Samoan
fale tele ['meeting house']. Every village has at least one,
all different, but of the same design.
Whenever I go anywhere, I
like to know the back story.
Guide books have never been much use to me, and Google Maps has only been a recent innovation in my lifetime. I remember 12 years ago, long before mobile phones and apps were ubiquitous, traipsing around looking for the main market in Luang Prabang in Laos, as located in Lonely Planet, only to eventually realise that it'd been demolished, fenced in and moved to somewhere else in town. That's the problem with tour guides - the moment they are published, they're out-of-date and redundant. Get on the ground and go look for yourself. Ask for help. While the stories can be told very differently, history never changes.
I once read Baker & Phonggpaichit's A History of Thailand on a nine hour overnight flight KSA → Bangkok. After going to Lao PDR, I read Grant Evans' A Short History of Laos - The Land in Between - a rattling good yarn about a country that's so complicated as fuck, I went back again, twice. I've read more histories of the French and American wars in Vietnam than I care to remember. The post-colonial history of East Timor is well covered in James Dunne's Timor: A People Betrayed, and Jeremy MacClancy's To Kill Two Birds with One Stone - A Short History of Vanuatu is a valiant attempt to explain one of the most diverse and scattered of the world's island nations. There are six bookcases in our house, and Fran would kill me if I got another one.
But, as far as I can work out, no one has even come close to writing a Short History of Samoa.
I'm sure the timelines would be taught in Samoan schools; the pre-history arrival of Polynesians in the islands about 3,500 years ago, John Williams bowling in from the London Missionary Society in 1830 [there is a decrepit barely legible memorial to him near The Clocktower in Apia], the Samoan Civil War [1887-94] is little understood, but the cyclone of March 1889, which sank all seven of the German, British, and American gun boats in Apia Harbour with tremendous loss of life [with the sole exception of the HMS Calliope, which managed by a mere whisker to escape the reef to ride out the storm at sea] effectively ended the battle of the colonial powers and it all finished up with the formal partition of Samoa, with the Germans taking the west and the Americans the east in 1900 - [the English got Fiji & Tonga] - the generally benign 14 year German rule, until the un-opposed New Zealand invasion of Apia on orders from London in 1914, followed by almost ten years of brutal martial law, before becoming a League of Nations "protectorate" under Kiwi administration, the Black Saturday Massacre [28 Dec 1928] when the New Zealanders turned a Gatling machine gun on the 'natives' [apparently there is a memorial to it somewhere - but do you think I could find it?], the post WWII Mau Independence movement led by prominent matai, and finally the realisation at the UN that Samoans were perfectly capable of running their own affairs, leading to the earliest example of independence in the South Pacific in 1962, in a part of the world where vast swathes are still under the colonial rule of France, and the American's of course still have American Samoa, and neither are willing to give them up in a hurry.
There you go - that's a very potted history lesson for you!
It's all there in black and white on Wikipedia for anyone to read, but to write a nuanced English language Short History of Samoa would be an enormous undertaking, involving three languages and many many years of research. It would have to be a labour of love and it will, in all likelihood, never be written; the complexity is too difficult, the documentary evidence too scant, and everything pre-1830 has now fallen into myth and legend.
I even read Simon Winchester's 497 page door-stopper, Pacific - The Ocean of the Future I found on a remainder table, to try to get a grip on the vast expanse of blue lapping at our doorstep, but, as good as it is, it wasn't much use to me either as he takes his starting point at New Year's Day 1950, when conventional Carbon-dating became redundant because of atmospheric nuclear explosions in the Pacific, and nowhere in it is Samoa even mentioned, but Winchester did put me onto "The Bumstead Map", which is a total revelation.
