Samoa
A Polynesian nation of two hundred thousand in the South Pacific whose whole way of life has a name, fa'a Samoa: the family, the chief, and the service that binds them. The complete guide, the forces first.
Samoa is a Polynesian nation of about two hundred thousand people on two main islands in the South Pacific, and its whole way of life carries a name: fa'a Samoa, the Samoan way. At its centre is the aiga, the extended family, led by a titled chief, the matai, and the path to becoming a matai runs through tautua, service to the family. Land, rank, the village council, the great ceremonies, and the deep Christianity of the islands all rest on this frame of family, service, and respect, carried now by Samoans at home and by the even larger number living abroad.
Fa'a Samoa, the Samoan way
Samoans have a name for their whole way of living, fa'a Samoa, the Samoan way, and it is spoken of as the thing that makes a person Samoan at all. It is not a set of quaint customs kept up beside modern life but the frame that modern life is lived inside, a web of family, rank, service, and respect that orders how a person stands toward everyone around them. At its centre is a way of seeing the person: a Samoan is understood less as a single self standing alone than as a being made of relationships, of the bonds to family, village, and ancestors, so that to be without those bonds is to be hardly a person at all. The space between people, the relationship itself, is the thing to be tended.
A handful of words name the values that hold it together. Aiga is the extended family, the centre of everything. Tautua is service, given by the young to their elders and their chief. Fa'aaloalo is respect, owed upward through the ranks of age and title. Alofa is love, and feagaiga the sacred covenant between a brother and his sister. Around these run the genealogies, gafa, that place each person in a line, the church, lotu, and the round of family obligations, fa'alavelave, that fall due at every wedding and funeral. Together they make a life of belonging and of duty in equal measure.
Fa'a Samoa is communal and it is ranked. Everyone has a place in it, titled and untitled, old and young, and with the place comes a part to play and a duty to perform. The young serve, and in time are served in turn; respect flows up, and care and protection flow down. To outsiders, and to some younger Samoans, the weight of obedience and obligation can sit heavily, yet it is also what gives a Samoan a name to be proud of, a family that will not let them fall, and a place that is theirs by right. Everything else in this guide is one face or another of fa'a Samoa.
The matai and the aiga
The working unit of Samoan society is the aiga, the extended family, and at its head stands the matai, the holder of a family title, who is its chief. The aiga is far wider than parents and children: it takes in the whole connected body of kin, and sometimes others who live under the family's care, all of them bound to the title and the land it holds. The matai is the trustee of that land and the voice of the family in the affairs of the village, charged with the welfare of everyone under the title, the keeping of peace within the family, and the upholding of its standing against other families.
There are two kinds of matai. The ali'i is the high chief, who holds the dignity of the title, and the tulafale is the talking chief, the orator, who speaks for the ali'i and the family in the formal exchanges of the village, carrying a fly-whisk and an orator's staff and wielding through his command of speech a power of his own. A family may hold many titles, of differing rank, and the more it holds the higher it stands among its neighbours. Both men and women may hold titles, though most matai are men, and within a family a first-born daughter may rank above her brothers, for the sister is held sacred in the bond of feagaiga.
A title is not simply inherited but conferred, given by the agreement of the aiga to the one judged worthy of it, and the giving is marked by a ceremony of installation. Where families fall into dispute over who should hold a title, or over the land that goes with it, the matter may go to a special court that judges such things by custom. The title carries into the modern state as well: in Samoa only the holder of a matai title may sit on a village council or stand for the national parliament, so that the chiefs remain, as they long have been, the people who govern.
Tautua, the path to authority
The road to a title runs through service. A Samoan saying holds that the path to authority lies through tautua, service, and a young person earns the right to lead by first giving years of labour and devotion to their family and their chief. The untitled young men of a village form a body called the aumaga, who are its workforce and once were its warriors, and it is they who do the heavy work of the family and the village, above all the cooking of the earth oven, and who serve the matai at every gathering. To serve well and faithfully is to build the claim that one day may be answered with a title of one's own.
Service takes more than one form. The plainest is the labour the Samoans describe as heating the eyes, the sweat and smoke of cooking over open fire and working in the sun for one's family. There is the service of protection, the readiness to stand and even bleed for one's matai and aiga, and the service of words, the giving of counsel and the speaking for the family. And there is service from afar, the support sent home by those who have gone away, in money, in goods, and in care, which counts as fully as the labour of those who stayed. A matai living overseas may serve the family no less than one at home.
