Etiquette demands that there shall be a stop or two on the way. Etiquette also demands that leading families provide a splendid barbecue. Samoan hospitality, carefully gauged by the family code, holds the patient long enough to get well—or else. The visitors know that it is their ancient right to demand food, and that their hosts will be their guests someday and there’ll be another big picnic. The visitors make gifts, too; usually fine mats and tapa cloths. These gifts are a part of the prevalent gentleman’s code.
The patient gets to the hospital—alive, let’s say. “Parties-carrying-the-sick” are not allowed in wards, so they are settled in a base-camp in a near-by village, as guests of the Ainga there. The visitors contribute more pigs, and mats which cost from one pound up, according to historic value. These expenses, Ielu writes, “will no doubt appear absurd to the European mind.... It may all be in the course of life, according to the Samoan way of living, yet a pig is a pig and a fine mat is a fine mat.”
Then comes the operation. The native pastor and an Orator have been at the patient’s bedside. The parson and the Tulafale have said their prayer, made their speeches. Back in the camp there is wholesale cooking. The occasion demands ... “something to mark the occurrence. The presentation will be done publicly and the food announced aloud wherever it is being presented. The announcing is usually done when the patient has been brought back to the ward after the operation.”
The sick man, if he got well, was in for such an entertainment bill as never faced Lucullus. If he died the funeral would be on the same lavish scale and his family would have to pay for it.
Ielu tells of operating on I’inga, an aristocrat. Ielu was a brilliant surgeon, and the patient’s elephantoid scrotum was such a simple matter that he let him walk a short distance to the hospital. That should have cut the cost. He didn’t need boats or a base camp or a lusty entourage. However, this proud I’inga was compelled by custom to make a large food presentation every day of his illness; daily 100 loaves of bread with sugar and butter and two whole roast pigs went down to his account. His title of Matai was a high one, therefore he had to pay in fine mats for the daily sua (pig) presentations. The party cost him five pounds in bread, and pigs were worth about seven pounds apiece. The whole job set him back forty-four pounds, thirteen shillings.
Surgical and hospital fees came to four pounds.
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One night in 1924 I was dining at Vailima with Governor Richardson, who lived in the romantic house which Robert Louis Stevenson used to occupy. Above it loomed the steep hill which is topped by Stevenson’s tomb. So many tourist-ladies have climbed the mud-slippery trail to visit this shrine that I blush to mention it.
Governor Sir George had risen to high office by force of sheer ability. War had advanced him from the rank of drill sergeant to general command. A born Englishman, he had immediately won New Zealand’s respect for his Mandate administration. You had to admire him. He had the middle-class Englishman’s anti-Yankee prejudices; a brush with our United States Navy control in American Samoa hadn’t helped. Don’t think that he was any martinet when it came to native administration. Devotedly, honestly he wished to be the father of his flock. But he seemed rather too self-satisfied. Touchy Samoa politely resented his attitude, “See what we are doing for you. Come to us if there’s anything you want done.” I longed to tell him that he was doing too much for the Samoan, feeding him with modernism faster than he could digest it. But you didn’t tell things to Governor Richardson. He told you.
At that meeting, as at many others, we had discussed the need of a modern native medical school in Fiji, and as usual Richardson had been favorable to the plan. The expenses of governing a country that had 3,000 chiefs to 40,000 population was the only thing that held him back until Queen Salote’s generous offer in 1926, when he pledged Samoa to share in a scheme in which he had always heartily believed. During that long evening’s talk in 1924 I didn’t mention the woman on Savaii who died in childbirth. But if a competent Native Medical Practitioner had been on the spot that day the story of Richardson’s administration might have had a happier ending. I think he had a right to feel proud of the medical situation, for the Mandate was already training native nurses in the model hospitals, was using one of our old-school Native Medical Practitioners, and had socialized medicine to a point where every Samoan paid a head-tax of about five dollars a year for all treatments.