The Bumstead Map is the only hand drawn, large scale [1:35,000,000] entirely precise map on the Mercator Projection of the unimaginably largely vacant vastness of the Pacific Ocean at its the centre. It was drawn by Alfred H. Bumstead in 1936 for the National Geographic Magazine, and is surrounded by 76 smaller maps on larger scales of all the most important islands. It is a work of art and a cartographic masterpiece. On the big map [and it is big 763mm x 965mm...or in the old money 30" x 38"] the islands are mere dots of land in all the staggering emptiness. Samoa is hard to see without a magnifying glass. Next to it is a tiny red stamp that directs you to the larger maps of the Samoan islands on the margin. I bought a beautifully printed copy from the map held in the Daisy Bates collection at the Australian National Library on-line and it now hangs on the wall at home in the Map Room, along with 12 others collected in places yonder. It's just another thing I do. Standing back and staring at it though, you realise that the mighty continent of Australia is literally dwarfed by the sheer enormity of the Pacific. But at least I knew where I was.
Before we went to Samoa, I saw the documentary film on the late Australian artist, Brett Whiteley. In it, he is interviewed about being deported when he was arrested for possessing marijuana after spending a year in Fiji, which he said he loved and could have easily lived there for the rest of his life. He enormously regretted being unceremoniously tossed out of the country overnight with his wife and young child, into the waiting glare of the media at Sydney's Kingsford Smith Airport in November 1969. But in all his comments on his time in Fiji, the one line that stood out for me was..."I will never understand the Polynesian mind".
I thought to myself, mmm, righty oh then, I've never been to Polynesia, so better go and have a look for myself.
And having done so, I've come to realise that the concepts of fa'a samoa ["the Samoan Way"] and fa'a matai ["the way of the Chiefs"] which underpin every aspect of life in Samoa, and has done un-changed for centuries, if not millennia, are so utterly complex as to be beyond the comprehension of a mere outsider. No shit.
I will never pretend to come even close to understanding the Samoan way, based as it is entirely on village life, and the extraordinary tangle of interdependent set-in-stone obligations and responsibilities everyone lives by - the obtuse, and often disputed, seniority ranking system of the matai, highly regulated relationships between families, the village, the set of extended villages, and ultimately your loyalty to one [or more] of the three 'aiga, who can be considered as the Samoan "aristocracy" led by extremely high ranking matai. And that's not even accounting for the nexus between Upolu and Sava'ii [the "Big Island"] in the west, and Eastern [American] Samoa, a hundred nautical miles away.
Frustrated that no one has even come close to writing a Short History of Samoa, by pure luck, I found my London bookseller had a copy of Robert Louis Stevenson's obscure book A Footnote to History - Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa [1892]; his account of the Samoan Civil War, which was still on-going at the time he wrote it. Stevenson only lived in Samoa for four years from 1890 until he dropped dead with an apoplexy at age 44. He apologises straight up that it was hastily written because if he didn't do it the story would be lost in short order, and he also says sorry to any of his Samoan friends who he might offend by the telling of his version of the truth. And he doesn't pull any punches.
I read it before going....two warring Samoan 'kings' with well armed infantry were at each other's throats mainly over misunderstandings and perceived slights, and a third 'king' deported out of the picture, as the Germans and Americans tried to take over the joint on the sly and plant it to copra, while the British loitered on the sidelines minding their own South Seas exploitation businesses. Stevenson stood firmly in the Samoan camp, but sensibly didn't take sides; he thought the British fools, the Americans blatant opportunists and gun-runners, and he hated the Germans with a passion for siding with one 'king' over the other, shelling 'rebel' villages from their gunboats, and getting into gun fights that were no business of theirs.
Stevenson never achieved fluency in Samoan despite his best efforts, noting that there are in fact two Samoan languages, one informal used in every day speech, and another formal - which contains many more adjectives - which is used by the tulafale matai ['speaking chief'] but is understood by everyone. Every important chief has a tulafale, who speaks for them in the council of chiefs, the fono [or as Stevenson called them "the little parliaments"], as high ranking matai are considered too dignified and important to speak. Orator matai are much admired and revered throughout the islands, and Stevenson invokes the joys of hearing Samoan oratory, and it was/is not uncommon for people to sit around and listen to an orator speak in formal Samoan for literally hours on end, invoking the spirits of the ancestors and using myth, legend, and poetry to make their points on behalf of the matai for whom they are speaking. Informal Samoan is a wonderfully lilting lyrical language as it is. After the speeches, decisions in the fono are always made by acclamation and consensus, with the strongest of traditional arguments prevailing. A stark contrast to the "first world", where politics and public policy are conducted in three second 'sound bites'.
