Welcome to a brief history of the Samoan Islands. This Polynesian paradise is 3,000 kilometers north of New Zealand and nestled in the heart of the Pacific Ocean. In the late 1800s, it was fiercely fought over by the British, the Germans and the Americans for its strategic port and bountiful resources.
Doing what disagreeing colonizers do best, they drew a line through the middle of a map and divided it up. The eastern islands go into the Americans, the west to the Germans, and the British got concessions in other parts of the world the colonizers drew lines through. Like Africa. The Germans settled into their new colony and built a thriving economy on the back of copra plantations.
But all good things must come to an end, especially with the onset of World War I. This is when the Samoan people would swap one oppressor for another. New Zealand, desperate to get into the colonising game, would administer Western Samoa on behalf of the British Empire. And who better to do so than a sheep farmer from Southland?
And in November 1918, Colonel Robert Logan and New Zealand allowed the Tallune, a ship carrying Spanish influencer, to dock in Apia Harbour, catastrophically nearly wiping out a quarter of the Samoan population. Yes, you heard correctly. New Zealand was responsible for one of the worst cultural and population decimations per capita in the world. By now the Samoan people have had enough.
But more was to come. It's funny, you know, I mean, independent for 3,000 years and then some balagi's come in and tell you. Oh no you're not.
A lot of New Zealanders don't get the fact that we loaded up ships and sailed off and occupied them and pulled up our flag and said you are now us and we're going to tell you what to do. Having little experience in governing colonies, New Zealand's military led administration in Samoa came with a poor understanding of the local people and a heavy hand. When Logan came in and then Tate after him I think, and then Richardson came, there were policies for example which allowed the administrator to banish Samoans anywhere, anytime, for any reason without any consultation with anybody. That's one of the things he did which really really angered the Samoans. So he started banishing people from one village to another village.
Stopping people from travelling in boats and canoes. He also set about dismantling the cultural structure of Samoan society by stripping chiefs of their matai titles, trying to remove any sort of autonomy they might have had. And then taking away a lot of power from the village councils and the village chiefs and focus everything onto himself. This crippling whitewash of the Samoan social structure and the economic...
downturn meant anti-New Zealand sentiment was rife and bubbling beneath this was the lingering anguish of the death of thousands from the fatal flu that New Zealand let into Samoa and the lack of accountability and remorse that flowed thereafter. It killed about a quarter of our population. I was very much aware of how much it impacted on my grandfather because he lost a lot of his family.
He suffered very much. So that, you know, if he talked about the epidemic, he'd break up into a bawling child. The scars of Samoa's colonial past were to inform the present.
The Mau a Pule, the first Mau movement for independence, It started 20 years earlier in reaction to the German rule of Samoa. Under renowned leaders like Lawaki Namulaulu Mamoe, who were exiled to Saipan, never to return to their homeland. Now the seeds were being sown for the mao to rise again, planted firmly with the catch cry that would become a call to arms for the nation. Samoa, more Samoa. Samoa, for Samoans.
I grew up in Maimoso exactly where the Mau House was and that was basically our little playhouse. We'd go and play there running up and jumping off the front of the Mau House. The Māori essentially began when the New Zealand administration was becoming oppressive about running businesses in Apia and a bunch of people basically got.
meeting together in our peer to discuss what we would regard these days as government policy on taxation. It was the catalyst though for a whole bunch of other people to say we're tired of being messed around with. One of these people was Tupua Tamasese Lealofi III. Amongst the Samoa leaders who were involved, he was certainly the most prominent person in terms of the title that he held.
The other prominent person, Ta'isi Oromia. Olaf Fredrik Nelson. This is my grandfather, Taishi Or Nelson.
I remembered him as somebody who loved me really, probably too much, you know, for my own good. and people enjoyed his company. He had a lovely sense of humour. We used to call him Frederick the Great. Taisey Nelson was an inspirational figure because he was really the ambassador for the movement on a global stage.
He was furious that the New Zealand administrators were trying to limit and trying to prohibit and trying just to restrain everybody from doing what they wanted to do. They all got together and established committees to work against the New Zealand administration. That was the Māu. So in 1927, after years of Samoan suffering at the hands of their colonial oppressor, the Māu was officially formed. There was a sense of panic in the New Zealand government that it might lead to other things.
It might open a can of worms. It was no longer just a few people meeting. It was now a movement. I heard about it from my grandmother.
It was full of people from Savai'i, from Alipata, and they would all come and live here. There was not enough room in the houses because people were billeted here. We asked her, why did they come here?
Because they all support them out. Our grandmother never, ever talked about the bad things. New Zealand administrators systematically set about trying to squash any potential uprising.
