Coconut Colonialism

Workers and the Globalization of Samoa

Holger Droessler

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780674270329
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: History

A new history of globalization and empire at the crossroads of the Pacific. Located halfway between Hawai'i and Australia, the islands of Samoa have long been a center of Oceanian cultural and economic exchange. Accustomed to exercising agency in trade and diplomacy, Samoans found themselves enmeshed in a new form of globalization after missionaries and traders arrived in the middle of the nineteenth century. As the great powers of Europe and America competed to bring Samoa into their orbits, Germany and the United States eventually agreed to divide the islands for their burgeoning colonial holdings.In Coconut Colonialism, Holger Droessler examines the Samoan response through the lives of its workers. Ordinary Samoans—some on large plantations, others on their own small holdings—picked and processed coconuts and cocoa, tapped rubber trees, and built roads and ports that brought cash crops to Europe and North America. At the same time, Samoans redefined their own way of being in the world—what Droessler terms "Oceanian globality"—to challenge German and American visions of a global economy that in fact served only the needs of Western capitalism. Through cooperative farming, Samoans contested the exploitative wage-labor system introduced by colonial powers. The islanders also participated in ethnographic shows around the world, turning them into diplomatic missions and making friends with fellow colonized peoples. Samoans thereby found ways to press their own agendas and regain a degree of independence. Based on research in multiple languages and countries, Coconut Colonialism offers new insights into the global history of labor and empire at the dawn of the twentieth century.

1

COCONUTS

As nourishment for body and mind, the coconut has fed Samoans for millennia. Coconut trees are among the most widespread plants in the South Pacific, providing Samoans and other Pacific Islanders with both calories and canoes. A medium-sized coconut yields more than fourteen hundred calories and is rich in iron, potassium, and saturated fat. Coconut trees are highly versatile plants whose entire organism—from the palm leaves to the roots—can be used for different purposes. Because growing coconut trees (niu) required little attention, Samoans were fond of saying: “Give a coconut a day and it will give you a lifetime.”¹

A well-known story from Samoa and other parts of Polynesia explains the origins of the coconut tree. According to oral tradition, a beautiful girl named Sina had a pet eel (tuna) who fell in love with her. Afraid, Sina ran away, but the eel followed her to a pool in a neighboring village. Before village chiefs could kill the eel, Sina granted him his last wish: cut his head off and plant it in the ground. From her planting grew the first coconut tree. The face of the eel—two eyes and a mouth—can be seen in the three round marks of the husked coconut.² The round form of the coconut with its three indentations also resembles a human head, an association that influenced even Samoan plantation pidgin: “White man coconut belong him no grass he stop [The white man’s head is bald].”³ And when Portuguese explorers brought back the first coconuts to Europe in the mid-sixteenth century, they called the fruit coco, or grinning face.

The coconut’s anthropomorphic appearance was matched by its great practical use for humans. Shells served as drinking cups and to carry water, the palm and midrib were used to make baskets, and fiber from the husk (coir) was plaited into sennit to build houses and canoes.⁴ The husking and splitting of nuts, followed by the grating and squeezing of the meat inside, were arduous and time-consuming labor processes. As a consequence, the time invested in the preparation of a coconut tended to correlate with the special occasion or the status of the guests to be served.⁵

An average family coconut grove was less than one acre in size but could yield up to sixty nuts per tree per year.⁶ Coconut trees took between five and eight years to mature, but some trees bore fruit for up to seventy years, longer than the average life expectancy of Samoans at the time. Samoans did not plant coconut trees in a particular order or distance from one another, but they made sure to plant them close to taro and yam fields to have quick refreshment available for workers.⁷ That way, Samoans knew that no spot on their islands was further than half an hour from the nearest coconut, which could provide food and drink in times of need.⁸ While coconut trees were owned by the families on whose ground they stood, passersby had the right to pluck a few nuts to refresh themselves.⁹ Fallen nuts were usually left to themselves and were free to be picked up by anyone who found them.¹⁰

