Who answers it education

teaches them to ask?

From FELISE VA*A in Apia

What does the educated young Samoan want to do with his educa tion? No one knows for sure; no thorough study of employment pros pects and aims has been done in Western Samoa. The Bureau of Statis tics has a study of employment in mind, but its execution is a long way off.

Meanwhile it is possible to say what the parents of schoolchildren want. It is well known that parents are sending their children to school to qualify them for decent jobs in government, industry and commerce.

Those who are not fortunate enough to get one of the limited number of jobs usually return to work on the family plantation.

There is another attractive alterna tive for those who cannot find jobs in town migration. Every year, hundreds of young Samoans migrate to New Zealand, their fares paid by relatives already there. A few go to the United States and elsewhere.

Western Samoa thus stands to lose some of its most promising young sters, for migration is not restricted to the low level graduates of the pri mary and secondary schools. The young of brilliant academic and tech nical accomplishments sometimes leave in disgust because they do not find in Samoan society the things that they want, whether these be wages, opportunity or freedom.

Nowadays it is as a rule the bright youngsters who leave their villages for the higher incomes in the towns, Apia or elsewhere, while it is fre quently the not so successful ex pupils who must stay behind in the villages and serve the matais. Their efforts are not in vain, for often they succeed the matais and on their shoulders rests the responsibility of preserving the country’s traditions and customs.

As matais, they alone can vote and be candidates for parliament. They are the true pacemakers for they are unconsciously delaying the changes that are bound to come, the changes that will be accompanied by certain destructive effects, perhaps the elimi nation of the matai system itself.

The universal desire in Samoa is for change but there is disagreement on the nature of the changes and on the methods of bringing them about.

This goes double for young school leavers. Unless business and govern

ment combine to provide jobs for the young, more and more of them will emigrate, with the result that in the long run, Samoa will be poorer.

But the opportunity must not be merely in employment; there is also needed in Western Samoa an atmos phere that is politically, socially and morally congenial to the young

(Continued over page)

Diluted Samoan Titles

people. Hence many of the present social and political restrictions ought to be removed.

For example on the political level, the vote should be extended to all persons 21 and over, and parents and families should do away with their authoritarian attitudes towards the young.

Meanwhile the matai system is developing problems too.

With voting power confined to holders of matai titles (heads of ex tended families) in Western Samoa, the titles have proliferated and some villages are, literally, mass producing them.

This state of affairs has so de teriorated that the government has been compelled to intervene. Recently, cabinet appointed a sub-committee to look into the matter and see if this mass production of titles can be con trolled.

At the bottom of the problem is the need for parliamentary candidates to obtain sufficient support. Some times, the voters are compelled to vote a certain way because of family ties, because they must respect the dignity of a high title or because of an obligation. What happens to the well-educated matai, who wishes well for his constituency and for the coun try but who has not got a hope against a formidable opponent in the person of a very high-titled matai who probably has finished his educa tion at only second grade? The best alternative, some think, is to create more matai titles for those who could be relied upon to vote for him in a general election. This is what has hap pened during the last three general elections.

The most famous example of this arose in one such electoral contest between the present Minister of Works, Tupuola Efi, and one of the Vaai brothers. Both candidates set about “mass-producing” matai titles so that at the end, it was believed, the number of new matai titles exceeded the population of the villages con cerned, something unheard of, since on the average the number of matais to a village is only about a tenth of the village population.

To curb this increasing habit, the parliament some years ago passed a law regulating the manner in which matai titles could be conferred. This law has been enforced repeatedly.

One of its most unpopular aspects is that it applies retroactively so that many of the titles conferred in the “mass-production” manner in the past have been reviewed by the court. In

most cases, the titleholders have been ordered to go through with the proper ceremonies laid down by the law and where the titles are spurious, they have been abolished altogether.

Naturally, the many hundreds that have come before the Land and Titles Court feel a resentment against the government. “What business is it of the government to try to regulate Samoan custom?” they would ask. “If the Samoan people in the villages approve of it, it is no business of the government.”

And so, the government finds that

it has put itself in a spot. But now, it feels it must intervene to protect the matai system. The committee will include at least three cabinet mem bers. The outcome is uncertain but there is little doubt that the practice will continue.

Some suspect that what the govern ment really fears is that “mass-produc tion” of matai titles might bring pres sure to bear on the government to introduce universal suffrage. This it has been felt would be preferable to the destruction of the matai system.

But the government does not want universal suffrage. It prefers the status quo, which many already feel is out of place in the modern world.