Cricket was little more than an afterthought in Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Footnote to History, his trenchant account of the Samoan civil war.1 In Stevenson’s telling, the Samoan archipelago—a cluster of islands in the South Pacific Ocean—brimmed with discord and uncertainty. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, various local factions and three foreign powers fought amongst themselves for political authority and economic primacy. At the heart of Stevenson’s tale was the contest between papalagi (foreigners) and Samoans. In his estimation, this contest was broad and deep: he framed it as a clash of fundamentally divergent systems of economic, political and social organisation. While Samoans were “Christians, churchgoers, singers of hymns at family worship, [and] hardy cricketers”, such cultural parallelisms were few and far between. “In most other points”, he surmised, their fundamentally unfamiliar way of life “makes them hard [for foreigners] to understand”.2
Whereas Samoa’s “hardy cricketers” were an aside in Stevenson’s telling, this book affords them centre stage. The book considers how the quintessentially English game of cricket was embraced, reshaped and reoriented in Samoa. It does so from the conviction that this apparently trivial episode—seemingly a mere footnote to sport history—in fact provides a valuable means of exploring the nature of ‘everyday’ contestation in Samoa specifically and at the edges of empire more generally. Its central premise, therefore, is that this history constitutes a distinctive and yet instructive example of how different groups sought to control the meaning and function of sport in the context of empire. By examining cricket in Samoa, we can test and refine our understandings of several more general questions. How do sports spread? How do they change and what does this signify? How did sport and games intersect with colonial authority? And what is the relationship between sporting practice, group identity and cultural resistance to colonisation?
Sport emerged in the mid-nineteenth century as an important process of cultural transfer from Britain to its imperial possessions and interests. Through sport were disseminated dominant British beliefs regarding social behaviour. While many sports performed these functions, cricket occupied a privileged place in Victorian England and the British Empire. Cricket was revered as the English game, prized for its unblemished heritage and its supposed edifying value for young men in the metropole and colonies alike. For British missionaries, soldiers, colonists and officials, the cricket pitch was a site for affirming their identity in foreign lands. By learning the lessons implicit in cricket, moreover, colonised peoples could be marched forwards, away from their ‘primitive’ state and towards the distant ideal of Englishness, serving as dutiful colonial subjects as they went. Cricket was useful not only for reaffirming colonisers’ identities, therefore, but also in reforming those of colonised peoples. Cricket thus truly was the Imperial Game.
The first recorded cricket match in Samoa took place in 1879, when officers from the HMS Cormorant challenged the expatriate British residents at Apia to a scratch match. In 1883 Samoans began to take up the game and within a few months it had attained widespread and lasting popularity throughout the islands. This reasonably orthodox diffusion narrative belies several distinctive features, however. Almost as soon as they began playing the sport, Samoans radically altered cricket’s method and meaning and recast it as the distinctive Samoan game of kirikiti.3 As can be inferred from Stevenson’s earlier quotation, he saw the cricket pitch as a rare space where the broader contest between Samoans and foreigners—and particularly the British—could be suspended. But Stevenson was mistaken: the meaning and practice of cricket was fiercely contested. Samoans infused ‘their’ game with mass participation, singular local rules and a range of other practices and significations borrowed from customary athletic contests. This initial act of appropriation established the pitch as a contested space between Samoans and papalagi, who were wary of kirikiti’s association with ‘disruptive’ Samoan politics and ‘wasteful’ customary exchange. The game was no longer English cricket, but kirikiti fa’a Samoa—cricket played ‘the Samoan way’. Rather than escaping contest, therefore, cricket in Samoa signified and embodied it.
This was only the broadest of many confrontations manifested on the pitch. As was the case in Samoa more generally, the struggle over cricket was not neatly divided between Samoans and papalagi. Instead, the ways that different groups used cricket and kirikiti reflected the complexities and blurred boundaries created by imperial expansion and subsequent colonial rule. In focusing on cricket and kirikiti, this book asks: why was cricket in Samoa embraced and then expressed in a distinctive and ‘transcultural’ form? How did various papalagi groups respond to this transcultural sporting practice—and why? How did Samoans use cricket and kirikiti to navigate the challenges and opportunities presented by the different colonialisms they faced? By answering these questions, the book aims to map the space of the cricket pitch and in so doing explore the multidimensional contests that took place in Samoa during the period of study. More broadly, it also seeks to challenge existing frameworks for understanding how sports are transmitted and adopted, reorient sporting histories that have often ignored ‘peripheral’ parts of empire and historicise present-centric accounts of sport’s significance in Oceania.
Sport and Empire
If this book’s title suggests an esoteric inquiry, its story is irrevocably tied to broader narratives and debates that have occupied scholars for several decades. Foremost among these are questions of how and why sporting practices spread across cultures, as well as the significance of sport in everyday life at the edges of empire. Samoa stands as an example of the many contact zones created by imperial expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.4 Since the 1970s, scholars have looked beyond the economic, political and military dimensions of empire and towards its social and cultural aspects. In so doing, historians have turned to questions of class, race, ethnicity, gender and popular culture—including leisure and sport—to better understand the contours of everyday life in contact zones across the globe.
As with other topics of study formerly considered ‘trivial’, sport and leisure studies grew out of the movement to write social histories ‘from below’. A trickle of analyses eventually led to what Steven Pope and John Nauright describe as “an explosion of studies from the 1980s onward”.5 In the decades since, scholars have used sport to examine issues of power and politics, culture, difference and identity. Within this diverse thematic field, the relationship between sport and empire has been one of the most productive research areas for historians of sport. While scholars have explored sport and physical culture in the context of (among others) French, German, American and Japanese imperialism,6 most research has examined sport in the former British Empire and—to a lesser degree—outside the formal boundaries of the Empire. J.A. Mangan pioneered this line of inquiry by tracing the rise of the so-called games ethic and the cult of athleticism to British public schools in the mid-nineteenth century.7 According to Mangan, school sport was the centrepiece of reforms designed to improve education by imposing order and discipline on unruly pupils. Because public schools served as a training field for ‘agents of empire’—missionaries , educators, military officers and administrators—the games ethic was diffused into the empire as they served and lived in it.
Subsequent studies have continued to interrogate processes of ludic dissemination and adoption. In so doing, historians have drawn on a rich sociological literature that seeks to explain how cultural practices spread between different groups. With few exceptions, the notion of transcultural diffusion has served this purpose. In this context, diffusion describes the transmission, adoption and eventual acculturation of an innovation by a recipient population. Sociologists and the historians who followed them often stress the importance of similarities between diffusers and adopters in certain attributes, such as beliefs, education and social status.8 This framework is unable, however, to account for the distinctive elements that can arise when a practice is transmitted from one society to another—as was the case in Samoa. In this book, I attempt to address this deficit with an instrument from the anthropologist’s toolbox—and latterly that of linguists and literary scholars—namely the concept of transculturation. Following Mary Louis Pratt, the term ‘transcultural’ can be used to describe those ‘mixed’ social practices that emerge at sites of intercultural contact, engagement and confrontation.9 Languages, religious practices, written texts and—of course—sports can all be characterised as transcultural in this way. These notions of diffusion and transculturation therefore provide a useful platform for discussing the adoption of cricket in Samoa and its transformation into kirikiti. While this book is firmly focused on Samoa and kirikiti, it is my intention that scholars of sport may find this revised framework more generally helpful in explaining the dissemination and adoption of sport in contact zones around the world.
As well as engaging with these debates about how sporting cultures spread, the book touches on broader questions regarding the meaning of sport in the...