To harvest the fruits while they were still green, Samoan men climbed up coconut trees that grew as tall as a hundred feet. Using only a sling wrapped around their feet as support, they hugged the tree trunk with their arms and scaled the tree like a caterpillar. Once at the top of the tree, the climber plucked the green fruits from their stems and dropped them onto the ground.¹¹ Mature coconuts could be more conveniently picked up from the ground and collected in baskets, usually made out of coconut leaf midribs.¹² Ripe coconuts also made better copra. Traditionally, young women carried the harvested fruits in two baskets, one in back and one in front of their bodies, connected with a stick across their shoulders.¹³ Filled to the top, two baskets of coconuts could weigh up to 150 pounds. Young men then processed the coconuts, to make use of their individual components. First, the husk of the coconut was split off and removed by pounding the nut against a sharpened wooden stick (meleʻi) rammed into the ground. Next, the young Samoans straddled a wooden stool (‘ausaʻalo) to scrape the open coconut against the seashell-like part of a coconut shell fastened to the stool’s point. The scraped-off pieces of the coconut kernel were then collected in a vessel or on a leaf placed below the stool. Finally, the scrapings were poured into a strainer and the juice squeezed into a bowl for further mixing with other foodstuffs.¹⁴

Figure 2. Samoan man under coconut tree near Pago Pago, Tutuila, 1884. [Pango Pango (sic). Cocoa Nuts], 1884, by Alfred Burton, Burton Brothers studio, Dunedin. Purchased 1943. Te Papa (C.018079).

Because coconuts and other food crops required little sustained attention, Samoan labor was sporadic in nature. Experienced in this noncapitalist mode of agricultural production, Samoans gradually seized the new opportunities that presented themselves with the increasing presence of Euro-American missionaries and traders beginning in the 1830s. After the introduction of commercial agriculture by German traders in the 1860s, Samoans fought to maintain their economic and cultural autonomy and to shape the copra economy according to their own values and interests.

Copra World

The origins of foreign copra plantations in Upolu and Savaiʻi in the mid-nineteenth century were bound up with the sale of Samoan land. Soon after the first outlanders decided to stay on the islands, Samoans began leasing and selling them land, likely unaware that the buyers expected exclusive and indefinite access.¹⁵ According to one Samoan historian, the possibility that Samoans “could lose in perpetuity, in return for one payment in cash or kind, control over the land, authority over the conduct of its occupants and jurisdiction over the future transfer or inheritance of land they bestowed, was outside their experience or comprehension.”¹⁶ A trading company from distant Germany played a major role in the alienation of Samoan land.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the German trading house J. C. Godeffroy & Sohn began its business activities in the South Pacific, establishing its headquarters in Apia in 1857.¹⁷ From Apia, Godeffroy & Sohn expanded its trade in tropical fruit throughout Polynesia and into Melanesia and Micronesia. In its early years, the trading house relied on local Samoan producers to supply the increasingly valuable cash crops. In the mid-1860s, the young and energetic Godeffroy manager Theodor Weber took advantage of a series of environmental disasters to purchase twelve acres of land from starving Samoans and set up the first cotton plantation.¹⁸ During the global cotton famine caused by the U.S. Civil War in the mid-1860s, a few Samoans worked for wages on these cotton plantations.¹⁹ By 1868, when the cotton boom began to subside, the firm owned twenty-five hundred acres, almost 1 percent of the total land area of Upolu.²⁰ After its reorganization into the Deutsche Handels-und Plantagen-Gesellschaft der Südsee-Inseln (DHPG) in 1878, the German firm continued to prosper.²¹

