Samoa

Samoa was settled more than three thousand years ago and, with Tonga, is often called a cradle of Polynesia, from where the wider Pacific triangle was later peopled. A powerful chiefly society developed, and missionaries who arrived from 1830 converted the islands rapidly.

In the late nineteenth century, Germany, Britain, and the United States contended for Samoa, with civil wars and a famous 1889 naval standoff in Apia harbour ended by a cyclone. An 1899 agreement partitioned the islands: Germany took the west, the United States the east (today's American Samoa), and Britain withdrew. New Zealand seized German Samoa in the First World War and administered it under a League mandate and then a UN trusteeship — a period marked by the 1918 influenza epidemic, which killed around a fifth of the population, and the non-violent Mau independence movement, whose peaceful march was fired on by police in 1929.

Western Samoa became independent on 1 January 1962, the first Pacific island nation to do so, and dropped "Western" from its name in 1997. The Human Rights Protection Party governed almost continuously from 1982, until a knife-edge 2021 election and a constitutional standoff brought the FAST party to power and made Fiamē Naomi Mata'afa the country's first woman prime minister.

Life is organised around fa'a Samoa, "the Samoan way": the aiga (extended family), the matai (titled chiefs) who hold family land and represent the family in the village fono council, and the web of reciprocal obligations — fa'alavelave — by which families contribute to weddings, funerals, church, and title bestowals. Around four-fifths of the land is customary and cannot be sold.

Christianity is central and visible: a large church in every village, White Sunday for children in October, and a constitutional declaration in 2017 that Samoa is a Christian state. Sunday and the evening prayer curfew are observed strictly.

Traditional arts remain strong — the siva dance, the fiafia feast and performance, fine mat weaving ('ie tōga), siapo bark cloth, and the pe'a, the hand-tapped male tattoo from waist to knee that is a mark of commitment to Samoan custom.

Most Samoans live on Upolu, in and around Apia and in coastal villages, with the larger island of Savai'i quieter and less developed. The economy is small and heavily supported by aid and, above all, by remittances from a Samoan diaspora in New Zealand, Australia, and the United States that is larger than the population at home.

Agriculture — taro, coconut, cocoa, bananas, nonu juice — and fishing are the main livelihoods, with a modest tourism sector and a light-manufacturing base that has shrunk. The country is acutely exposed to disaster: catastrophic cyclones in 1990–91, the 2009 tsunami, and a 2019 measles epidemic that killed 83 people, mostly infants, in a country with then-low vaccination rates.

Village life runs on the church calendar, communal work, and the authority of the matai and the fono.

Samoan food is based on root crops, coconut, and the sea. Taro, breadfruit, and green bananas are the staples, cooked with fish, chicken, or pork, and palusami — young taro leaves baked in coconut cream, wrapped in banana leaf — is the signature dish. The umu, an above-ground earth oven of hot stones, cooks the Sunday to'ona'i feast.

Oka, raw fish marinated in coconut cream, lime, and chilli, is eaten fresh, and the market in Apia sells everything from octopus to fa'ausi coconut-caramel squares. Koko Samoa, a thick local cocoa drink, and green coconut water are the everyday refreshments, and 'ava (kava) is drunk in ceremony.

Upolu, the main island, has the To Sua ocean trench near Lotofaga, the waterfalls of Papapapaitai and Togitogiga, the Piula cave pool, and the palm-backed south- coast beaches of Lalomanu and around Aleipata, many lined with beach fales. Apia has the Robert Louis Stevenson museum at Vailima, where the writer spent his last years and is buried on Mount Vaea, along with the fish market and the Immaculate Conception cathedral.

Savai'i, the larger and wilder island, has the Alofaaga blowholes, the Saleaula lava fields from a 1905–11 eruption that buried villages and a church, the Falealupo rainforest canopy walkway, and the giant Pulemelei stone mound, the largest ancient structure in Polynesia. Between them, the ferry crossing and the reef- protected lagoons are attractions in their own right.