Coping with Samoan resistance after the 1918 influenza epidemic

independence emerged in Western Samoa with the formation of the Mau in 1926. Earlier forms of resistance to colonial rule sought merely to remedy specific grievances of the two separate sections of the community, Samoan and local European. Yet all were interconnected. Seeds of the Mau were sown by the German governors 1900-14 and the first two New Zealand administrators, 1914-23, though neither allowed them to germinate as did their more forceful, self-confident successor, Major-General George Spafford Richardson. The suppression of the Oloa movement of 1904 and the Mau a Pule of 1908 by the first German governor, Dr Wilhelm Soif, has been well researched and analysed by Pacific historians.1 The efforts of the acting New Zealand Ad ministrator, Colonel Robert Ward T?te, to smash the Toeaina Club and its satellite company (heirs of the Oloa) and to subdue unrest in the aftermath of the first World War and the influenza epidemic have been largely ignored.2 About 1935, in retirement, T?te himself began to write a history of them. Although he intended it to be primarily an account of what he did and saw in Samoa for his children, he also felt the need to justify his past actions. Among the fragments he drafted are 10 pages on the Samoan scene as he found it, in January 1919, and 15 pages on the resistance and unrest he encountered, in the months that followed, from the Toeaina Club and Afamasaga Toleafoa Lago Lago, and during the harbour board enquiry and the arrival and sitting of the Epidemic Commission. These drafts, together with his personal diaries and correspondence,3 provide a much franker, more intimate picture of his prob lems and perplexities than his official reports and despatches to the New Zealand Government.4