Politically, Govt. in Samoa is run on the Westminster system, but it's democracy in name only. It's been a one-party state for a very long time - the leader of the Human Rights Protection Party, Tuilaepa Lupesoliai Neioti Aiono Sailele Malielegaoi, [who's universally known by his main chiefly title Tuilaepa] has been Prime Minister for 20 years, and holds 48 of the 50 seats in the Parliament after last year's election. All MP's must be matai, including the 25% quota for women. Commoners are barred. There are reputedly about 16,000 matai in Samoa [so that's about one chief for every 12 people] and another six or so thousand living in the Samoan diaspora, mainly in New Zealand, Australia and Hawai'i. There is no great appetite for change. But you only have to read the independent and fearless daily tabloid the Samoan Observer to know that corruption flourishes, and it's all very much kept in-house, but that's another story.
Stevenson, like me, never fully understood Samoan society, and was under some glaring misapprehensions in A Footnote to History. But he constantly expresses his frustration at also not being able to "get it", and the realisation that he most likely never would bedeviled him, in a place he loved like no other in the world, and he'd been around. Even though he had made a very good life for himself living handsomely off his book royalties and was, and still is, highly regarded by the locals as Tusitala ['the teller of tales'], he well knew he was condemned to be always the alien, the outsider looking in.
On our last day on Upolu, we decided to drop in at Stevenson's old gaff, the now magnificently restored Villa Vailima in the hills behind Apia. It had suffered in cyclones and earthquakes over the years, and had been left derelict. But now, under the auspices of some wealthy American philanthropist, it's like stepping into a colonial time-warp. But you'd be hard pressed to find it on the Cross Island Road by signage alone - it is very small, and just reads "RLS Museum →". It's the finest example of a two story Victorian Plantation House, a mansion really, you could ever hope to see, built from a variety of local hardwoods. We had a quietly spoken, almost reverant and very knowledgeable personalised guide who took us slowly around every room in the joint, which still has a lot of the original furniture and even more replica's.
Man oh man, did Stevenson pick his spot and go for it, or what? It's set on 400 acres of meticulously maintained grounds. Tropical rain showers were sweeping over the mountains when we were there, but it would have the most magnificent view of Apia harbour and the vastness of the Pacific beyond in clear weather. He was a weirdo Scot though, married to a feisty American named Fanny, after they'd met in Paris. He had his elderly mother there with him too, and his young adult step-children by Fanny. What the? He had a chimneyless fireplace installed in the Smoking Room that was never lit in the tropics, to remind him of home back in Scotland, and his wife's bedroom is floored and paneled in Californian redwood for the same reason. A very strange couple. They had imported more than 90 tonnes of furniture and fixtures and fittings, including a grand piano, to put in the villa. On a wall hangs a huge much larger-than-life oil portrait; our man asked if we knew who it was, and after some futile scratching of heads trying to put a time-frame on it, he said "Christopher Columbus".
Stevenson is buried on a mountain top on the estate, but we were warned off by people who had attempted the trek, as the two long tracks to the grave are narrow, jungle covered, steep and slippery. Not for a couple of crips! He remains an enigma in the islands. In a Footnote to History, Stevenson used an archaic word I had never heard of before while excoriating some German official for his complete and utter inability or unwillingness to "understand the mansuetude of the Samoan".
"Mansuetude"??...what a nice word...I just had to look it up...it's dictionary definition is "of habitual mildness or gentleness, meekness, modestness" &etc.
Sums up the people of Samoa perfectly in a single word.
