I went to Samoa and quoted her offer to the old Governor, Major-General Sir George Richardson. “Well,” he grunted, “if Tonga is willing to do that we’ll come in too.”
The fight wasn’t over, even then, but the wall was breached.
******
When I left Tonga for the last time the Crown Prince Taufaahau was on the ship with us. He had come home to the celebration of his twenty-first birthday and had been given the high title of Tubou Toa. He was a splendid boy, one I would have been proud to have claimed as my son. Two young anthropology professors from the University of Chicago were with us and were charmed with his conversation, always on an intellectual footing with theirs. Gigantic as his ancestors, he kept fit by exercising with fifty-six-pound dumbbells. He laughed, remembering the chocolate bars I used to feed him. I was telling him about a chief of a lost Pacific island who had asked me to come back and be his guest for life; the Crown Prince fell into a long study, the way his mother did when she was deciding something for herself. Then he said, “Doctor, I invite you to make your home with me in Tonga. But of course,” he said, “that will be after I have assumed my place in Tongan society.”
I know of no happier place for my old age.
CHAPTER IV
THE LAND OF THE TALKING MEN
I only stretch the long-bow lightly when I say that Western Samoa’s political troubles began with a small medical problem and ended with a great one. Certainly the finish of the Mau Rebellion was a picture of hatred’s reaction upon public health.
The malanga of 1924 was in full swing, and I was one of the party. From days of old the malanga has been a royal progress, an annual window-dressing on the march, as it was in England when a grateful populace turned out to greet Henry VIII with polished hauberks and freshly dry-cleaned plumes. In Samoa’s year of plenty, 1924, the malanga was still an impressive show. His Britannic Majesty’s proconsul, Governor of New Zealand’s ten-year-old Mandate, had full-costumed a military display and was accepting the feasts or listening to the bands and musical orators all around Savaii.
Since Samoa’s dawn of time the Tulafale (the orator or “talking man”) had commanded leadership. No funeral, wedding or political controversy in the Fono (meeting place) has been official without a competition of orators, first on one side, then on the other, showering palaver or threats neatly wrapped in compliments. In the years of the Mandate the Talking Men were still importantly featured, and that wolf-gray, bullet-headed old British soldier, Major-General Sir George S. Richardson, had made many stops along his two weeks’ march, to examine the well-being of a people he governed all too kindly.