I

II

The Government in Samoa is called the Malo. This means literally—the Conquering Party. It had always been the custom, from time immemorial, to pay tribute, in food, to the Malo. For the Government of a race of primitives, under such circumstances, to try to put a stop to an hospitable practice conveying this deeper implication, was deliberately to cut the ground from under its own feet.

Over and above this, the Administrator's order was calculated to defeat even its immediate purpose. We were making a drive, in the Agricultural Department, to get as much of the native plantations cleaned up as was possible, by means of communal work. In this way thousands of acres were cleared in Savaii during 1924. The quarterly inspection was regarded by the natives as in the nature of a gala. The bigger the Govern-page 174ment party that arrived, the more important was it considered, the greater was the excitement, and the better was the village pleased. For this reason we sometimes employed extra carriers. The event was made an occasion for festivity, and the inspections were probably less dreaded than desired. The few hours that the natives devoted to cooking food—of which we saw to it that they cultivated an abundance—should have been considered by the Administrator as very well spent. By robbing the day of its holiday aspect, the work in the plantations would have slumped hopelessly.

The projected instructions were issued, and caused great offence to the Samoans, who imagined that their hospitality was not appreciated. But they still continued to make presentations of food!

III

During an early inspection I had occasion to inflict one or two fines. These the European Inspector was not actually allowed to impose himself, but had to order the Native Inspector of Lands to do so. This peculiar procedure, it was explained to me, was designed with an eye to framing reports for the League of Nations. (Presumably so that it could be said that only Commissioners of the Court among European officials inflicted fines.) During the course of our journey the Native Inspector of Lands developed eye-trouble which rendered him temporarily blind, and I had to leave him for a few days at his own village. On my way up the coast, prior to the inspection, I had noticed that a section of road belonging to the village of Neiafu, we had particularly ordered to be cleared of scrub, had not been touched. A warning had already been issued. The Samoans are quick to take advantage of any weakness, and they will try with a new official to see how far they can go. I suspected such a test in this case, and accordingly took the Native Inspector's fine-book with me. The road had not been cleared; we had been issuing fines on this inspection, and in common fairness had to be consistent; I fined the village collectively the sum of one pound. At the next Faipule Fono in Apia, the Faipule of Neiafu raised the matter, although I doubt strongly if it was of his own initiative. General Richardson, I was informed, page 175replied: "We cannot have the European Inspectors issuing fines in this fashion!" and cancelled the fine. (He also said that no communal fines were to be issued under any circumstances.) Anyone with administrative experience, I think, would agree that the proper reply would have been, "I will inquire into the matter"; even if he had already determined to cancel the fine or to reprimand or even to sack the European official.

On looking back at incidents such as these, it seems to me somewhat surprising that a district of mine should have won the agricultural contest for 1924.

IV

At the half-yearly Faipule Fono—June 1924—the Administrator said:

"During this Fono you will be asked to convert your past discussions into deeds, and to make regulations on many matters for the benefit of your people. When these regulations have been passed you will proceed to your districts and see that action is taken to give effect to them."

Thus he proceeded, through the Faipule Fono, by means of "Regulations," to legislate, without reference either to the Legislative Council in Samoa or the Minister of External Affairs in New Zealand. An assault was now launched on the native social system.

It was decided (Samoa Times, June 20, 1924) that "District Councils be established in each District to assist the Government in controlling Native Affairs" … to be presided over by the Faipule, and to see among other things to the remodelling of villages. District Councils to have the power to suspend a chief or official for "not doing his duty" pending final decision of His Excellency. Fines to be inflicted for the non-observance of regulations, one fourth of the money to be paid to the Government and three-fourths to Village Committee and used for the benefit of the village. Native land to be divided up….

District Councils and Village Committees were, in 1925, legalized by Order-in-Council, New Zealand.

At the Seventh Session of the Permanent Mandates Commission at Geneva the New Zealand representative explained that the Administration had succeeded in inducing the natives page 176to adopt a policy which had for its object the abolition of the communal system of the ownership of land.

