Tag Archives: Study in Samoa

Group of islands, volcanic and mountainous, located in the south-central Pacific Ocean, between 13º25´ and 14º30´ S latitude and 168º10´ and 172º48´ W longitude; the archipelago extends for a total of 2,831 km², stretching from E to W for approx. 500 km, and consists of about ten main inhabited islands and various uninhabited islets. The population is 183,000 residents (2005 estimate); the average population density is 63 residents/km². Politically, the western section constitutes the independent state of Western Samoa, the eastern one is a dependency of the United States called American Samoa (or Eastern Samoa). The human development index (HDI) is 0.769 and places the country in 75th place in the world ranking. According to COUNTRYAAH, Samoa is a nation in Polynesia, the capital city of which is Apia. The latest population of Samoa is 198,425.

HISTORY AND ART
The archipelago, one of the dispersal centers of the Polynesian race, was discovered in 1722 by the Dutch Roggeveen; the French Bougainville rediscovered it in 1768 and gave it the name of the Navigators’ Islands. The constituent islands of the archipelago lived practically independent under their own heads until the middle of the century. XIX, when Malietoa succeeded in affirming itself over all the others. In the last thirty years of the century, a lively rivalry between Germany, the United States and England broke out around the king: the three powers were attracted to the production of copra and the strategic position of the islands. The first had created a chain of farms starting from 1857 through the Godeffroy firm of Hamburg, which, having gone bankrupt, had sold its activities to a “German company for the trade and plantations of the islands of the South Seas” (1879). Two years earlier, the German government had entered into a friendship treaty with the sovereign of Samoa, followed the following year by the US government and then, two years later, by the English one, which had previously refused to accept the pressure of the New Zealand and Australia to occupy Samoa. Also in 1879 the three powers signed an agreement to guarantee order and good governance in the capital Apia (Upolu island). Suddenly, in 1884, Germany entered into a treaty with the king of Samoa that practically meant the establishment of the German protectorate. The result was a tension aggravated by the rivalry of three leaders for the succession to the throne; each of them was backed by one of the three Western powers. Through minor Anglo-German agreements, an Anglo-German-American tripartite agreement was reached in 1889, which guaranteed the territorial neutrality of Samoa. Rivalries between indigenous leaders and Western representatives caused serious incidents in the death of King Malietoa I (1898). The South African crisis advised England to give in to German claims. A convention was signed in November 1899 with which London recognized the German protectorate over Western Samoa (the great islands of Savaii and Upolu plus two smaller islets) in exchange for the German renunciation of claims on the Tonga Islands and the sale of some Solomon Islands, already occupied by Germany. With a subsequent tripartite convention of December 2, 1899, Germany and England recognized the US protectorate on Eastern Samoa (Tutuila and smaller islands). § Absent statuary, Samoan art is expressed in the creation of tools (bowls, headrests) and weapons of the highest formal level. The pictorial decoration is missing, while the geometric carving involves the war clubs. Geometric and zoomorphic motifs are stamped on the tapa.