Guide books have never been much use to me, and Google Maps has only been a recent innovation in my lifetime. I remember 12 years ago, long before mobile phones and apps were ubiquitous, traipsing around looking for the main market in Luang Prabang in Laos, as located in Lonely Planet, only to eventually realise that it'd been demolished, fenced in and moved to somewhere else in town. That's the problem with tour guides - the moment they are published, they're out-of-date and redundant. Get on the ground and go look for yourself. Ask for help. While the stories can be told very differently, history never changes.
I once read Baker & Phonggpaichit's A History of Thailand on a nine hour overnight flight KSA → Bangkok. After going to Lao PDR, I read Grant Evans' A Short History of Laos - The Land in Between - a rattling good yarn about a country that's so complicated as fuck, I went back again, twice. I've read more histories of the French and American wars in Vietnam than I care to remember. The post-colonial history of East Timor is well covered in James Dunne's Timor: A People Betrayed, and Jeremy MacClancy's To Kill Two Birds with One Stone - A Short History of Vanuatu is a valiant attempt to explain one of the most diverse and scattered of the world's island nations. There are six bookcases in our house, and Fran would kill me if I got another one.
But, as far as I can work out, no one has even come close to writing a Short History of Samoa.
I'm sure the timelines would be taught in Samoan schools; the pre-history arrival of Polynesians in the islands about 3,500 years ago, John Williams bowling in from the London Missionary Society in 1830 [there is a decrepit barely legible memorial to him near The Clocktower in Apia], the Samoan Civil War [1887-94] is little understood, but the cyclone of March 1889, which sank all seven of the German, British, and American gun boats in Apia Harbour with tremendous loss of life [with the sole exception of the HMS Calliope, which managed by a mere whisker to escape the reef to ride out the storm at sea] effectively ended the battle of the colonial powers and it all finished up with the formal partition of Samoa, with the Germans taking the west and the Americans the east in 1900 - [the English got Fiji & Tonga] - the generally benign 14 year German rule, until the un-opposed New Zealand invasion of Apia on orders from London in 1914, followed by almost ten years of brutal martial law, before becoming a League of Nations "protectorate" under Kiwi administration, the Black Saturday Massacre [28 Dec 1928] when the New Zealanders turned a Gatling machine gun on the 'natives' [apparently there is a memorial to it somewhere - but do you think I could find it?], the post WWII Mau Independence movement led by prominent matai, and finally the realisation at the UN that Samoans were perfectly capable of running their own affairs, leading to the earliest example of independence in the South Pacific in 1962, in a part of the world where vast swathes are still under the colonial rule of France, and the American's of course still have American Samoa, and neither are willing to give them up in a hurry.
There you go - that's a very potted history lesson for you!
It's all there in black and white on Wikipedia for anyone to read, but to write a nuanced English language Short History of Samoa would be an enormous undertaking, involving three languages and many many years of research. It would have to be a labour of love and it will, in all likelihood, never be written; the complexity is too difficult, the documentary evidence too scant, and everything pre-1830 has now fallen into myth and legend.
I even read Simon Winchester's 497 page door-stopper, Pacific - The Ocean of the Future I found on a remainder table, to try to get a grip on the vast expanse of blue lapping at our doorstep, but, as good as it is, it wasn't much use to me either as he takes his starting point at New Year's Day 1950, when conventional Carbon-dating became redundant because of atmospheric nuclear explosions in the Pacific, and nowhere in it is Samoa even mentioned, but Winchester did put me onto "The Bumstead Map", which is a total revelation.
The Bumstead Map is the only hand drawn, large scale [1:35,000,000] entirely precise map on the Mercator Projection of the unimaginably largely vacant vastness of the Pacific Ocean at its the centre. It was drawn by Alfred H. Bumstead in 1936 for the National Geographic Magazine, and is surrounded by 76 smaller maps on larger scales of all the most important islands. It is a work of art and a cartographic masterpiece. On the big map [and it is big 763mm x 965mm...or in the old money 30" x 38"] the islands are mere dots of land in all the staggering emptiness. Samoa is hard to see without a magnifying glass. Next to it is a tiny red stamp that directs you to the larger maps of the Samoan islands on the margin. I bought a beautifully printed copy from the map held in the Daisy Bates collection at the Australian National Library on-line and it now hangs on the wall at home in the Map Room, along with 12 others collected in places yonder. It's just another thing I do. Standing back and staring at it though, you realise that the mighty continent of Australia is literally dwarfed by the sheer enormity of the Pacific. But at least I knew where I was.
