The history of Samoa

Samoa occupies the western islands of the Samoan archipelago, chiefly Upolu and Savaiʻi, in the heart of Polynesia. Its people descend from Lapita voyagers who arrived about 3,000 years ago and built a society of chiefly families, villages and titles that still governs everyday life. In the nineteenth century Germany, Britain and the United States fought over the islands through rival Samoan factions, and in 1899 they divided the archipelago, leaving the eastern islands to the Americans. New Zealand took the western islands in 1914, presided over a catastrophic influenza epidemic and faced a long non-violent resistance, the Mau, before Western Samoa became independent in 1962 as the first Pacific island nation of the century to do so.

The archipelago was settled by Austronesian people of the Lapita culture, who sailed east from Island Melanesia. Pottery fragments found in the lagoon at Mulifanua on Upolu, and at Falefā, date the first settlement to roughly 1000 BCE. Samoa and Tonga were the first homeland of Polynesian culture, and from them voyagers using the skills of Pacific wayfinding later spread across eastern Polynesia. Pottery-making stopped in the early centuries CE for reasons that are still debated, and the archaeological record then grows thin for centuries.

Samoan oral tradition traces the people to the god Tagaloa and gives an early primacy to the Manuʻa islands in the east, seat of the sacred Tui Manuʻa title. Samoa's history was always bound up with that of Tonga and Fiji through voyaging, war and chiefly marriage. Tradition holds that two women from Fiji brought the art of tatau, the tattoo, to Samoa. For several centuries the Tuʻi Tonga, the sacred kings of Tonga, claimed influence over much of Samoa, until, according to Samoan accounts, the brothers who founded the Malietoa line drove the Tongans out, probably in the thirteenth century.

The warrior goddess Nafanua, deified in Samoan religion, was later remembered as the founder of the faʻamatai, the system of chiefly titles held by heads of extended families, and her successor Queen Salamasina, who held the four great titles of Samoa at once, presided over a period remembered as a golden age. Power in the islands rested less with any king than with the matai, the titled heads of families, and with the orator groups of Upolu and Savaiʻi, known as Tumua and Pule, who conferred the highest titles. Rivalry among the four paramount lines, the tama a ʻāiga, later shaped Samoan politics.

The Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen sighted the islands in 1722, and the Frenchman Louis-Antoine de Bougainville named them the Navigator Islands in 1768. Lasting contact began in 1830, when John Williams of the London Missionary Society landed on Savaiʻi with Tahitian teachers and won the backing of Malietoa Vainuʻupo. Christianity spread rapidly, and the Congregational church became a pillar of village life. Methodists and Catholics followed.

Whalers called for supplies, and Apia grew into a beach town of traders, consuls and beachcombers. The Hamburg firm of J. C. Godeffroy und Sohn arrived in 1855 and built large German plantations of coconut, cacao and rubber on Upolu. Britain, Germany and the United States, which wanted the harbour of Pago Pago on Tutuila, each backed different claimants to the kingship. The result was a long civil war between Samoan factions from 1886, in which the powers supplied arms and sometimes their own troops. In March 1889 German, American and British warships faced each other in Apia harbour, and war between the powers seemed close, until a cyclone on 15 March sank or wrecked the German and American ships. The Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson, who settled at Vailima in 1889, sided with Samoan critics of the foreign officials and attacked them in print.

Fighting resumed in 1898 over the succession, and in 1899 British and American ships shelled villages around Apia in support of Malietoa Tanumafili I against the forces of Mataʻafa Iosefo, who defeated an allied force at Vailele. The powers then settled the matter among themselves. Under the Tripartite Convention of December 1899 the islands west of 171 degrees west became German Samoa and the eastern islands became American Samoa, while Britain withdrew in exchange for concessions elsewhere, including Tonga and the northern Solomon Islands. No Samoans were consulted.

