KEY POINTS:
Any day now, Labour MP Mark Gosche will go to the Speaker of Parliament and change his name to "The Honourable Vui Mark Gosche".
The change follows a trip to Lano in Samoa, the home village of his grandmother and father, where he sat centre stage in a
fale for a formal ceremony, sealed with gifts and drinking of ava (Samoan for kava) to emerge as a matai.
His extended family had discussed for some time who should be given the family Vui title, vacant for some years, as they wanted it to go to a NZ-based person. The news was broken to him in front of about 350 people at a family reunion in Mangere last year.
"It was something I'd been wary of for a long time because, being New Zealand-born and not having the Samoan language, I felt inadequate in terms of stepping into the part of the culture that is the matai system," said Mr Gosche, MP for Maungakiekie and a former Cabinet minister.
"But it just seemed right in the end. The family didn't consider that to be an issue and [the title] was something it felt strongly about. The older family members are passing on now and you realise, 'Oops, we are it now'."
Many of his generation in New Zealand had taken a low-key approach to their Samoan heritage but things had changed from "the Muldoon years and election campaign ads with all the bushy-haired Islanders running across the stage, and the dawn raids and that sort of stuff".
The saofa'i, or ceremony, was performed on April 16 by a senior matai orator in formal Samoan. The title is a recognition of leadership from a person in the family and the village.
Mr Gosche sees his village as extending to other NZ-born Samoans.
"There's 131,000 Samoans in New Zealand and 60 per cent of those are born here. Among those are a heck of a lot of people in the same situation as me. So it's important to say, 'Let's be comfortable with the fact we are New Zealand-born Samoans'. People are happier to say that now."
Mr Gosche's Samoan heritage comes from his grandmother, who married his German grandfather, a trader for Burns Philp.
Mr Gosche knows little else about the man, who was in Samoa when it was a German colony. He had red hair, hazel eyes and "some said he was a baker or an opera singer". Mr Gosche got the surname and the hazel eyes.
The official form of address is lau afioga Vui (the high chief Vui) while in Parliament he'll be known as "the Honourable Vui Mark Gosche".
