Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017. xxviii, 399 pp. (B&W photos., illustrations.) US$72.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-6653-2.
This biography sets the life of Ta’isi Olaf Frederick Nelson (1883–1944), a Samoan merchant and anti-colonial political leader, in the context of twentieth-century colonialism and the British Empire. He was the son of a Swedish settler-trader, August Nelson, and Sinagogo Masoe from Safune Savai’i. This was a period in which race was the justification for colonial rule in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific Islands. Colonial officials told themselves stories about how their regimes were for the benefit of the colonized people they ruled. Believing they belonged to a superior race, European colonizers claimed that colonialism was a project to civilize the child-like natives. The colonial race-based order was one in which white people ruled brown people. The racist narratives of those times depicted mixed-race people as half-castes, those who could upset and subvert the colonial order. Those with family connections on both sides of the imposed racial divide were regarded with prejudice and suspicion.
Maintaining racial hierarchies was central to colonial rule throughout the British Empire (Damon Ieremia Salesa, Racial Crossings, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). To divide and conquer, the colonizers had to ensure that mixed-race people were marginalized and mistrusted. Accordingly, if the “simple” natives objected to colonial laws, there must have been a villain who was misleading them who had to be silenced. In the opinion of successive Administrators of Samoa in the 1920s and their political allies in New Zealand, that villain was Nelson. He was a rich, successful, respected man who supported the objections of other Samoan leaders to laws that deprived Samoans of basic rights. Nelson became a scapegoat and was blamed as an agitator for supporting the Mau independence movement. The Mau movement passively resisted New Zealand rule, which was granted under a League of Nations Mandate over Samoa in 1921, following New Zealand’s disastrous military administration (1914–1920). The memory of New Zealand’s failure in 1918 to quarantine the islands from an influenza pandemic that killed approximately one in every five Samoans, mainly young adults, was a major factor in Samoa’s resistance to New Zealand rule.
Nelson had initially advocated the racial classification system by which the population was divided into “natives” and “Europeans,” which included part-Europeans as well as white settlers and colonial officials. However, the heavy-handed paternalism of New Zealand’s civil administration soon led him to reject a system in which Samoans had few legal rights. Nelson took the chiefly title of his mother’s family Ta’isi to emphasis his Samoan identity and founded a newspaper criticizing the policies of the administration. Unable to accept that the growing rebellion against them was initiated by Samoan leaders, the New Zealand administration blamed Nelson as a half-caste instigator and sponsor of the Mau. In their view, the simple natives could not have hatched ideas of justice and equality for themselves. The story they told the world was that Nelson was not a “real” Samoan, but a half-caste, whose criticism of the New Zealand administration was motivated solely by his business interests. They said that Nelson was not only a troublemaker but an exploiter who cheated and misled the Samoans.
A number of those who have written on the Mau movement have suggested that Nelson was mainly motivated by threats to his business interests. O’Brien challenges this explanation, pointing out that in the New Zealand colonial administration’s efforts to separate part-Samoan business operators and planters from their Samoan family and village connections, they introduced a government-subsidized copra-buying scheme. At the same time, they placed the confiscated German plantations under management by the colonial administration. Instead of selling off the plantations to the likes of Nelson, the colonial administration corporatized them as the New Zealand Reparation Estates, which became, upon Samoa’s independence in 1962, the Western Samoan Trust Estates Corporation. These extensive plantations never regained the efficiency and prosperity that they had under the large German corporation from whom they were confiscated.
The Mau was organized in villages throughout Samoa and had the support of three of Samoa’s four paramount chiefs, with direct leadership by two of them. Members of the Mau wore uniforms and held regular protest processions along the main street of Apia town in front of the colonial administration’s headquarters. A political climax was reached in 1929 when the police opened fire on one such peaceful demonstration killing a number of Samoan leaders, including one of the paramount chiefs, Tupua Tamasese Lealofi. The Mau was declared a seditious organization and troops were brought in from New Zealand to quell it. The year before, Nelson had been exiled to New Zealand along with two other part-European members of the Mau. During his five years of exile, Nelson canvassed his wide circle of influential friends around the world, including famous Maori leaders of the time. He was able to write in elegant, articulate English as well as Samoan, and wrote hundreds of letters and articles to support the cause of Samoan self-government. He also travelled to Geneva to make Samoa’s case to the League of Nations, but was shunned as a result of the New Zealand delegation’s insistence that he was a dangerous agitator. Shortly after his return to Samoa, Nelson was found guilty of treason, and on the most dubious evidence sentenced to ten additional years in exile as well as eight months imprisonment in New Zealand. As a result, he was ruined financially.
Tautai is an extremely detailed history in which O’Brien has meticulously researched Nelson’s life and times with the cooperation of Nelson’s heirs, including the former head of state and prime minister of Samoa, Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Tupuola Tufuga Efi. The Nelson family has preserved Nelson’s correspondence and publications, as well as many other records of his life and times. Until now Nelson’s story has been barely told, and in telling it, O’Brien has provided the deepest historical account ever written of colonial Samoa between the two world wars.
Malama Meleisea
National University of Samoa, Apia, Samoa