As soon as the girls are strong enough to carry heavy loads, it pays the family to shift the responsibility for the little children to the younger girls and the adolescent girls are released from baby-tending. It may be said with some justice that the worst period of their lives is over. Never again will they be so incessantly at the beck and call of their elders, never again so tyrannised over by two-year-old tyrants. All the irritating, detailed routine of housekeeping, which in our civilisation is accused of warping the souls and souring the tempers of grown women, is here performed by children under fourteen years of age. A fire or a pipe to be kindled, a call for a drink, a lamp to be lit, the baby’s cry, the errand of the capricious adult—these haunt them from morning until night. With the introduction of several months a year of government schools these children are being taken out of their homes for most of the day. This brings about a complete disorganisation of the native households which have no precedents for a manner of life where mothers have to stay at home and take care of their children and adults have to perform small routine tasks and run errands.
Before their release from baby-tending the little girls have a very limited knowledge of any of the more complicated techniques. Some of them can do the simpler work in preparing food for cooking, such as skinning bananas, grating cocoanuts, or scraping taro. A few of them can weave the simple carrying basket. But now they must learn to weave all their own baskets for carrying supplies; learn to select taro leaves of the right age for cooking, to dig only mature taro. In the cook-house they learn to make palusami, to grate the cocoanut meat, season it with hot stones, mix it with sea water and strain out the husks, pour this milky mixture into a properly made little container of taro leaves from which the aromatic stem has been scorched off, wrap these in a breadfruit leaf and fasten the stem tightly to make a durable cooking jacket. They must learn to lace a large fish into a palm leaf, or roll a bundle of small fish in a breadfruit leaf; to select the right kind of leaves for stuffing a pig, to judge when the food in the oven of small heated stones is thoroughly baked. Theoretically the bulk of the cooking is done by the boys and where a girl has to do the heavier work, it is a matter for comment: “Poor Losa, there are no boys in her house and always she must make the oven.” But the girls always help and often do a great part of the work.
Once they are regarded as individuals who can devote a long period of time to some consecutive activity, girls are sent on long fishing expeditions. They learn to weave fish baskets, to gather and arrange the bundles of fagots used in torch-light fishing, to tickle a devil fish until it comes out of its hole and climbs obediently upon the waiting stick, appropriately dubbed a “come hither stick”; to string the great rose-coloured jellyfish, lole, a name which Samoan children give to candy also, on a long string of hibiscus bark, tipped with a palm leaf rib for a needle; to know good fish from bad fish, fish that are in season from fish which are dangerous at some particular time of the year; and never to take two octopuses, found paired on a rock, lest bad luck come upon the witless fisher.
Before this time their knowledge of plants and trees is mainly a play one, the pandanus provides them with seeds for necklaces, the palm tree with leaves to weave balls; the banana tree gives leaves for umbrellas and half a leaf to shred into a stringy “choker”; cocoanut shells cut in half, with cinet strings attached, make a species of stilt; the blossoms of the Pua tree can be sewed into beautiful necklaces. Now they must learn to recognise these trees and plants for more serious purposes; they must learn when the pandanus leaves are ready for the cutting and how to cut the long leaves with one sure quick stroke; they must distinguish between the three kinds of pandanus used for different grades of mats. The pretty orange seeds which made such attractive and also edible necklaces must now be gathered as paint brushes for ornamenting bark cloth. Banana leaves are gathered to protect the woven platters, to wrap up puddings for the oven, to bank the steaming oven full of food. Banana bark must be stripped at just the right point to yield the even, pliant, black strips, needed to ornament mats and baskets. Bananas themselves must be distinguished as to those which are ripe for burying, or the golden curved banana ready for eating, or bananas ready to be sun-dried for making fruit-cake rolls. Hibiscus bark can no longer be torn off at random to give a raffia-like string for a handful of shells; long journeys must be made inland to select bark of the right quality for use in weaving.
In the house the girl’s principal task is to learn to weave. She has to master several different techniques. First, she learns to weave palm branches where the central rib of the leaf serves as a rim to her basket or an edge to her mat and where the leaflets are already arranged for weaving. From palm leaves she first learns to weave a carrying basket, made of half a leaf, by plaiting the leaflets together and curving the rib into a rim. Then she learns to weave the Venetian blinds which hang between the house posts, by laying one-half leaf upon another and plaiting the leaflets together. More difficult are the floor mats, woven of four great palm leaves, and the food platters with their intricate designs. There are also fans to make, simple two-strand weaves which she learns to make quite well, more elaborate twined ones which are the prerogative of older and more skilled weavers. Usually some older woman in the household trains a girl to weave and sees to it that she makes at least one of each kind of article, but she is only called upon to produce in quantity the simpler things, like the Venetian blinds. From the pandanus she learns to weave the common floor mats, one or two types of the more elaborate bed mats, and then, when she is thirteen or fourteen, she begins her first fine mat. The fine mat represents the high point of Samoan weaving virtuosity. Woven of the finest quality of pandanus which has been soaked and baked and scraped to a golden whiteness and paper-like thinness, of strands a sixteenth of an inch in width, these mats take a year or two years to weave and are as soft and pliable as linen. They form the unit of value, and must always be included in the dowry of the bride. Girls seldom finish a fine mat until they are nineteen or twenty, but the mat has been started, and, wrapped up in a coarser one, it rests among the rafters, a testimony to the girl’s industry and manual skill. She learns the rudiments of bark cloth making; she can select and cut the paper mulberry wands, peel off the bark, beat it after it has been scraped by more expert hands. The patterning of the cloth with a pattern board or by free hand drawing is left for the more experienced adult.