V

From the time that the Faipules illegally commenced to legislate, in the middle of 1924, a regular land-slide set in. The first step on that path was the setting up of the self-elected Village Committees, which began almost immediately to abuse their powers. Fines were levied by them for the most preposterous reasons from among those villagers least able actively to resent it, and appeared to be put to the single purpose of buying tinned beef and biscuit from the stores: "for the good of the village" being interpreted obviously as "for the delectation of the Village Committee." Nor were these councils of orators and petty chiefs to be blamed. They had been granted penal powers, and supposed, naturally, that they must make a point of exercising them. Why else had they been granted? There grew up, then, throughout the districts an atmosphere of bewilderment. So many foreign innovations were afoot.

VI

Shortly before I had transferred to Savaii, in 1923, the Administrator mentioned to me that he was starting a "boy movement"—with the idea, so he said, of inculcating discipline into the youth of the country, of which he remarked (incorrectly) that they did not get enough in their home lives.

Accordingly, the Sea Scouts had been merged into a new organization, called the Star, or Fetu, which had already, in 1924, largely as a result of compulsion exercised by the Fai-pules, made considerable progress in Upolu.

In August of that year the Administrator set out on his annual inspection of Savaii. He was accompanied by various white officials, including the Chief Medical Officer, and also by two visiting doctors—Lambert and Buxton. I saw something of the party at their starting-point, Fagamalo. One incident there impressed itself vividly upon me. A sandy road overhung by palms, and dusk has already fallen. There comes the blaring of a bugle and the throb of a drum, and suddenly page 177from the gloom emerges the Administrator, closely followed by a short column of native youths with red topless fezzes, white singlets, and scarlet lava-lavas. They are headed also by the physically enormous high-chief Faumuina—with red sash of office across his bosom. I had barely time to step aside—for I had not known of the presence of the Fetu in Savaii—and in a few seconds they had vanished again into the gloom, with somewhat of the strange and orderly exuberance of a band of urchins.

This particular squad was recruited from the youth of Apia, and accompanied the Administrator on his malanga round Savaii, being designed to initiate the movement in that island. Their example, although no doubt so intended, cannot have been entirely to the good, for they thieved from the very Residency at Fagamalo itself. In this respect, however, they were no worse than the Sea Scouts who had accompanied the Administrator on his first malanga, in 1923. Their penchant had been for breaking into trading-stations and stealing beer: a misdemeanour which at least one trader had found himself at a loss how to report.

At the Seventh Session of the Permanent Mandates Commission, 1925,

"M. Rappard said his attention had been called to an article in the Wellington Evening Post, in which the Superintendent of Schools of the mandated territory, Mr. Rutherford, had made a very interesting statement on the admirable scout movement. There was a badge worn by the Boy Scouts, the five rays of which represented God, King, Country, Mind, and Body. He ventured to suggest that possibly another ray might be added to represent the League of Nations."

This scintillating suggestion, I regret to have to record, gave no evidence of being favoured with adoption.

VII

The Administrator, as I have mentioned, was accompanied on this malanga by the Chief Medical Officer and two visiting doctors. One of these was from England, and the other was Dr. Lambert of the Rockefeller Foundation.

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At Faiaai, a village on the west coast of Savaii, where the party spent a night in native houses, Faumuina—the Leader of the Fetu—was approached by Samoans from the adjacent village of Foa, not five minutes' walk away, with a request for medical attention for a woman who was believed to be dying in childbirth. The following was among the evidence given by Faumuina before the Royal Commission (1927):

"There was a little trouble took place at the village of Foa. A woman gave birth to a child, and the arm of the child protruded first. It was thought there was a Samoan nurse in the village of Gagaemalae, and the woman was ordered to be sent there.

"Were you there at the time or are you telling us something someone else saw?—This was the explanation given to me.

"We cannot have that. You can only tell us things you saw yourself, with your own eyes?—The village pastor——

"Were you there or were you not?—I was not there, but this matter has been brought to my notice by these different people, begging me to attend to it.

