Occupying Force:
New Zealand’s Invasion of Samoa August 29, 1914

Massey’s final statement was not quite correct. Two days before the Samoan occupation began the West African German colony of Togoland (modern day Togo) had unconditionally surrendered after a three-week British and French offensive. The operation in Togoland had been aimed at destroying the German wireless station at Kamina. Apia’s new station was similarly viewed as a critical communications link for Germany that would allow unacceptable wartime advantages for that country in the Pacific region. Samoa, like Togoland, was viewed only in terms of the needs and opportunities for the colonial powers. 

The marginalization of Samoan perspectives is a common thread in contemporaneous reporting and informed subsequent opinions. It wasn’t a new phenomenon as British, American and German governments had been arguing over their spheres of influence in the Samoan archipelago for decades. Interfering in internal politics by backing and fomenting leadership struggles contingent on what would best serve their own interests. At the end of the civil war in 1899 the Tripartite Convention formalized colonial rule partitioning the eastern islands of Samoa to establish the unincorporated United States Territory of American Samoa, and what became known as German Samoa, a German protectorate from 1900 to 1919, with Britain stepping away from Samoa to extend its dominion over the Solomon Islands.²  

Despite Euro American domination, Samoan power structures persisted and survived. German Governor Wilhelm Solf’s declared intention in 1900 was to ‘render ineffectual […] and slowly do away with the instrument of Tumua and Pule which dates back to the earliest times.'³ Tumua ma Pule was a coalition of tulafale (orator chiefs) from the islands of ‘Upolu and Savai‘i. ‘We are Tumua and Pule, we are the rulers of Samoa’ said leading tulafale Lauaki Namulau‘ulu Mamoe. Solf recognized the power within this cohort which he labelled both a ‘body of indolent intriguers’⁴ and a thirteen headed ‘hydra’⁵ and on 14 August 1905 proclaimed the abolition of the Tumua and Pule at Mulinu’u.⁶ Solf instituted an alternative and, some say, powerless⁷ advisory body known as Fono a Faipule containing some of the same membership as the Tumua ma Pule, such as Lauaki. From a colonial viewpoint then the influential cohort was neutralised but their impact and standing within fa‘a Samoa would continue up to 1914 and beyond. 

Solf’s successor and Governor of Samoa during New Zealand’s invasion was Dr Erich Schultz. He had initially left Apia when the invaders arrived but eventually surrendered to New Zealand military administrator Colonel Robert Logan.⁸ Logan’s signature ratifies the proclamations on display in the Samoa case and he casts a long shadow in Samoan history. Among Logan’s legacies in Samoa was his impact on the Chinese indentured labourers originally brought to work on plantations by the German administration in 1903. During the four years of the war, he cut the number of Chinese plantation workers from 2184 to 832 and devised a number of ways in which to criminalise and control Chinese lives. Not that the labour force had been well treated under German rule; a point made repeatedly by Chinese-Samoan editor of the Samoanische Zeitung James Ah Sue and recognized by the Chinese consul as early as 1908.⁹