Why would a sport vanish from a country? And how does it then reappear and flourish? The first question is the harder one, and answering it involves a short trip through history. From the writings of George Vason, an English missionary dropped on one of the country's 170 islands in 1797, we know that Tongans used to surf. From the shore he would watch the natives take "particular delight" in an amusement they called fanifo. "It is astonishing to see with what dexterity they will steer themselves on the waves," Vason wrote, "one hand being stretched out, as the prow before, and the other guiding them like a rudder behind. Several hours are often spent at one time in this sport, in which the women are as skillful as the men."
Clearly, Tongans enjoyed bodysurfing. And they were good at it. Less clear is why, not long after Vason admired them, they abruptly dropped the pastime. Except for Vason's, missionaries' accounts of Tonga during the 1800s make no mention of fanifo or any aquatic activity that could be mistaken for it. What happened? The widely accepted theory is that someone convinced Tonga's ruling chiefs to ban the sport. That someone was not Vason, who arrived with eight others sent by the London Missionary Society. Amid civil war, three of Vason's colleagues were killed; the others fled. Vason, a young bricklayer, saved himself, he wrote, by assuming "the revolting customs of a savage life." Far from banning anything, "I entered, with the utmost eagerness, into every pleasure and entertainment of the natives, and endeavored to forget that I had left a Christian land to evangelize the heathen."
Missionaries who came to Tonga shortly after Vason appear to have stuck more closely to their brief, and to have frowned on a pastime in which men and women, boys and girls - almost certainly naked - cavorted in the surf. It's thought that the missionaries convinced the chiefs that fanifo was corrupting Tongan youth and didn't belong in a budding Christian society, and that the chiefs placed on the sport a tapu, or ban. "This is, to some extent, speculation," says Po'oi Puloka, secretary general of the Tonga Amateur Sports Association and National Olympic Committee (tasanoc), "but it's more than likely what happened." (The banning of a sport has a more recent precedent in Tonga. In the 1920s authorities prohibited the playing of cricket, which had so gripped the local men that they were neglecting their crops. "It was a food security issue," says Puloka, adding that the ban lasted a decade. In the 1950s, rugby overtook cricket as Tonga's favorite sport and it remains so today.)