Efeso Collins: ‘The ancestor we always knew you were’ – Simon Wilson

Fa’anānā Efeso Collins’ sister Millie told a loaves and fishes story at his memorial service in Manukau today.

He came to her one day and asked her to cook for a thing he was starting
called Dream Fono. A kind of camp for teenagers to get in touch with their dreams of a better life and get some help to make those dreams happen.

“I’ve got $750,” Fa’anānā told his sister. “You don’t need to do much, just cook the food you cook at home.”

She dragged the other details out of him. There would be 80 young people, then another 40 were turning up, they also had to feed the visiting speakers and mentors. And the money had to last five days.

“And I suppose your kitchen staff will need feeding, too,” he said.

Yep, they would.

So was that it? Efeso Collins was the biggest dreamer around?

“Here’s the thing,” said Millie. “He has a way of asking you to do something so that you believe you can do it. And I believed. And we did it, and we did it every year after that.”

Dream Fono is famous in South Auckland and so is Fa’anānā. You bet he was a dreamer. One of those dreamers who can make people believe great things are possible. All it takes, as speaker after speaker told us he had shown them, are hard work, confidence in your fellow human beings, faith and a deep conviction that it’s possible to make good things happen.

It’s tempting to think Fa’anānā was just getting started. Two terms on Auckland Council did not produce a string of achievements. In truth, he seemed to find it hard to know how to fit in. His mayoral campaign failed.

After that, the Green Party offered him a home, and a high-enough list placing to become an MP. But he made his maiden speech merely a week before he died. The promise was all before him.

In Parliament, that is. But Millie’s story told us something different, and the other speakers yesterday backed her up. The promise of Fa’anānā, they said, was realised every day. He was at it all the time.

“He taught us we must lead big lives,” said one.

“He saw the best and did it all for the best,” said another.

There are 2500 seats in the Due Drop Events Centre in Manukau and the place was almost full. People came to say thank you, to share their grief, to laugh and to celebrate.

Nearly three hours after it began, his widow stood before us, their two daughters by her side.

“My name is Vasa Fia,” she said, “and I am an ordinary woman who married an extraordinary man.”

You couldn’t help think that if it was him up there, he’d have said the same about her. Let’s call them both extraordinary.

She told us she had learned early on she would not be able to keep him to herself. “Thank you,” she said, “for making every second count.”

A few years ago I went out to Tangaroa College in Ōtara, the school where Fa’anānā had been head boy. I was doing a story on what makes schools good and I was there to listen to the choir practicing for the Big Sing. Several of the boys had come straight from First XV rugby practice. They sounded glorious, as they did in the competition in the town hall a week later.

Today, when Annie Grace sang the gospel song It is Well, a big block of Tangaroa kids in the crowd provided, unprompted, a beautiful harmony. Still got it.

After the event, they waited on the driveway and, as the hearse approached, broke into a thunderous haka.

“We have lost one of the most impactful voices of our generation,” said the journalist Indira Moana Stewart.

“His maiden speech was a call to action,” said Vasa Fia, a long row of politicians from most of the parties sitting in front of her. “Please don’t let all that he did – all the blood and sweat and tears – be for nothing.”

The poet Karlo Mila called him “wheturangitia”, which means “stars that adorn the sky” and often refers to someone who has died too young.

She read her poem to him. “Wheturangitia. You become the ancestor we always knew you were.”

Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues, with a focus on Auckland. He joined the Herald in 2018.