"We cannot listen to what other people told you. Is there anything else you want to say concerning the Medical Department?

—I wish to state my grievance against the Chief Medical Officer of a certain thing that I saw, and about which there was nothing done. The Faipule, and the village pastor, and also the orator of the village, came and begged me——

"You cannot tell us that. You cannot tell us what conversation you had with anyone else?—I personally appeared before the doctor. I went to the doctor and explained to him about this very serious case concerning this woman. We wakened the doctor up, and he said to send the woman to the Samoan nurse. We explained to the doctor that the Samoan nurse could not deal with it, and that it was a case for him personally and should be attended to by him. The doctor then said it was better to take the woman to Tuasivi. We—the Faipule, the village pastor, and the orator—told the Medical Officer that such a thing was impossible, as the woman would die before reaching Tuasivi. Then the doctor said to take her to Apia, and they also told him that such a thing was impossible, as the woman would not live as long as that. Then, after several communications passed between them, he finally said, 'Faumuina, I cannot do anything in the matter.'

page 179

"Is that the same woman as you mentioned when you first referred to the matter?—Yes, the same one.

"How far would it be away from Tuasivi Hospital?—A very long way. (Distance pointed out on map: some sixty miles, with a lava-field in between.)

"Was the doctor on malanga at the time?—He was, together with the Governor's party.

"What happened to the woman?—I cannot say, because the party then passed on."

As the Chief Medical Officer chanced to be taken ill just as the Royal Commission commenced its sittings, we are denied his version of the occurrence. I can say, however, that Faumuina's account was corroborated to me personally by natives, the Faiaai trader, and also the Wesleyan missionary of Gagaemalae—who was at that time a pretty decent specimen.

Failing to get a doctor, the natives then sent to the mission station at Gagaemalae, to obtain the aid of the Government-trained Samoan nurse attached to its dispensary. She refused to come along in view of the presence of the qualified Europeans. The natives then in desperation borrowed a buggy from the Faiaai trader, Mr. Ross, and drove in the opposite direction along the coast to Samata—where there was a sort of devil doctor in some repute among them. He declared that if the woman died under his hands he would be persecuted by the European medicine-men. The result was that the woman died, without medical attention, and undelivered of child. When she was dead, the natives said, they cut the child out and, I think, buried them together.

VIII

In the Samoa Times of December 4, 1925, may be found a reprint from a New Zealand newspaper:

"Dr. S. M. Lambert, an expert on tropical diseases and a medical officer of the famous Rockefeller Foundation of New York, was a passenger by the Tahiti which arrived in Wellington to-day en route to San Francisco. He speaks of the splendid work done by the medical staff in Samoa, upon which he has reported to the League of Nations…. There is nothing com-page 180parable with this splendid medical and administrative work in the Pacific. It is a justification for New Zealand asking for almost anything it wants in the South Pacific."

About this time propaganda was being put out to bring Fiji also under New Zealand.

Speaking of the west of Savaii—my own district—I can affirm that, barring occasional campaigns to eliminate hook-worm and yaws, the Samoans had practically no medical attention. But, none the less, they had to pay a special medical tax of a pound a year over and above the poll-tax, which amounted to about another pound.

In the Samoa Times of December 17, 1926, with regard to a different matter, we learn that "the Governor of American Samoa reported the incident to the President of the Rockefeller Foundation, and requested that, if Dr. Lambert made the statements attributed to him, he be impressed with the gross impropriety of his conduct, as the wild assertions published did very great injustice to the people of American Samoa." This stricture might equally well have been applied to Dr. Lambert and the western part of the Samoa group. His reply was decidedly equivocal.