Throughout this more or less systematic period of education, the girls maintain a very nice balance between a reputation for the necessary minimum of knowledge and a virtuosity which would make too heavy demands. A girl’s chances of marriage are badly damaged if it gets about the village that she is lazy and inept in domestic tasks. But after these first stages have been completed the girl marks time technically for three or four years. She does the routine weaving, especially of the Venetian blinds and carrying baskets. She helps with the plantation work and the cooking, she weaves a very little on her fine mat. But she thrusts virtuosity away from her as she thrusts away every other sort of responsibility with the invariable comment, “Laititi a’u” (“I am but young”). All of her interest is expended on clandestine sex adventures, and she is content to do routine tasks as, to a certain extent, her brother is also.
But the seventeen-year-old boy is not left passively to his own devices. He has learned the rudiments of fishing, he can take a dug-out canoe over the reef safely, or manage the stern paddle in a bonito boat. He can plant taro or transplant cocoanut, husk cocoanuts on a stake and cut the meat out with one deft quick turn of the knife. Now at seventeen or eighteen he is thrust into the Aumaga, the society of the young men and the older men without titles, the group that is called, not in euphemism but in sober fact, “the strength of the village.” Here he is badgered into efficiency by rivalry, precept and example. The older chiefs who supervise the activities of the Aumaga gaze equally sternly upon any backslidings and upon any undue precocity. The prestige of his group is ever being called into account by the Aumaga of the neighbouring villages. His fellows ridicule and persecute the boy who fails to appear when any group activity is on foot, whether work for the village on the plantations, or fishing, or cooking for the chiefs, or play in the form of a ceremonial call upon some visiting maiden. Furthermore, the youth is given much more stimulus to learn and also a greater variety of occupations are open to him. There is no specialisation among women, except in medicine and mid-wifery, both the prerogatives of very old women who teach their arts to their middle-aged daughters and nieces. The only other vocation is that of the wife of an official orator, and no girl will prepare herself for this one type of marriage which demands special knowledge, for she has no guarantee that she will marry a man of this class.
For the boy it is different. He hopes that some day he will hold a matai name, a name which will make him a member of the Fono, the assembly of headmen, which will give him a right to drink kava with chiefs, to work with chiefs rather than with the young men, to sit inside the house, even though his new title is only of “between the posts” rank, and not of enough importance to give him a right to a post for his back. But very seldom is he absolutely assured of getting such a name. Each family hold several of these titles which they confer upon the most promising youths in the whole family connection. He has many rivals. They also are in the Aumaga. He must always pit himself against them in the group activities. There are also several types of activities in one of which he must specialise. He must become a house-builder, a fisherman, an orator or a wood carver. Proficiency in some technique must set him off a little from his fellows. Fishing prowess means immediate rewards in the shape of food gifts to offer to his sweetheart; without such gifts his advances will be scorned. Skill in house-building means wealth and status, for a young man who is a skilled carpenter must be treated as courteously as a chief and addressed with the chief’s language, the elaborate set of honorific words used to people of rank. And with this goes the continual demand that he should not be too efficient, too outstanding, too precocious. He must never excel his fellows by more than a little. He must neither arouse their hatred nor the disapproval of his elders who are far readier to encourage and excuse the laggard than to condone precocity. And at the same time he shares his sister’s reluctance to accept responsibility, and if he should excel gently, not too obviously, he has good chances of being made a chief. If he is sufficiently talented, the Fono itself may deliberate, search out a vacant title to confer upon him and call him in that he may sit with the old men and learn wisdom. And yet so well recognised is the unwillingness of the young men to respond to this honour, that the provision is always made, “And if the young man runs away, then never shall he be made a chief, but always he must sit outside the house with the young men, preparing and serving the food of the matais with whom he may not sit in the Fono.” Still more pertinent are the chances of his relationship group bestowing a matai name upon the gifted young man. And a matai he wishes to be, some day, some far-off day when his limbs have lost a little of their suppleness and his heart the love of fun and of dancing. As one chief of twenty-seven told me: “I have been a chief only four years and look, my hair is grey, although in Samoa grey hair comes very slowly, not in youth, as it comes to the white man. But always, I must act as if I were old. I must walk gravely and with a measured step. I may not dance except upon most solemn occasions, neither may I play games with the young men. Old men of sixty are my companions and watch my every word, lest I make a mistake. Thirty-one people live in my household. For them I must plan, I must find them food and clothing, settle their disputes, arrange their marriages. There is no one in my whole family who dares to scold me or even to address me familiarly by my first name. It is hard to be so young and yet to be a chief.” And the old men shake their heads and agree that it is unseemly for one to be a chief so young.
The operation of natural ambition is further vitiated by the fact that the young man who is made a matai will not be the greatest among his former associates, but the youngest and greenest member of the Fono. And no longer may he associate familiarly with his old companions; a matai must associate only with matais, must work beside them in the bush and sit and talk quietly with them in the evening.
And so the boy is faced by a far more difficult dilemma than the girl. He dislikes responsibility, but he wishes to excel in his group; skill will hasten the day when he is made a chief, yet he receives censure and ridicule if he slackens his efforts; but he will be scolded if he proceeds too rapidly; yet if he would win a sweetheart, he must have prestige among his fellows. And conversely, his social prestige is increased by his amorous exploits.