Book Reviews

A Shy Lad Looks Back

On Western Samoa

It’s not true, after all, that the only territory likely to be written about by its oldhands is New Guinea. Prominent West Samoan oldhand, C. G. R. McKay, has produced a small volume of Samoan reminiscences from retirement in New Zealand, which will fill in some of the minutae of the days before Samoan independence.

Samoana offers us no revelations or blunt opinions, despite the fact that the author spent 23 years as a public servant in Western Samoa, the last 10 of them as Secretary for Native Affairs, and for four more years was Secretary of Island Territories, in Wellington. This reticence will come as no surprise to those who know Mr. McKay, who is described in a foreword by former West Samoan High Commissioner Sir Guy Powles as having a “careful professional competence, and a deep affection for the Samoan people”.

Insight of language

Careful is the operative word, and Samoana is more a memoir than memoirs. The author says he was a shy lad when he first went to Apia as a records clerk in 1919, before he was 20, and he recalls that his shy ness took some time to wear off.

His promotion from clerical obscur ity to the position of Secretary of Native Affairs when only 32, was, he surmises, “earned by my knowledge of the Samoan language and by being too shy to get into trouble”.

It is the insight he has from his knowledge of Samoan language and custom that supplies the main interest in Mr. McKay’s book, and one would like to have read even more detail on such things as his yearly walking treks around the two main islands and of the conciliation matters that took up so much of his time. And more, too, of behind-the-scenes atti tudes in the Mau movement which he now sees, with hind-sight, as being Western Samoa’s politically emergent days.

Some students, Mr. McKay thinks,

have tended to see in the Mau an example of culture conflict or of social change, but the Mau move men, he says, “was simply a straight forward, clear-as-daylight tussle as to who was going to run the country, paternalism from New Zealand or the people themselves”.

His book talks of many things.

From his long talks, in the quiet of the Tokelau evenings, with wizened old seamen who had made ocean crossings in their open canoes, Mr. McKay is not one of those ready to endow Polynesian navigators with more knowledge than they actually possess.

Ocean travel and planned migra tion were frequent practices of the Tokelauans, and he found that although they have a knowledge of the sun’s varying declinations and

the bearings of some of the stars, they could not fix their position if wind or current carried them off course.

As a precaution, their custom was for a fleet of canoes to spread in ex tended order in right angles across the course, a mile or more apart and just within sight and signal of each other, so they would sweep on a wide front towards their destina tion, as aircraft do when homing to their carriers at sea.

He adds: “The longer the journey the more was arrival a question of trial and error. It was high adven ture indeed when error would mean such final results.”

Mr. McKay remained in Western Samoa during much of World War 11, which, he recalls, was “almost as much fun” for the Samoans as it was for the American Marines who garrisoned Samoa.

Among 65,000 islanders there were 12,000 servicemen. Their laundry created a new local income of over half-a-million dollars a year in one month it grew from nothing to be the third industry in Samoa.

Wartime life

Over 2,000 local workmen em ployed on all sorts of duties received another half-million dollars. Life became a soaring balloon. Employers were patient, exasperated or ceased to care. Schools closed because teachers wandered off to American employment.

“Apia’s beach front, which in the 1860’s had boasted 19 saloons, now brought forth more than 30 restaur ants and hamburger joints. The ordinary stores could sell anything

on their shelves and managed to keep them full,” he writes.

“Gl’s and officers bought nylons and sent them back to the United States where they were made, but where they were difficult to get.

Church and social gatherings broke all records. For a wedding, the bride’s family would scour the countryside for fine mats, in a seller’s market of $l5 a piece, while the husband’s relations moved to the scene in chartered motor boats and with up to $5,000 in money . . . . inter-village visiting became a joie de-vivre that had not been experienced since the exciting days of the Mau.

Acquiring and distributing their own forms of wealth, always satisfying to the people, captivated all interest.

Politics hibernated.”

Yet the Samoan basics did not change, the author says. The sudden wealth was not spent on Western gadgets or in dissipation, but in greatly increased exercise of their own ways of finding satisfacton.

No false ways

“When the tide of dollars receded, they were in the fortunate position that never while it flowed had they adopted a false way of living.” As he says elsewhere, “The main con tributor to stability in Western Samoa has been time, and with it the poise and conservatism of a people which makes them cautious of change and jealous of behaviour.”