IX

At Falealupo, where in due course the Administrator's party proceeded, after leaving Faiaai, the white-bearded Roman Catholic priest who lived there, Father Haller, reported to the Administrator two glaring cases of misconduct on the part of the Resident Commissioner of the island. The first concerned a youth who, for wanton and deliberate murder (he threatened to shoot another youth, loaded a gun, and then shot him dead), was sentenced by the Commissioner to two months for carrying a gun without a licence. This case the Commissioner had not the legal powers to try, and should have referred to the High Court at Apia. The other incident concerned the banishment from his village of Salailua of a chief named Lealaitafea. The chief was summoned before the Commissioner in the pulenuu's house at Salailua, and no charges having been proferred against him, was simply sentenced to banishment from the page 181district for a twelvemonth. The Commissioner—who had just returned from drinking whisky with a trader who had intimated that he was going to make trouble for the chief—then fell dead drunk from his chair to the ground, and was carried off to his bed in full view of hundreds of Samoans in and about the house.

The native, on the advice of other traders, and also of the Gagaemalae missionary referred to in the Faiaai incident, went to Apia to appeal. He got no satisfaction, I need hardly say, from Mr. Griffin, who was responsible for the Commissioner's appointment, nor was he allowed to see the Administrator. When later he broke the banishment order—having been driven ashore at the prescribed place by bad weather when out fishing in a canoe—he was reported by the Faipule and jailed. He was, I should add, out of favour with the London Mission, having previously led a body of natives over to the Wesleyan church.

Nothing was said, when this case came up before the Royal Commission of 1927, of the Resident Commissioner having been drunk. On that point, from a sense of fair-play, Lealaitafea had been advised to keep silent in the first instance by his European advisers. This, however, together with other matters, I proved in December 1924, before a Board of Inquiry. Reference to this inquiry, for which I was responsible, and during which the Commissioner committed suicide, will be found in a document included in the Appendix.¹ The Commissioner was also proved to have been guilty of sodomy with his prisoners and policemen. He had been deported from Tonga for similar offences concerning schoolboys some years previously.

On the two charges proffered by the Roman Catholic priest General Richardson took no action. Perhaps he found them incredible. He had assured me only a week or two before of his esteem for the official, with whom I was already on extremely bad terms. The priest had also stated that he believed the Resident Commissioner to be homo-sexual. To all of this General Richardson had replied, "Very sad! Very sad!" Sodomy, I would add, was a vice practically unknown to the page 182Samoans. It now goes by the name of a New Zealand official, and is believed to be coming into vogue.

I would caution anyone who should refer to the Report of the Royal Commission concerning Laelaitafea, to study the evidence carefully. Exhibits are introduced in such a way as to make it appear that the native had been guilty of various breaches of the peace, which will be found to have no reference to him. No reason was adduced by the Administration for his banishment, save only a vague reference to a dispute concerning the London and Wesleyan missions.

X

The administration of justice in Savaii during 1923 and 1924 amounted to a scandal I should think without modern parallel in a British possession. I remember during a Court case in a native house at Salailua, the principal witness for the Crown being missing. His parents suddenly arrived and announced vociferously that he was locked in a trader's copra shed immediately across the road. And although his presence was urgently needed in Court, and the trader—the defendant in the case—was there, no doubt with the key of the shed in his pocket, yet the Crown made no attempt to secure the witness's release, despite the fact that natives could be seen conversing with someone through cracks in the copra-shed door. This was the trader who, on a former occasion, had filled the Resident Commissioner up with whisky. For this the trader had a medicinal permit, and, according to the local postmaster, used sometimes to send bottles through the post addressed to high officials in Apia, over whom he was for ever boasting his influence, even in my hearing. He was once convicted of assaulting a cripple with a riding-whip—owing to the insistence of other traders—but generally speaking he seemed to be sans reproche so far as the Government was concerned and certainly sans peur. The whisky apparently was very effective. So much for another aspect of Prohibition!

XI

On Flag Raising Day, August 29, 1924, General Richardson, page 183in the course of a speech, quoted the Mandates Commission as saying that it had no criticism to offer and complimented New Zealand especially regarding the measures it had taken in connection with the health of the natives. "It was disposed to regard Samoa as a model among the Mandated Territories."