This is why service sits so deep in the culture and is asked of the young so plainly. A title is understood as something earned by giving, not seized by ambition, and the years of tautua are the proving of a person's humility, diligence, and devotion to the family before they are trusted to lead it. The same idea is written on the body in the great male tattoo, whose completion marks a man as ready for the service of his matai and his aiga, a readiness shown in the enduring of pain for something larger than himself.
The village and the fono
Samoans live in villages, and the village, the nu'u, governs itself. A village is a group of aiga settled together within known boundaries, and its affairs are decided by the council of its chiefs, the fono, which is at once its government and its court. The matai of the village gather, when a matter is weighty, on the malae, the open green at the village's heart, the orators standing to speak while the rest sit on mats, and they settle between them the business of the village and the quarrels of its people. The decision is reached not by counting heads but by the weight of the senior chiefs, whose word the rest accept, and the law of the land has given these councils formal standing to handle much of the ordinary run of disputes by custom.
The village has its other offices too. The taupou is a ceremonial maiden of high rank, often the daughter of a leading chief, who prepares the kava at formal occasions and dances the closing dance of honour. The manaia leads the untitled young men, and the women of the village have their own organised body with its own duties. Each has a place and a part, and the order among them is minded closely, for fa'a Samoa is a culture in which who speaks, who serves, and who sits where all carry meaning.
Beneath the offices runs the sacred bond between brother and sister, the feagaiga, which holds the sister and her line in special honour and lays on the brother the duty to protect and provide for her. From it comes much of the standing of women in a society whose visible chiefs are mostly men, and the place of the first-born daughter, who may rank above her brothers. The village, with its council, its green, its ranked offices, and its covenants, is fa'a Samoa made into a place where people live.
The ava ceremony
The most formal act in Samoan life is the sharing of 'ava, the drink the wider Pacific calls kava, made from the pounded root of a pepper plant steeped in water. No important occasion begins without it: the bestowal of a title, the welcome of a guest of rank, the opening of a council, all are marked by an ava ceremony, conducted with care and a fixed order. The drink is mixed in a wide wooden bowl, the tanoa, that stands on short legs at the head of the gathering, and is strained and prepared by a person of standing, by custom the taupou, while the company sits cross-legged on mats around the open house.
What gives the ceremony its weight is the order of serving, which follows rank exactly. A caller announces each cup and the title of the one it is to go to, and the cups pass in their proper order, the highest chief first, on down through the assembly, so that the whole hierarchy of the gathering is spoken aloud and acted out in who is served and when. To receive one's cup is to have one's place in the order acknowledged before all. A few words or a clap may accompany the drinking, and a little is poured out in respect before the cup is raised.
Around the ava sits the high art of Samoan oratory. The talking chiefs deliver the formal speeches, the lauga, that open and frame such occasions, drawing on proverb, genealogy, and the honorific names of those present, in a polished and ceremonious speech that is among the most prized skills a matai can hold. In a culture that kept no writing until the missionaries came, the spoken word carried the law, the history, and the courtesies of the people, and the ava ceremony is the setting where that word is still spoken with the greatest care.
Tatau
Samoa gave the world the word tattoo, from its own tatau, and it has kept the practice alive without a break for some two to three thousand years, through colonial attempts to stamp it out and on into the present. The great male tattoo is the pe'a, which covers the body in dense black pattern from the waist to the knees; the female tattoo is the malu, finer and more open, worn on the thighs and behind the knees. Neither is decoration chosen for its look. The tatau is a covenant marked on the body, a sign of a person's endurance and of their readiness to serve their family and village under fa'a Samoa.
It is made by a master, the tufuga ta tatau, whose craft is hereditary and held within a small number of families, using tools of bone, tusk, and turtle shell bound to a handle and tapped into the skin with a mallet. The work takes many days and is severe, and it is done before the family, who hold the one being tattooed, sing to support them, and feed them between the sessions; it is undertaken in pairs as often as not, so that each may be strong for the other. To begin the pe'a and fail to finish it, to break under the pain, leaves a man with an unfinished tattoo that the culture marks as a lasting shame, on himself and on his family.
The tatau is sacred ground, and it is thriving. More pe'a and malu are given now than in living memory, the hereditary tattooing families still train their apprentices, and the hand-tapped way continues beside the machines of the parlour. For Samoans at home and abroad, to carry the pe'a or the malu is to wear the culture on the body and to declare a place within it. A visitor does well to treat it with the seriousness it holds: to ask before photographing it, never to touch it, and never to take its patterns for a holiday souvenir, for it belongs to a people and a covenant, not to a fashion.
