A Yankee doctor in paradise

by S. M. Lambert

In 1923 Dr. T. Russell Ritchie came in as Chief Medical Officer and his four years there were as remarkable for scientific achievement as anything accomplished by Gorgas in cleaning up Cuba and Panama. In civil administration you’ll find mistakes everywhere this side of Heaven. But even the mistakes were motivated by a fiery zeal to show the world New Zealand’s disinterestedness. Education and public health were the features in a program so thorough that it should not be forgotten.

It was a demonstration of preventive medicine unexcelled in the tropics. By 1926 a death rate of over thirty per thousand was reduced to twenty in four Samoan districts. Yaws was practically eliminated, infant welfare work had brought down the average mortality under five years to the lowest in the Pacific—before Tonga worked out that problem. Soil sanitation had become the rule instead of the exception; in 1921 New Zealand had sent a commission to Australia to study the Foundation’s hookworm campaigns there; Ritchie had adapted it to Western Samoa with marvelous results. He was bringing in pure piped water; on islands like Savaii, which is very rainy but so lava-porous that it has no streams, he had overridden Polynesia’s superstition and used church roofs as watersheds for storage tanks. New Zealand’s successful medical work was becoming a model for other island groups. There could not have been a better one. Germany’s last census in 1911 showed a population of 33,476. In 1917, after three years in possession, New Zealanders counted 37,196. In 1918 pandemic influenza, a scourge that baffled world medicine, mowed the natives down. But the Mandate’s care brought them back so steadily that in 1933—despite the hellish work of the Mau Rebellion—our yaws campaign workers counted 48,300. This last estimate, I think, was about 1,500 short of the actual number. Confused conditions, following years of revolt, made the count extremely difficult. In 1936 the census showed 55,000.

From 1921 to 1931, half of those years consumed by the Mau’s hateful destruction, New Zealand had given to Samoa between £12,500 and £14,000 annually for medical purposes alone. None of this was in the form of a loan; it was free as a birthday present. Add to this New Zealand’s gifts of public works,—like the native piped water supplies, for instance,—and you have a total of some £250,000 devoted to Western Samoa with no expectation of any return but the moral satisfaction of seeing a race revived.

Then what was the matter with Samoa that she wanted to rebel?

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Samoa has been plowed over so often by romance-hawkers, big and little, that it would hardly be worth my time or yours to try to revisualize the moonlight and song, the deep-grooved valleys, the lacy waterfalls infested by golden girls with tumbled raven hair. On my frequent professional visits I saw their unromantic side, yet always admired a people who refused to be coaxed or slave-driven into the sort of work which, to them, seemed unnecessary. Don’t dismiss the Samoan as a happy good-for-nothing. On sterile Savaii I have seen them carrying farm produce on their backs, mile after mile; it was the old way, and they were working their own land. If Samoan racial pride seems to you to be no more than backwoods vanity, remember the Polynesian brain, one of humanity’s best. And remember that in both Samoas, Western and American, there are as many people, perhaps, as you’ll find in one of New York’s longer streets. The old days are done for; the days of brave canoe-voyaging over uncharted blue waters. Among their ancestors were baffled Alexanders, weeping for more worlds to conquer. The worlds they found were so small, so scattered....

They have settled down to a small-town complex. For hours on end they sit around the kava circle, talking, talking. We are outnumbered, they say, but we are still Samoans. The New Faith is well enough. We must still observe our ancient ceremonies, our rules of courtesy, our carefully graded social distinctions, and every complication of our political structure. Listen to that old chief over there. He can recite his ancestry for thirty or more generations back. He is an aristocrat, and his memory is long, they say. All our memories are long.

This is not all poppycock. The Samoan is a born gentleman. Although books have been a stranger to him since the dawn of history, he is reading now. He is a nationalist and his reasoning mind has told him that his nationalism will have international support. Inwardly he believes that he is smarter than a European, and he wants a Samoa that is governed by Samoans. He looks across toward the Kingdom of Tonga and asks, “If they govern themselves, why can’t we? Tongans don’t work for Europeans. They hire them.”

All such ideas are splendid, if impractical and slightly ridiculous. They had much to do with the disastrous Mau.

The good Samoan mind is still factional. When the Dutch explorers first saw Apia they found a people who lacked the solidarity that welded Tonga. Each of Samoa’s three main islands had its own complicated aristocracy and tribal intrigue. It was Japan without a Mikado. You would have thought that the descendants of voyaging warriors would have developed the leadership that pulls a country together. Perhaps the Samoans were too innately civilized to crave a Hitler and a generation of massacres. It was the European’s job to drag them out of the Stone Age into the Bomb Age—all in a century and a half. By 1900 they could use rifles well, as witness the small butchery of Marines that led to the partition of the two Samoas between Germany and the United States.