The German Empire ruled western Samoa from 1900 to 1914 under Governor Wilhelm Solf. He abolished the kingship, ruled through appointed Samoan advisers and took control of decisions over land and titles. In 1908 the orator chief Lauaki Namulauʻulu Mamoe of Savaiʻi led a peaceful protest movement, the Mau a Pule, against this rule. Solf had warships brought in, and in 1909 Lauaki and other leaders were exiled with their families to Saipan in the Mariana Islands. Lauaki died in 1915 on his way home.

At the start of the First World War, on 29 August 1914, troops of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force landed at Apia and took the colony without a fight. After the war Western Samoa became a League of Nations mandate under New Zealand, and later a United Nations trust territory.

On 7 November 1918 the administration allowed the steamer Talune, carrying influenza from Auckland, to berth at Apia without quarantine. Within days the disease spread across Upolu and Savaiʻi. Around 90 per cent of the population fell ill, and roughly one Samoan in five died: official counts recorded close to 7,000 deaths among about 38,000 people, and later estimates run higher. The dead included many of the matai who held the knowledge of land, titles and genealogy. In American Samoa, which its governor had closed to shipping, no one died. A royal commission confirmed the cause in 1919, but the disaster left deep distrust of New Zealand rule.

That distrust fed a new Mau, meaning firmly held opinion, in the 1920s. Led by the Samoan-Swedish merchant Olaf Nelson and by high chiefs, it organised a non-violent campaign of boycotts, its own police and a refusal to cooperate with the administrator, George Richardson, and his successor. Nelson and other leaders were exiled. On 28 December 1929, as a peaceful Mau procession welcomed a returning leader in Apia, police tried to make an arrest, scuffles broke out, and officers fired into the crowd, including with a machine gun. Tupua Tamasese Lealofi III, the Mau's leader, was shot while appealing for calm and died the next day, asking that no more blood be shed. Ten others were killed. The day became known as Black Saturday. In 1930 the movement was banned, and hundreds of its men took to the bush while sailors and marines raided villages. With so many men arrested or in hiding, Samoan women took the lead in rallies and demonstrations and kept the movement alive. A new Labour government in New Zealand recognised the Mau in 1936, and Mau candidates won most seats in the advisory council that year.

After the Second World War, when Samoa served as an Allied base, the United Nations pressed for self-government. A constitution of 1960, combining parliamentary government with the matai system, was approved by a plebiscite, and the Independent State of Western Samoa came into being on 1 January 1962. Fiamē Mataʻafa Faumuina Mulinuʻu II became prime minister, and two paramount chiefs, Malietoa Tanumafili II and Tupua Tamasese Meaʻole, shared the office of head of state. Malietoa held it alone from 1963 until his death in 2007.

Only matai could vote until 1990, when universal suffrage was introduced, though candidates must still hold chiefly titles. The Human Rights Protection Party governed from 1982, and under Tuilaʻepa Saʻilele Malielegaoi, prime minister from 1998 to 2021, it dominated politics. The country dropped "Western" from its name in 1997, which caused offence in American Samoa. In 2002 New Zealand formally apologised for the epidemic and the 1929 shootings. In 2011 Samoa skipped 30 December to share a calendar day with Australia and New Zealand, where large Samoan communities live. A tsunami struck the south coast in 2009, and a measles epidemic in 2019 killed more than 80 people, most of them small children.

In the April 2021 election the new FAST party tied with the governing HRPP. A constitutional crisis followed, with Tuilaʻepa refusing to leave office, until the courts ruled in July that FAST's Fiamē Naomi Mataʻafa had become prime minister, the first woman to hold the post. In January 2025 she dismissed the FAST chairman, Laʻauli Leuatea Schmidt, from her cabinet after he was charged with criminal offences, and was herself expelled from the party. After parliament rejected her budget, she called a snap election for 29 August 2025. FAST under Schmidt won 30 seats, and he became prime minister on 16 September 2025. The head of state since 2017 has been Tuimalealiʻifano Vaʻaletoʻa Sualauvi II.