The umu, the fine mat, and fa'alavelave
Cooking in Samoa is shared work, and its centre is the umu, an oven of heated stones built above the ground on which the food is laid and covered to cook slowly: taro and breadfruit, fish and pork, and parcels of taro leaves baked in coconut cream. Making an umu is a task for many hands, done largely by the untitled young men, and the meal that comes from it is meant to be shared rather than parcelled out, with generosity prized far above thrift. To feed people well, and to be fed among them, is one of the plainest expressions of Samoan belonging, and a meal is something to linger over rather than hurry through.
Beyond the daily table stands a custom of formal giving that binds the whole society together. The great events of a life, the fa'alavelave, the weddings, funerals, title bestowals, and church openings, call on every family connected to them to give, and what they give is money, food, and above all the 'ie Samoa, the fine mat. The fine mat is the supreme treasure of Samoan custom, woven from split pandanus so finely that a single one may take months or years to make, soft as cloth and prized for its age and its history. At a fa'alavelave the fine mats and the money move between the families in great formal exchanges, and a matai is expected to carry much of his family's share.
This giving is a serious matter and a heavy one. To meet the obligations of fa'alavelave is to hold one's family's place in the web of kin and village, and the demands can stretch a household, the more so now that money is asked alongside mats and food. A matai also gives a regular contribution to the running of the village. The fine mat and the feast carry the same meaning here as the bead money does in Palau or the gathered gifts of a Marshallese first birthday: to give at the proper time, in the proper measure, is to be a person of standing among one's kin.
Church and the Sabbath
Samoa is among the most devoutly Christian nations on earth, and the faith is woven completely into fa'a Samoa. Around nineteen in twenty Samoans are Christian, the national motto holds that Samoa is founded on God, and the constitution names the country a Christian nation. Missionaries arrived in 1830, and the people took to the new faith readily, some seeing in it the fulfilment of an old prophecy; the largest church today, a Congregational body grown from that first mission, stands beside Catholic, Methodist, Latter-day Saint, and Pentecostal churches across the islands. Samoans in turn carried the gospel to other islands of the Pacific as missionaries themselves.
In the village the church is central in every sense. Each village has at least one, often the largest and finest building in it, and the minister, the faifeau, is among the most respected people in the community, supported by the giving of his congregation. Every evening many villages keep sa, a short curfew for family prayer, when a bell or a blast sounds, the village falls quiet, movement stops, and families gather to pray; a visitor caught walking through is expected to halt and wait until it lifts. Sunday belongs to church and to rest, marked by worship and by the family meal that follows, with ordinary activities, even swimming in some villages, set aside for the day.
None of this stands apart from the older culture; the two have grown together. A Samoan keeps the obligations of the aiga and the customs of the matai and finds no quarrel between them and the church, which has taken its place among the things that bind a community. The minister is honoured much as a chief is, the church's events sit among the fa'alavelave that call for giving, and the faith and the way of the ancestors are lived as two parts of one whole.
A nation and a diaspora
The Independent State of Samoa is a country of about two hundred thousand people on two main islands, mountainous Upolu, where the capital Apia lies, and larger Savai'i, with smaller islands between. It is not to be confused with American Samoa, a separate territory of the United States lying to the south-east; the two share a people and a language but not a flag. Samoa was the first Pacific nation to regain its independence in the modern age, taking it on the first day of 1962 after nearly half a century of New Zealand rule, which had followed the German and had included a failure to keep out an influenza that killed about a fifth of all Samoans. Against that rule a resistance had risen under the call of Samoa for the Samoans, and independence was its victory.
The nation is matched by a diaspora as large as itself or larger. Samoans have moved in great numbers to New Zealand, to Australia, and to the United States, where they form one of the largest Pacific Islander communities, and the money they send home makes up a great share of Samoa's income, by some measures around a third of the whole economy. This is service from afar made into the lifeblood of the country, the duty of tautua carried across an ocean, and the churches, the family councils, and the obligations of fa'alavelave all reach out to wherever Samoans have settled. The culture travels with its people.
At home, the old order remains stitched into the new. Only the holder of a matai title may sit in the national parliament, most of the land is still held under customary tenure that the constitution guards, and the village councils still govern village life. The country has moved with the times in its own way, switching the side of the road its people drive on, and even skipping a day from the calendar to sit on the western side of the international date line with its trading partners, and in 2021 it chose its first woman prime minister. Through all of it Samoa holds, more firmly than most, to fa'a Samoa, and asks how that way of family, service, and rank will live on among the many Samoans now born and raised far from the islands.