Kotiate and kapa haka

And we’ve got a couple of hand held weaponry here, in particular the kotiate. Now those of you who may not have seen a kotiate before, as you can notice it is of a different shape, has a couple of niches in here. Dion how does the kotiate work?

For all the boys who are doing kapa haka, they are most probably familiar with the kotiate. It’s… the English terminology for it is what we term as a cleave. We don’t use the term club, ‘cause club basically means that you don’t need to aquire any sort of prowess when you’re fighting. But with the likes of the kotiate, the wahaika, the patu parāoa, the patu rākau, the mere pounamu, all those other types of patu, there’s skill that’s required and you need to master them. Basically, the functionality of this particular taonga, is that…say for instance if you have the taiaha which I had previously, if it was struck down towards you, basically you could offer a block (if you can just catch that in there). So I would catch the taiaha…and there is a groove, (I don’t know if you can see it, but there is a black sort of curtain behind me) but anyway it would be caught in this area here. And that’s why the young guys would work on their flexibility to strengthen their wrists so as they could actually snap…like so - you’re most probably familiar with this – and basically destroy your opponent’s weapon.