In 1946 Mr. McKay, then Secre tary of Island Territories, found himself in New York as part of the NZ delegation to the United Nations to arrange for the new Trusteeship Agreement for Western Samoa, and for the inauguration of the Trustee ship Council.

His comment on those times is relevant: “Several founders of the United Nations hoped that all the world’s dependent peoples would be brought within the trusteeship system, but the administering members seemed shy of this. In the event, the trusteeship system was applied only to former German, Japanese or Italian territories, because they were available as the chance outcome of war.

“Thus trusteeship status in itself was no measure of the advancement or otherwise of the peoples con cerned, and former colonies of great

consequence—lndia and Nigeria, as examples—emerged to successful in dependence, or instability, as the case may be, without the special fanfare that surrounded the trusteeship sys tem.”

Late one night at the UN, a Soviet delegate was doubting McKay’s word that the Samoans were democratic when John Foster Dulles came to McKay’s chair and told him that “the word democracy was intentionally omitted from the charter of the United Nations by the states men that had framed it, because they knew it would be abused often for the sake of advantage in argu ment, each claiming the only inter pretation of democracy to be his own.”

Mr. McKay was later, in 1961, co

administrator of the UN plebiscite on independence. For some years he was senior NZ Commissioner on the South Pacific Commission, and one of the stories he tells of a South Paci fic Conference probably helps to ex plain why the Samoans moved so easily to independence in 1962, At that conference the delegation from American Samoa included a young American anthropologist as ad viser. On a question being put one day to Tuiasosopo, an elderly Samoan orator, he put his fingertips to his forehead, affecting a Western man nerism, and replied, “Do you mind if I consult my anthropologist? He is supposed to know how I think!”—

SI.

(SAMOANA. Published by A. H. and A. W. Reed. $2.50.)

Land Tenure: Niue Shows Them How

Those interested in land tenure in the Pacific will find good value, for 10c, in a recent small publication entitled Report on Land Tenure in Niue, which is published as House of Representatives’ Paper No. A. 4, by the Government Printer, Welling ton, New Zealand.

The report, of 14 pages, was written by the Secretary for Maori and Island Affairs, Mr. J. M. McEwen, who is a former Resident Commissioner of Niue.

Any local situation is, of course, unique and the Niue proposals will not be directly applicable to any other place, but a number of the suggestions and principles may never theless be of considerable interest.

Niue is a largely self-governing island of 64,000 acres, with 5,500 people who are also citizens of New Zealand. One of the important land problems results from the fact that about one-third of all Niueans reside permanently on the mainland of New Zealand but are, nevertheless, reluct ant to relinquish their rights to land on Niue.

Traditionally, it was possible for children to inherit the land rights of both parents, although they usually only inherited rights in lands they occupied. With the introduction of the Land Court, however, “the im portant element of occupation has dropped out of the picture” and now everybody inherits rights in all the lands of all his recognised ancestors.

Fortunately, the Land Court has done little work on Niue, and it was because of the problems that followed the Land Courts in New Zealand and the Cook Islands that McEwen, when Resident Commissioner, decided that Niue needed a different system. He

instituted some brief studies of Niuean land tenure and involved the local legislature over a number of years in thinking through the con sequences of alternate approaches to tenure change.

There has probably been no colonial people in the Pacific who have been more fully consulted on the tenure legislation to be adopted, though such extensive consultation would hardly have been possible in a large territory.

The principles on which the Niue people have decided to base their tenure merit much wider considera tion in other parts of the Pacific.

They have decided that there shall be two main levels firstly, that of the mangafaoa or lineage, and secondly, that of the individual man within the lineage. All rural lands will belong to existing lineages and will be demarcated and registered in the name of those lineages, each of which will have an elected head as its trustee.

Within each lineage, however, occupation rights will be granted to individual men for such land as they are farming or intend to farm. A man with an individual occupation right has security of tenure guaran teed for himself and his children in definitely, provided he continues to use the land.

If he ceases to use it for a given number of years, it reverts to the lineage as a whole. All unallocated land rests with the lineage, but can be allocated as required to men who need it for farming.

The recommendations in the Mc- Ewen report are now being incorpor ated into legislation which will be

enacted during 1969.

R. G.

Crocombe.