To test their mettle, in January of 1928, they banished Taishi Olaf Nelson and three others from Samoa. In an attempt to humiliate Maori members, they ripped the stripes from their earlover lovers. And food supplies were cut off from some of the villages. This just steeled the Maori resilience.
Well, that's the thing, is that New Zealand didn't understand what they were dealing with. They thought by sending the four Afrikasis out of the country, they were going to close it off. And then when that didn't work, they thought, well, we'll bring in some more police and we'll arrest the leadership.
Well, that didn't work. Back in New Zealand, Nelson did all he could from afar, garnering support from a man who knew more about fighting colonial legacies than most. Prominent Māori MP Sir Maui Pōmare, who would become a key New Zealand advocate for the Māori and the injustices being carried out on behalf of the Crown in Samoa.
You know, I think there's a lot of racial stuff in it. Samoans were victims of that kind, of those kinds of attitudes. We come here, we look after you and unconditioned that you behave. But Samoans were done behaving.
On December 28th, 1929, a welcome party gathered on Beach Road in Apia Harbour to welcome back Olaf Nelson's lawyer, who had been visiting him in exile in New Zealand. Mau came down to meet the boat that was... bringing back the lawyer from Auckland, O.F. Nelson's lawyer from Auckland.
They were going to greet him, take him out to the Waimusu, have a feast, and all go home. But that developed into a protest march, and a lot of people joined in and walked along the beachfront. I think that scared the New Zealanders, and the police in particular.
There were men in that march who hadn't paid their taxes, their poll taxes, and the police had decided they were going to arrest those men. And the fact that they decided they were going to arrest them right on the spot where all the weapons were all queued up, well, I have no faith that it was an accident. I think it was a plot to kill the leadership of the mole. New Zealand police opened fire on unarmed peaceful protesters. Yes it was a machine gun that was used.
They shot people by firing at the crowd and a lot of people were injured and a couple of them fatally. I personally think it was an ambush that the New Zealand administration had decided at that particular point that they were going to teach Samoan's a lesson. Pepe Robertson's grandfather was gunned down in the street.
About seven bullets in his lava lava and plus so many bones broken in his body that there was no way that he could be he could survive. the shooting. In addition to the three wounds in his chest he had also been hit on the left side the groin, right foot between the shoulders and six times in his right foot. The evidence is there that they knew that there was going to be gunfire and exchanges. On that dark day, close to 60 people were injured and 11 were killed, one of whom was the Māori's talismanic figurehead and leader, High Chief Tupua Tamasesi le Alofi.
But on his deathbed, rather than rage for revenge, he pleaded for peace, leaving Samoa a legacy with his last words. My blood has been spilt for Samoa. I'm proud to give it.
Do not dream of avenging it as it was spilt in maintaining peace. If I die, peace must be maintained at any price. This amazing man, you know, before Gandhi, before Martin Luther King, this guy was preaching non-violent resistance.
Samoans were doing non-violent resistance. It's very actually of now. The Tree of Liberty is watered by the blood of martyrs and it's very true because it gives it life, it gives it meaning, it gives it substance. because it talks about a man's commitment to his forebears, to his poetry, to his family, and to his god, because all these things are interwoven.
Outrageous to me is that there was no proper inquiry or investigation. There were no criminal charges for any of it, and yet at least one person involved, the coroner, said there was no necessity. for men to be opening fire onto Pūtama Sisi. Well, that implies at the very minimum a manslaughter charge. In the days after Black Saturday, New Zealand doubled down.
They brought in more police and even sent New Zealand's first ever RAF mission to hunt the men of the Maori. The police and the soldiers come to raid the family houses. The kids are all screaming and crying because the soldiers will be just coming with the batons to find out if there's any men lying there hiding.
But they never found any men. They were all gone bush. That did nothing to deter the Samoan people.
The resistance rolled on as the mantle of the mao was picked up by the women, who formed new leadership and strategies to keep the momentum of the resistance moving. We have this confluence of tragedies and running Samoa for 20, 30 years. It was almost inevitable that it was going to end badly. You don't really hear about, you know, the trauma that, you know, families went through during that time. But I think that history of how things happened need to be told and understood so that we appreciate what those people did.
There were also the shootings in this town, Apia, in December 1929 of non-violent protesters by New Zealand police. On behalf of the New Zealand government, I wish to offer today a formal apology to the people of Samoa for the injustices. 70 years later Helen Clark would apologise to the Samoan people for the inexcusable actions and attitudes of New Zealand whilst being the colonial rulers of Samoa.
But despite all that has been said and done, this still remains an important story. omitted from the pages of New Zealand's history books. The attitudes that contributed to that colonialist rule are still around today. You just have to look at Facebook and you see comments about Pacific people. So I don't know, it's not us that has to learn the story.
It's actually Zealanders. I know We don't want to be a part of that. Supporting local content, so you can see more of New Zealand on air.