Before we went to Samoa, I saw the documentary film on the late Australian artist, Brett Whiteley. In it, he is interviewed about being deported when he was arrested for possessing marijuana after spending a year in Fiji, which he said he loved and could have easily lived there for the rest of his life. He enormously regretted being unceremoniously tossed out of the country overnight with his wife and young child, into the waiting glare of the media at Sydney's Kingsford Smith Airport in November 1969. But in all his comments on his time in Fiji, the one line that stood out for me was..."I will never understand the Polynesian mind".
I thought to myself, mmm, righty oh then, I've never been to Polynesia, so better go and have a look for myself.
And having done so, I've come to realise that the concepts of fa'a samoa ["the Samoan Way"] and fa'a matai ["the way of the Chiefs"] which underpin every aspect of life in Samoa, and has done un-changed for centuries, if not millennia, are so utterly complex as to be beyond the comprehension of a mere outsider. No shit.
I will never pretend to come even close to understanding the Samoan way, based as it is entirely on village life, and the extraordinary tangle of interdependent set-in-stone obligations and responsibilities everyone lives by - the obtuse, and often disputed, seniority ranking system of the matai, highly regulated relationships between families, the village, the set of extended villages, and ultimately your loyalty to one [or more] of the three 'aiga, who can be considered as the Samoan "aristocracy" led by extremely high ranking matai. And that's not even accounting for the nexus between Upolu and Sava'ii [the "Big Island"] in the west, and Eastern [American] Samoa, a hundred nautical miles away.
Frustrated that no one has even come close to writing a Short History of Samoa, by pure luck, I found my London bookseller had a copy of Robert Louis Stevenson's obscure book A Footnote to History - Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa [1892]; his account of the Samoan Civil War, which was still on-going at the time he wrote it. Stevenson only lived in Samoa for four years from 1890 until he dropped dead with an apoplexy at age 44. He apologises straight up that it was hastily written because if he didn't do it the story would be lost in short order, and he also says sorry to any of his Samoan friends who he might offend by the telling of his version of the truth. And he doesn't pull any punches.
I read it before going....two warring Samoan 'kings' with well armed infantry were at each other's throats mainly over misunderstandings and perceived slights, and a third 'king' deported out of the picture, as the Germans and Americans tried to take over the joint on the sly and plant it to copra, while the British loitered on the sidelines minding their own South Seas exploitation businesses. Stevenson stood firmly in the Samoan camp, but sensibly didn't take sides; he thought the British fools, the Americans blatant opportunists and gun-runners, and he hated the Germans with a passion for siding with one 'king' over the other, shelling 'rebel' villages from their gunboats, and getting into gun fights that were no business of theirs.
Stevenson never achieved fluency in Samoan despite his best efforts, noting that there are in fact two Samoan languages, one informal used in every day speech, and another formal - which contains many more adjectives - which is used by the tulafale matai ['speaking chief'] but is understood by everyone. Every important chief has a tulafale, who speaks for them in the council of chiefs, the fono [or as Stevenson called them "the little parliaments"], as high ranking matai are considered too dignified and important to speak. Orator matai are much admired and revered throughout the islands, and Stevenson invokes the joys of hearing Samoan oratory, and it was/is not uncommon for people to sit around and listen to an orator speak in formal Samoan for literally hours on end, invoking the spirits of the ancestors and using myth, legend, and poetry to make their points on behalf of the matai for whom they are speaking. Informal Samoan is a wonderfully lilting lyrical language as it is. After the speeches, decisions in the fono are always made by acclamation and consensus, with the strongest of traditional arguments prevailing. A stark contrast to the "first world", where politics and public policy are conducted in three second 'sound bites'.
