For Tongan women drinking kava tea with others is becoming more popular, but does require them to break with tradition.
For Ikanamoe Ma’u, that is exactly what she has been doing for almost two decades.
She proudly calls herself a heavy kava drinker.
“I can drink kava all night and drink more cups than men,” she says proudly.
Now living in Aotearoa, it was a pleasant surprise to notice a shift in female kava consumption on a recent trip back to Tonga, she said.
“I went home and was surprised to see a lot of young females as kava consumers and they do drink the kava.”
She said when she started drinking kava heavily in the late 1990s, she hadn’t heard of any other Tongan women who also did it.
By tradition, the Tongan fai kava or practise of drinking kava is usually done with men sitting around the kava bowl circle and a woman serving kava to the men is known as a tou’a.
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