Lapita settlers made a “holy centre” of two main Polynesian isles
Samoa’s Independent State joins Savai‘i and Upolu with Manono, Apolima, and smaller islets in Polynesia. Lapita voyagers arrived about 3,500 years ago; the country dropped “Western” from its name on 4 July 1997 after 1962 independence.
The islands formed in the Miocene and have seen hotspot volcanism for two million years. Lapita settlers came from Island Melanesia, and the oldest human remains, from a site at Mulifanua, date to between 2,900 and 3,500 years ago. Samoans kept close voyaging and marriage ties with Fiji and Tonga, and the Malietoa line is credited with defeating the Tongans in the thirteenth century.
Jacob Roggeveen sighted the islands in 1722, and Bougainville called them the Navigator Islands in 1768 because of local seamanship. John Williams of the London Missionary Society arrived in 1830, and American whalers called for water and crews until 1870. In March 1889 German, British and American warships faced off in Apia harbour until a storm on 15 March wrecked them.
The 1899 Tripartite Convention gave the east to the United States and the west, much the larger part, to Germany. New Zealand troops took German Samoa without bloodshed in 1914 and governed it as a mandate from 1920. Robert Louis Stevenson, who chronicled the power struggle, urged chiefs in 1894 to farm and use their land or lose it.
Sā-moa may mean “sacred middle,” or recall a chief or mythic chicken-moa story. A unitary parliamentary democracy with eleven divisions joined the UN on 15 December 1976 and sits in the Commonwealth and Pacific Islands Forum. Neighboring American Samoa protested the 1997 rename that left only one “Samoa” in ordinary speech. New Zealand’s defence force is responsible for its defence.
Source: Samoa
