Birthdays are of little account in Samoa. But for the birth itself of the baby of high rank, a great feast will be held, and much property given away. The first baby must always be born in the mother’s village and if she has gone to live in the village of her husband, she must go home for the occasion. For several months before the birth of the child the father’s relatives have brought gifts of food to the prospective mother, while the mother’s female relatives have been busy making pure white bark cloth for baby clothes and weaving dozens of tiny pandanus mats which form the layette. The expectant mother goes home laden with food gifts and when she returns to her husband’s family, her family provide her with the exact equivalent in mats and bark cloth as a gift to them. At the birth itself the father’s mother or sister must be present to care for the new-born baby while the midwife and the relatives of the mother care for her. There is no privacy about a birth. Convention dictates that the mother should neither writhe, nor cry out, nor inveigh against the presence of twenty or thirty people in the house who sit up all night if need be, laughing, joking, and playing games. The midwife cuts the cord with a fresh bamboo knife and then all wait eagerly for the cord to fall off, the signal for a feast. If the baby is a girl, the cord is buried under a paper mulberry tree (the tree from which bark cloth is made) to ensure her growing up to be industrious at household tasks; for a boy it is thrown into the sea that he may be a skilled fisherman, or planted under a taro plant to give him industry in farming. Then the visitors go home, the mother rises and goes about her daily tasks, and the new baby ceases to be of much interest to any one. The day, the month in which it was born, is forgotten. Its first steps or first word are remarked without exuberant comment, without ceremony. It has lost all ceremonial importance and will not regain it again until after puberty; in most Samoan villages a girl will be ceremonially ignored until she is married. And even the mother remembers only that Losa is older than Tupu, and that her sister’s little boy, Fale, is younger than her brother’s child, Vigo. Relative age is of great importance, for the elder may always command the younger—until the positions of adult life upset the arrangement—but actual age may well be forgotten.
Babies are always nursed, and in the few cases where the mother’s milk fails her, a wet nurse is sought among the kinsfolk. From the first week they are also given other food, papaya, cocoanut milk, sugar-cane juice; the food is either masticated by the mother and then put into the baby’s mouth on her finger, or if it is liquid, a piece of bark cloth is dipped into it and the child allowed to suck it, as shepherds feed orphaned lambs. The babies are nursed whenever they cry and there is no attempt at regularity. Unless a woman expects another child, she will nurse a baby until it is two or three years old, as the simplest device for pacifying its crying. Babies sleep with their mothers as long as they are at the breast; after weaning they are usually handed over to the care of some younger girl in the household. They are bathed frequently with the juice of a wild orange and rubbed with cocoanut oil until their skins glisten.
The chief nurse-maid is usually a child of six or seven who is not strong enough to lift a baby over six months old, but who can carry the child straddling the left hip, or on the small of the back. A child of six or seven months of age will assume this straddling position naturally when it is picked up. Their diminutive nurses do not encourage children to walk, as babies who can walk about are more complicated charges. They walk before they talk, but it is impossible to give the age of walking with any exactness, though I saw two babies walk whom I knew to be only nine months old, and my impression is that the average age is about a year. The life on the floor, for all activities within a Samoan house are conducted on the floor, encourages crawling, and children under three or four years of age optionally crawl or walk.
From birth until the age of four or five a child’s education is exceedingly simple. They must be house-broken, a matter made more difficult by an habitual indifference to the activities of very small children. They must learn to sit or crawl within the house and never to stand upright unless it is absolutely necessary; never to address an adult in a standing position; to stay out of the sun; not to tangle the strands of the weaver; not to scatter the cut-up cocoanut which is spread out to dry; to keep their scant loin cloths at least nominally fastened to their persons; to treat fire and knives with proper caution; not to touch the kava bowl, or the kava cup; and, if their father is a chief, not to crawl on his bed-place when he is by. These are really simply a series of avoidances, enforced by occasional cuffings and a deal of exasperated shouting and ineffectual conversation.
The weight of the punishment usually falls upon the next oldest child, who learns to shout, “Come out of the sun,” before she has fully appreciated the necessity of doing so herself. By the time Samoan girls and boys have reached sixteen or seventeen years of age these perpetual admonitions to the younger ones have become an inseparable part of their conversation, a monotonous, irritated undercurrent to all their comments. I have known them to intersperse their remarks every two or three minutes with, “Keep still,” “Sit still,” “Keep your mouths shut,” “Stop that noise,” uttered quite mechanically although all of the little ones present may have been behaving as quietly as a row of intimidated mice. On the whole, this last requirement of silence is continually mentioned and never enforced. The little nurses are more interested in peace than in forming the characters of their small charges and when a child begins to howl, it is simply dragged out of earshot of its elders. No mother will ever exert herself to discipline a younger child if an older one can be made responsible.
