When the American liner Mariposa, bound from San Francisco to Sydney, called at Āpia on Wednesday night 3 May 1899, forty tons of cargo and a handful of passengers were put ashore. The Sāmoa Weekly Herald listed two passengers; ‘Dr. W.H. Solf and servant’. Solf, dispatched to end an imperial inspired civil war, became one of the bookends to Sāmoa’s 20th Century. Another was to come. Germany left a solid legacy from its 14-years of direct rule in Sāmoa. In Āpia, there was useful infrastructure that stood up to subsequent decades of New Zealand neglect. German directed agriculture like coco and plantation copra continue to this day. Germany’s cultural impact is greater than realised; echoes of Solf, Schultz and Krämer are present in much of fa’a Sāmoa. That it is not recognised is the product of a sustained New Zealand campaign to demonise German rule. In the 21st Century the New Zealand narrative on German Sāmoa is the accepted Sāmoan version. This was built up even as New Zealand’s 48-year rule came with death and disaster, inertia and racism. At every point, New Zealand had resisted coming to terms with real people. They did not speak their language, nor understand their culture. By the time the last of the New Zealand functionaries headed back to run rural post offices or similar, Āpia was a rundown, weary town.
In its first decade of restored independence, Sāmoa was introverted and seldom involved in regional or international issues. Poor shipping, aviation and communications lines were responsible in part, but mostly the country needed time to recover from over a century of invincible strangers pressing on their hospitality. Much of fa’a Sāmoa remained in place, if battered.
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