The spoiling of Samoa

By TAPU MISA

As invasions go, the New Zealand takeover of Samoa in August 1914 was a low-key affair. New Zealand had received a request from Britain to take over the radio station in Apia.

Wellington was so hungry for action and Pacific territory, that within hours, a 1363-strong advance force was thrown together from three infantry companies. Just over a week later it set sail on two passenger ships, the Moeraki and the Monowai.

On August 29, 1914, the New Zealand forces landed in Apia barely three weeks after World War I was declared. Led by Colonel Robert Logan, an English-born farmer from Maniototo in Otago, the heavily garbed New Zealand soldiers went ashore unopposed and the next day the Union Jack was raised over Apia. It was the first German territory captured in the war.

The takeover was achieved with remarkably little fuss. One soldier wrote home that it was a "tame affair". Not a shot was fired. In fact, German Governor Erich Shultz had already left town, deciding that resistance was pointless when the island's forces consisted of 20 soldiers and special constables, about 50 rifles, and one gun "which was religiously fired every Saturday afternoon and took half an hour to load".

New Zealand was to rule Samoa for nearly 50 years - a period marked by injustices and tragedy, caused in large part by its bungling, misguided and often racist administration.

By far the worst of these tragedies was the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which swept through Samoa with "amazing rapidity", as a commission of inquiry later found, killing up to 8500 people.

The virus came to Samoa on board the Talune, which had docked in Auckland as the epidemic was raging. It stopped in Suva, where it was quarantined, and by the time it reached Apia on the morning of November 7, six passengers were down with the flu.

None of this information was passed to the islands' health officer, Frank Atkinson, who later quoted the ship's captain, John Mawson, as saying, "We had sniffles, but nothing serious and we are all over it now."

The passengers were allowed to disembark, and within weeks, more than 22 per cent of Samoans were dead. People returning to New Zealand told of entering houses to find every occupant dead, of dead-carts stopping at huts to pick up the dead, of Samoans dying on the roads, on the beaches and near waterholes where they'd gone to get some relief. Bodies were piled and then thrown into mass graves.

Colonel Logan ignored an early offer of medical help from American Samoa, apparently because he disliked the Americans. Australia sent seven Navy and Army doctors and 33 orderlies, but by the time their ship arrived in Samoa on December 3, it was too late.

New Zealand never sent any help and the doctors already on the island were reported to be too busy helping whites in Apia, and seemed almost uninterested in the plight of the Samoans.

Elizabeth Moore, an English missionary who ran the Papauta girls' boarding school in Apia, later told how Logan had been outraged when she asked for meat from the newly established relief kitchen in Apia, so she could have soup made for 150 sick people. He stormed into the school while they were preparing for the burial of a girl who had died the day before, told them he would not give them any meat and demanded that the sick girls be sent out to dig graves.

"I do not care if they die," he told the missionary. "Let them die and go to hell."

Atkinson was later found to have failed in his duty, but Logan was never officially censured for the disaster. He went back to New Zealand on leave and never returned to Samoa.

But his handling of the epidemic had left its mark. There was widespread anger and, as the next administrator noted, "absolute proof of mismanagement" in the minds of Samoans.

The flu decimated families and took many of the country's leaders. Of the 34 matai who made up Samoa's highest political council, the faipule, only seven survived.

A 1948 United Nations study described what happened in Samoa as "one of the most disastrous epidemics recorded anywhere in the world during the present century". By comparison, New Zealand lost 0.5 per cent of its population to the pandemic. Its total war losses were 16,000 or 1.5 per cent, which was seen as heavy.

Thanks to strict quarantine, American Samoa was left untouched by the pandemic, and it was impossible to escape the conclusion that New Zealand had failed to protect Samoans while the Americans had not.

That resentment, along with the heavy-handed actions of successive administrators of the same ilk as Logan, helped to feed the Mau movement, which promoted self-government through peaceful means.

The administration dealt with this by introducing the Samoan Offenders Ordinance. This gave the administration, in the opinion of one Supreme Court judge opposed to the ordinance, "the power, without any trial, and without the formality of hearing the party proceeded against, to order his banishment from his own village to any place in the territory for any period of time, even extending to the life of the person against whom the order is made".