If small families of parents and children prevailed in Samoa, this system would result in making half of the population solicitous and self-sacrificing and the other half tyrannous and self-indulgent. But just as a child is getting old enough so that its wilfulness is becoming unbearable, a younger one is saddled upon it, and the whole process is repeated again, each child being disciplined and socialised through responsibility for a still younger one.
This fear of the disagreeable consequences resulting from a child’s crying, is so firmly fixed in the minds of the older children that long after there is any need for it, they succumb to some little tyrant’s threat of making a scene, and five-year-olds bully their way into expeditions on which they will have to be carried, into weaving parties where they will tangle the strands, and cook houses where they will tear up the cooking leaves or get thoroughly smudged with the soot and have to be washed—all because an older boy or girl has become so accustomed to yielding any point to stop an outcry. This method of giving in, coaxing, bribing, diverting the infant disturbers is only pursued within the household or the relationship group, where there are duly constituted elders in authority to punish the older children who can’t keep the babies still. Towards a neighbour’s children or in a crowd the half-grown girls and boys and even the adults vent their full irritation upon the heads of troublesome children. If a crowd of children are near enough, pressing in curiously to watch some spectacle at which they are not wanted, they are soundly lashed with palm leaves, or dispersed with a shower of small stones, of which the house floor always furnishes a ready supply. This treatment does not seem actually to improve the children’s behaviour, but merely to make them cling even closer to their frightened and indulgent little guardians. It may be surmised that stoning the children from next door provides a most necessary outlet for those who have spent so many weary hours placating their own young relatives. And even these bursts of anger are nine-tenths gesture. No one who throws the stones actually means to hit a child, but the children know that if they repeat their intrusions too often, by the laws of chance some of the flying bits of coral will land in their faces. Even Samoan dogs have learned to estimate the proportion of gesture that there is in a Samoan’s “get out of the house.” They simply stalk out between one set of posts and with equal dignity and all casualness stalk in at the next opening. By the time a child is six or seven she has all the essential avoidances well enough by heart to be trusted with the care of a younger child. And she also develops a number of simple techniques. She learns to weave firm square balls from palm leaves, to make pin-wheels of palm leaves or frangipani blossoms, to climb a cocoanut tree by walking up the trunk on flexible little feet, to break open a cocoanut with one firm well-directed blow of a knife as long as she is tall, to play a number of group games and sing the songs which go with them, to tidy the house by picking up the litter on the stony floor, to bring water from the sea, to spread out the copra to dry and to help gather it in when rain threatens, to roll the pandanus leaves for weaving, to go to a neighbouring house and bring back a lighted fagot for the chief’s pipe or the cook-house fire, and to exercise tact in begging slight favours from relatives.
But in the case of the little girls all of these tasks are merely supplementary to the main business of baby-tending. Very small boys also have some care of the younger children, but at eight or nine years of age they are usually relieved of it. Whatever rough edges have not been smoothed off by this responsibility for younger children are worn off by their contact with older boys. For little boys are admitted to interesting and important activities only so long as their behaviour is circumspect and helpful. Where small girls are brusquely pushed aside, small boys will be patiently tolerated and they become adept at making themselves useful. The four or five little boys who all wish to assist at the important business of helping a grown youth lasso reef eels, organise themselves into a highly efficient working team; one boy holds the bait, another holds an extra lasso, others poke eagerly about in holes in the reef looking for prey, while still another tucks the captured eels into his lavalava. The small girls, burdened with heavy babies or the care of little staggerers who are too small to adventure on the reef, discouraged by the hostility of the small boys and the scorn of the older ones, have little opportunity for learning the more adventurous forms of work and play. So while the little boys first undergo the chastening effects of baby-tending and then have many opportunities to learn effective co-operation under the supervision of older boys, the girls’ education is less comprehensive. They have a high standard of individual responsibility but the community provides them with no lessons in co-operation with one another. This is particularly apparent in the activities of young people; the boys organise quickly; the girls waste hours in bickering, innocent of any technique for quick and efficient co-operation.
And as the woman who goes fishing can only get away by turning the babies over to the little girls of the household, the little girls cannot accompany their aunts and mothers. So they learn even the simple processes of reef fishing much later than do the boys. They are kept at the baby-tending, errand-running stage until they are old enough and robust enough to work on the plantations and carry foodstuffs down to the village.
A girl is given these more strenuous tasks near the age of puberty, but it is purely a question of her physical size and ability to take responsibility, rather than of her physical maturity. Before this time she has occasionally accompanied the older members of the family to the plantations if they were willing to take the babies along also. But once there, while her brothers and cousins are collecting cocoanuts and roving happily about in the bush, she has again to chase and shepherd and pacify the ubiquitous babies.