith S. Chambers and Anne Chambers, Tuu mo Iloga: The Nanumea Ethnographic Archive. (secondary)

Sources

• Tefolaha is the founding settler-ancestor of Nanumea, a part-spirit, part-human warrior who won the island from the spirit-women Pai and Vau and from whom the chiefly lineages of Nanumea descend.: Keith S. Chambers, Heirs of Tefolaha: Tradition and Social Organization in Nanumea, a Polynesian Atoll Community (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1984). (secondary); Simati Faaniu et al., Tuvalu: A History, ed. Hugh Laracy (Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, University of the South Pacific; Funafuti: Ministry of Social Services, 1983). (secondary)