Between 1921 and 1926, 53 matai suffered banishment and the loss of titles. Some were deported to New Zealand and jailed, among them Mau leaders, Taisi Olaf Frederick Nelson and one of the island's highest-ranking chiefs, Tupua Tamasese Lealofi III.

But the Mau's policy of passive resistance continued. Poll and medical taxes weren't paid. Copra cutting stopped. Boycotts were imposed on all white stores.

Matters came to a head on Black Saturday, December 29, 1929. When unarmed Mau supporters, led by brass bands, marched down Beach Rd in Apia, the New Zealand police opened fire on them with rifles and a machine gun, killing at least eight Samoans, including Tamasese. One New Zealand policeman was attacked and killed by the now rioting crowds. No formal inquiry was ever held.

As journalist Michael Field writes in his book Mau Samoa's struggle for Freedom, New Zealand's colonial pretensions went against the reality of its being itself only a small Pacific nation still struggling to find its own identity. (Governor Grey, for instance, declared that New Zealand was amply qualified to take charge of Polynesians because it had been so successful with Maori.) The truth was, writes Field, that New Zealand "was in no fit state to run nations of people who had a rock firm notion of who they were".

Helen Clark says she'll be reflecting on New Zealand's "utterly inept colonial administration" when she is in Samoa early next week for celebrations to mark the 40th anniversary of its independence from New Zealand.

But how important is it to Samoans that she say the "S" word? For Samoan academic Galumalemana Alfred Hunkin, there is no doubt.

Samoans have not asked for an apology - "What good is an apology if it has to be wrenched from someone?" - but he thinks he knows what the reaction of most Samoans will be if one is offered, and it is from the heart. They will be deeply moved, as he was at the thought that Helen Clark might want to say sorry.

"I had tears in my eyes. The idea that a leader of New Zealand, which has been responsible historically for doing all that damage, is prepared to take responsibility for all those tragedies, is a great thing. It's a big release in terms of that anger, that unspoken hurt that's been part of our psyche as Samoans."

In Samoa, of course, saying sorry is not something to be done lightly.

The traditional form of atonement, ifoga, requires those who have committed major wrongs to demonstrate their sorrow by sitting outside the house of the wronged person and exposing themselves not only to the elements but to possible attack.

"It has a very deep spiritual background," says Galumalemana. "When the va [the bond between people] is broken, whether by murder or rape or some other serious crimes, you have to repair it. Serious crimes require serious sorrow."

So expectant is the community that the Ministry of Pacific Island Affairs has arranged for a live satellite feed of the Prime Minister's speeches on Tuesday in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch.

While some are cynical, many see an apology as the chance to shine a light on a dark chapter of this country's little-known colonial history. Says Oscar Kightley, playwright and actor: "If nothing else, an apology will get people asking, 'What are they sorry for?"'

Kightley was born in Samoa and became a born-again Samoan after reading Michael Field's book on the Mau. "I remember sharing my outrage with other Samoans. The most appalling thing is the fact that we didn't know. Here we were learning about the Six Day War and various dukes and kings and there's our own history, which seemed to have been covered up.

"New Zealanders need to know that stuff, too, because there are many aspects of life in New Zealand where Samoans claim privileges because of that relationship. People don't realise that New Zealand ran the country for decades."

As Galumalemana says, it's the irony of colonialism. "We're here because you were there."

It was New Zealand's actions in Samoa that led to the 1982 Privy Council decision, which ruled that all Samoans born between 1924 and 1948 and their heirs were New Zealanders. That decision dated back to the 1920s, when the Government of the day had to declare Samoans New Zealand citizens to deport troublemakers to this country.

The decision was hastily overturned by the Citizenship Western Samoa Act of 1982 - "We woke up the next morning and it was gone" - a move that always rankled with the Samoan community.

Like others, Galumalemana sees an apology as the chance for the Samoan New Zealand relationship to make a new beginning - to finally move beyond the colonial baggage of the past.