By the 1870s, copra had become Samoa’s main export to Europe and North America, where it was processed into a variety of products, including high-quality soap, margarine, and even dynamite.²² Driven by growing demand for copra, the DHPG dramatically expanded its plantation holdings by purchasing land from Samoans at war. Trading land for firearms and other supplies, Weber managed to purchase around twenty-five thousand acres of prime plantation lands during the Malietoa succession war between Talavou and Laupepa (1869–1872).²³ At the same time, the Central Polynesian Land and Commercial Company—a group of land speculators based in San Francisco—acquired claims to an area of more than 300,000 acres, or nearly half the land area of all the Samoan islands.²⁴ Samoan land became so scarce after this rush in the 1870s that at the beginning of the twentieth century, an acre of land was selling for up to £500 ($100).²⁵ Samoans were divided over these escalating land sales to outlanders. Many feared that foreign ownership would undermine long-standing ways of life based on sustainable agriculture, while some welcomed the considerable profits they reaped from the sales. These profits usually came in the form of imported rifles, which matai used to gain an advantage over their rivals. The result was what outside observers innocently called “civil war,” which belied the active support Euro-American traders and plantation owners provided to different sides of competing Samoan parties. Fueled by demand for copra in the United States and Europe, the vicious cycle of selling Samoan land for arms accelerated.

Land sales had far-reaching consequences for Samoans and their relationships with outlanders. Euro-American planters were so desperate for Samoan land (and regulations so minimal) that newly “land-conscious” Samoans were able to sell the same parcels of land to several buyers.²⁶ As a result of widespread fraud, the area claimed by Euro-American speculators amounted to a grand total of 1.7 million acres, or more than twice the overall area of Samoa.²⁷ In 1893, a land commission installed by the colonial powers recognized only about 8 percent of these outlander claims to Samoan lands, but these included 35 percent of overall cultivable land and 60 percent of cultivable land in the plantation belt between Apia and Mulifanua.²⁸ Decades after the Great Māhele in Hawaiʻi, Samoans fought their own struggle against colonial enclosure.²⁹

Selling land also increased the power of Samoan men over women and of matai over those without title. Since ownership of property conferred social prestige, the increasing commodification of plantation land intensified conflicts between and within Samoan families.³⁰ With the arrival of Euro-American capitalists and their ideas about private property, claims to land ownership in colonial Samoa moved from genealogical title to usufruct occupation. In American Samoa, Euro-American settlers and the U.S. Navy used the common law doctrine of adverse land possession, based on individual land titles derived from at least ten years of cultivation, to undermine customary Samoan land tenure, based on family (‘aiga) and village (nui) rights.³¹

Besides the German company and a handful of Euro-American merchants, another group rose in size and power in colonial Samoa: Samoans of mixed-race descent (afakasi). As the interracial offspring of Samoans and Euro-American newcomers, the first generation of mixed-race Samoans was born in the early nineteenth century. As outlanders arrived in greater numbers and decided to stay, the mixed-race population of Samoa expanded. Interracial liaisons and marriages were often motivated by economic interests. Euro-American men sought out marriages with high-ranking Samoan women to gain access to coveted land. After establishing a foothold in Samoan family and village networks, these newcomers were able to expand their landholdings or establish trading stations. Their interracial offspring were usually classified as “European” by Euro-American law, which allowed them to hold land, enter into individual contracts, and participate in political self-representation. Generally accepted by other Samoans, mixed-race Samoans used their language and intercultural skills to seize new opportunities presented by coconut colonialism. For colonial officials, mixed-race Samoans became “troublesome half-castes” because they muddled the colonial rule of difference by crisscrossing well-defined boundaries of race, class, and culture. Furthermore, many Samoans of mixed-race descent traveled widely within Samoa and beyond, which challenged restrictions on mobility passed by colonial administrators.³²

Among the mixed-race Samoans was a young man by the name of Taʻisi Olaf Fredrick Nelson. Born in Safune (Savaiʻi) in 1883, Nelson was the fourth child of a Swedish merchant and a Samoan mother. Twelve years younger than interpreter Charles T. Taylor, Nelson l...