Western Samoa

Press, Volume LXXX, Issue 24187, 21 February 1944, Page 4

Western Samoa

In the recent visit to Wellington of the Administrator of Western Samoa and the announcement that 12 Samoan youths are to be sent here every year to complete their education there is a timely reminder to New Zealand of her responsibilities as a mandatory Power. For four years almost nothing has been heard of the Samoan people and their problems. That is not because these problems have become less difficult or urgent; it is because the war has crowded Samoa out of the public mind and because the defence of the] territory has seemed more important than its domestic affairs. Now that the tide of war has begun to ebb back from the south Pacific, Western Samoa’s problems must once again claim the attention of the New Zealand Government. Nor can the Government afford to deal with them so fitfully and offhandedly as in the past. By signing the Canberra Pact, the Government claimed for itself special responsibilities in the south Pacific and professed a special interest in the welfare of the native peoples of the region. Its administration of Western Samoa is a fair test of its fitness for those responsibilities and of the genuineness of its professions. The record of this administration has been curiously mixed, periods of unintelligent benevolence alternating with periods of repression and conflict. Generally speaking, the Samoan people ha'-e prospered. Their health has improved, their numbers have increased, and they have become economically more secure. For these achievements New Zealand can claim much of the credit, though not all. But in the minds of the Samoans, who have an intense political consciousness, these benefits arc of small significance beside the plain fact that they have been promised self-government and

in 20 years have made no real progress towards self-government. This lack of progress is not due to political incapacity on the part of the Samoans; the Mau organisation is I witness that their social organisaI tion is amazingly adaptable to modern conditions of government. It is due primarily to the failure of the Administration and the New Zealand Government to think out and carry out any scheme for realising self-government by stages. There are more Samoans in the public service than there used to be; but no Samoan has yet managed to rise out of the lower grades of the service. Samoan chiefs have been I given high-sounding official titles; j but the Samoans know well enough ! that administrative power is still in European hands. In the last analysis, the problem of selfgovernment is a problem of education. Samoans have not been able to rise to positions of, administrative responsibility because the Samoan education system, chaotic and inefficient, is incapable of fitting them for this responsibility. Though elementary education at a low level is in theory available to all Samoan children, there is no opportunity in Samoa for the abler students to go forward to the sort of training that would qualify them for the higher posts in the administration. Nor is it any solution of the problem to send these abler students to New Zealand to complete their education. Experience has shown that the Samoan educated in European schools and in a European environment is unwilling to return to the village and goes to swell that unhappy and restless community which, in its ways of thinking and living, is neither European nor Samoan. The object of any scheme of higher education for Samoans should be to maintain the present Samoan social system and to develop its proved capacity for adaptation. Necessarily, this means that the scheme should function in the Samoan environment. If the New Zealand Government and the Administration of Western Samoa would reflect upon t’ a experiences of colonial administrations generally, they would realise that the proposal to bring 12 Samoan students a year to New Zealand, far from being a step forward, is a disastrous evasion of responsibility. The schools of New Zealand can do little to train Samoans for the task of governing their own people. They can do a great deal to unfit them for that task, and, with the best intentions, will not be able to avoid doing it.