Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa

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CONTENT WARNING: THIS WORK INCORPORATES QUOTATIONS CONTAINING RACIST SLURS. IF YOU WANT TO CREATE A BOWDLERIZED COPY, SEE BETWEEN ABOUT 07.47 AND 07.50, AND AGAIN BETWEEN 11.00 AND 11.08, OF SECTION 9 / CHAPTER 8. There is no single experience with imperialism. The world over, every country subjected to foreign influence or subjugated to foreign control has their own story shaped by economics, civics, development, environment, culture, geography, diplomacy and people. There is no single experience with imperialism, and yet I suspect most people would not judge Samoa’s experience to be particularly exceptional either. Robert Louis Stephenson’s A Footnote to History is a particularly engaging account for being a pedestrian’s-eye view of imperialism at work. In Stephenson’s own words, his story is largely “. . . one of rapacity, intrigue and the triumphs of temper”. There is that. Cultures clash. Ordinary people are caught in the gears—while others are simply spectators, swept along. There are schemers too. Those seeking to shape the world to their own designs. Those who wrought this Samoan Crisis. Many of them are caught in the gears too. Stephenson’s treatment of many of the subjects who populate this account is penetrating and sympathetic—be that the irascible Colonel Henry de Coetlogon, the savvy and resolute chief Mataafa or the upright but unbending Captain Eugen Brandeis to name but a few. Why all this fuss? What great riches would bring industrial behemoths like the Germany and the United States to the brink of war? For what bounty do they contend in these islands, so far from their own shores? They contend for the commercial production of copra—dried coconut meat from which coconut oil can be extracted. Coconut oil is an ingredient which can be used in margarine. During the late 19th century, copra was produced across the region including in the Philippines, Tonga, the Dutch East Indies and New Guinea. Lurking behind men like Heinrich Becker and Wilhelm Knappe, Richard Phillips Leary and Harold Marsh Sewall, ever-present are the interests of certain business groups as perhaps embodied on the ground by men like Theodor Weber (Misi Ueba), and Stevenson’s own friend Harry Jay Moors (Misimoa)—whom he described in a letter as the “ablest, wealthiest and best-informed trader in Samoa”. From lobbying in Washington to smuggling in and directly supplying Mataafa’s forces with ammunition, traders like Moors were no mere bystanders but power players. Ultimately, for all the acquisitiveness and power games of man—there is no more apt reminder of where in the schema of our world that true power lies than the first Samoan civil war. “Do not let us weep,” said one Samoan in 1887 before Laupepa’s exile, “We have no cause for shame. We do not yield to Tamasese, but to the invincible strangers.” The strangers with their science and their industry would prove to be quite vincible, after all. Whenever Nature unleashes even a desultory shadow of shattering violence of which it is truly capable, even the mighty tremble and our contentions fall away. At least for a time. (Summary by Alister)