German-Samoan Colonial Legacies - Malifa handbook

The front cover of this handbook indicates that it was presented to Mr. and Mrs. D. A. J. Rutherford in 1936. The Rutherfords had arrived in Samoa in 1919 when Mr. Rutherford was appointed superintendent of schools. Previously he had been headmaster of Highcliff School near Dunedin, New Zealand before taking up his position as headmaster of Leififi School, the first government school in Samoa established for local European children and children of expatriates. The handbook has hand-drawn images on the front cover and seven pages of handwritten text inside. It was presented to the Rutherfords upon their leaving Samoa in 1936. What other stories - beyond such biographical facts – can this handbook tell us?

Written by a student, this object is an example of how New Zealand policies in the early 1900s influenced Samoa’s educational system. During his 18 years tenure, Rutherford left his mark as an article in the Evening post on December 3, 1936, exemplifies. Referring to Mr. Rutherford’s departure, a ‘native teacher’ is quoted in saying: ‘The news of Mr. Rutherford’s retirement is sad to Samoa. Latafoti, as he is known in Samoa, has been with us in good times and bad times’. New Zealand’s education policy personified through Rutherford seems to have been awarded with a Samoan name, Latafoti, in return. Once we travel further back in historical time, we can detect more of such personal interactions and cross-cultural alterations throughout the school’s institutional evolution.

A Samoan School

Malifa was the second government school established during the German period in Samoa in 1908. It was intended for Samoan children. In 1909, a boarding school for the sons of matai (chiefs) was added to the Malifa compound. In fact, only boys were allowed out of respect for the Samoan chiefly elite and its underpinning hierarchical and gender divisions. 

The influence of Samoan ways of thinking and being can also be witnessed in the school’s founding. Faletoese, a pastor for many years at Fagamalo, Savaii, was asked by Dr. Solf, the German governor, to come to Apia to establish the government school at Malifa. A matai thus became the headmaster, demonstrating how ‘the Germans agreed to move within a world that was draped with Samoan webs of meaning’. Even in secrete correspondence, officials refereed to the school’s matai, rather than a German equivalent designating the position, thus indicating the level to which ‘Samoan concepts had permeated the colonial administration’. 

Culture War

In a similar vein, the Samoan language remained the main language at the school, prompting Solf – who spoke Samoan fluently himself – to declare that children of the German school would be allowed to attend Samoan language education here. Germany’s ‘salvage colonialism’, mainly designed and enacted by Solf and his successor Schultz to preserve Samoan customary practices while simultaneously subjecting these to overarching colonial institutions was – despite the undeniably uneven power dynamics – still a two-way affair leaving a Samoan imprint on the German population. Moreover, this two-way avenue branched out into multiple side-tracks, as seen in the Kulturkampf (culture war) erupting between Solf and the Catholic Mission over the school’s secular orientation.

Transactions and Transformations

So what broader conclusion can be drawn from such interwoven narrative threads? A flag that was also given as a farewell gift to Rutherford and is also housed in Te Papa’s collection serves well to use a particular object not as an end in itself but as a brush to paint a bigger picture. Aesthetically, the flag appears designed in a Samoan pattern and made from local material, while at the same time being devoted to a New Zealand teacher with his both identities – Rutherford and Latafoti – written in German script. Is this flag then purely Samoan, New Zealand or German? Does it represent one or all of these broad categories, or is there something else going on here? The Samoan-German poet and scholar Albert Wendt might help us thinking through the flag:

…it is a body coming out of the Pacific, not a body being imposed on the Pacific. It is a blend, a new development, which I consider to be in heart, spirit and muscle, Pacific: a blend in which influences from outside (even the English Language) have been indigenised, absorbed in the image of the local and national, and in turn have altered the national and local.

The flag, having travelled to Te Papa’s collection and (re)appearing in this text, continues to perform as a specific ‘material maker(s) of relationships’ through which we can zoom in on concrete ‘transactions and transformations’  between in its makers, givers, receivers, viewers and so on. Throughout its ongoing journey, it continues to blend and newly develop, living on as a multitude of flags.

Philipp Schorch (2016)