Politically, Govt. in Samoa is run on the Westminster system, but it's democracy in name only. It's been a one-party state for a very long time - the leader of the Human Rights Protection Party, Tuilaepa Lupesoliai Neioti Aiono Sailele Malielegaoi, [who's universally known by his main chiefly title Tuilaepa] has been Prime Minister for 20 years, and holds 48 of the 50 seats in the Parliament after last year's election. All MP's must be matai, including the 25% quota for women. Commoners are barred. There are reputedly about 16,000 matai in Samoa [so that's about one chief for every 12 people] and another six or so thousand living in the Samoan diaspora, mainly in New Zealand, Australia and Hawai'i. There is no great appetite for change. But you only have to read the independent and fearless daily tabloid the Samoan Observer to know that corruption flourishes, and it's all very much kept in-house, but that's another story.
Stevenson, like me, never fully understood Samoan society, and was under some glaring misapprehensions in A Footnote to History. But he constantly expresses his frustration at also not being able to "get it", and the realisation that he most likely never would bedeviled him, in a place he loved like no other in the world, and he'd been around. Even though he had made a very good life for himself living handsomely off his book royalties and was, and still is, highly regarded by the locals as Tusitala ['the teller of tales'], he well knew he was condemned to be always the alien, the outsider looking in.
On our last day on Upolu, we decided to drop in at Stevenson's old gaff, the now magnificently restored Villa Vailima in the hills behind Apia. It had suffered in cyclones and earthquakes over the years, and had been left derelict. But now, under the auspices of some wealthy American philanthropist, it's like stepping into a colonial time-warp. But you'd be hard pressed to find it on the Cross Island Road by signage alone - it is very small, and just reads "RLS Museum →". It's the finest example of a two story Victorian Plantation House, a mansion really, you could ever hope to see, built from a variety of local hardwoods. We had a quietly spoken, almost reverant and very knowledgeable personalised guide who took us slowly around every room in the joint, which still has a lot of the original furniture and even more replica's.
Man oh man, did Stevenson pick his spot and go for it, or what? It's set on 400 acres of meticulously maintained grounds. Tropical rain showers were sweeping over the mountains when we were there, but it would have the most magnificent view of Apia harbour and the vastness of the Pacific beyond in clear weather. He was a weirdo Scot though, married to a feisty American named Fanny, after they'd met in Paris. He had his elderly mother there with him too, and his young adult step-children by Fanny. What the? He had a chimneyless fireplace installed in the Smoking Room that was never lit in the tropics, to remind him of home back in Scotland, and his wife's bedroom is floored and paneled in Californian redwood for the same reason. A very strange couple. They had imported more than 90 tonnes of furniture and fixtures and fittings, including a grand piano, to put in the villa. On a wall hangs a huge much larger-than-life oil portrait; our man asked if we knew who it was, and after some futile scratching of heads trying to put a time-frame on it, he said "Christopher Columbus".
Stevenson is buried on a mountain top on the estate, but we were warned off by people who had attempted the trek, as the two long tracks to the grave are narrow, jungle covered, steep and slippery. Not for a couple of crips! He remains an enigma in the islands. In a Footnote to History, Stevenson used an archaic word I had never heard of before while excoriating some German official for his complete and utter inability or unwillingness to "understand the mansuetude of the Samoan".
"Mansuetude"??...what a nice word...I just had to look it up...it's dictionary definition is "of habitual mildness or gentleness, meekness, modestness" &etc.
Sums up the people of Samoa perfectly in a single word.
1936
"Bumstead" Map of Pacific Ocean for National Geographic
Magazine.
Detail,
Samoan Islands, 1936 "Bumstead" Map of Pacific Ocean for
National Geographic Magazine
Villa
Vailima, Vailima, Apia, Upolu, Samoa