SCOPA 50TH ANNIVERSARY 

Paying Homage to 50 Years
 of Service to Samoa

By Afamasaga Toleafoa

Money, or love of it, is said to be the root of all evil, or in local terms, the Achilles heel so to speak, of any community undertaking. Well, the Samoa College recent 50th anniversary celebrations committee has managed it seems, to keep evil at bay by publishing in the Samoa Observer last Sunday, a detailed financial statement of the event.

I am sure the statement went a long way to allying fears, often justified, of the many who donated so generously, of part or all of their donations going walk about. It also allows for some comment this week about the event itself. 

As expected, Samoa College's 50th anniversary was celebrated with fine speeches, not so fine food, music and dancing, and congratulations all around. No less than the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance and many other luminaries were there to honour the life and achievements of Samoa's premier school. It was a joyous occasion, befitting fifty years of illustrious service to the nation. 

It was also an occasion, that called for reflection. Because the story of Samoa College, is in many respects, also the story of Samoa itself, before and since independence. 

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, it was clear that Samoa needed educated men and women to manage its own affairs as an independent nation, which it was aspiring to be. With little preparation up to then for self government, a source of embarrassment for NZ as the administrative power on behalf of the UN, Samoa College was to spearhead the rush to produce the men and women needed for the task. 

If corporate plans had been invented or known by that name then, Samoa College's mission statement would probably have read " to produce educated Samoan men and women to manage the affairs of Western Samoa, a small Polynesian country that wants to be independent and to control its own destiny."

And this had to be done in a great rush, because the winds of change that blew away colonial rule in other parts of the world was beginning to be felt in the Pacific too. Besides, with the Cold War raging, the United Nations had a particularly active De-colonization Committee, that wanted all vestiges of colonialism and Western domination in the world blown away as well. 

When officially opening Samoa College on 2nd October 1953, Dr Beeby the then NZ Minister of Education said, 'It need scarcely be said that the opening of Samoa College marks the beginning of a new era for Samoa, and that hopes for effective self rule will depend largely on the success of this school.'

And so the new school was conceived and born. It was officially opened on 2nd October 1953, although classes had started in February that year. The gold plated plaque mounted outside the principal's office at the school says that this was 'a gift from the people of New Zealand to the people of Samoa' It was a generous gift indeed, and came mainly by way of eighty thousand pounds sterling from the profits of the then NZ Reparations Estates, former German plantations given to NZ as reparations after the First World War. 

The money was valuable enough, but the real gift was that of learning and education. And in the last fifty years, some 8000 men and women have passed through the school's corridors and classrooms and gates and into the world, empowered with 'knowledge to serve,' as the school motto proclaims, an independent and self governing Samoa, the first Pacific island nation to do so.

But Samoa College stood for much more than excellence in learning and in providing educated men and women. It also embodied the idealism and fighting spirit of a young nation taking its place for the first time among the nations of the world, a spirit that has sustained the new nation thick and thin, but mostly thin, since independence. Samoa College likewise has battled against the odds, or rather against some very odd political and administrative decisions in recent years in order to fulfill its own mission. And it has shown the same resilience of spirit as the nation whose name it carries. 

Because inspite of the shining record of achievement, and fulfillment of the vision that conceived it in the first place, Samoa College has seen hard times and neglect no less, in recent times, as its present physical state and condition bear witness to. The crumbling school buildings, the rust, the unkempt grounds, the gaudy and ugly inner city architecture of the new wing, the makeshift added on school rooms, the remnants of the west wing which was pulled down under questionable circumstances and has never been rebuilt. They speak of neglect and dereliction, and of a vision that has dimmed and died.

It poses the question how an institution and public asset this invaluable and which represented a once shining vision of our founding fathers, is allowed to deteriorate and to be extinquished. Was it an oversight on the part of those who manage our affairs? Or is there something more sinister in such neglect? Is this the school version of the tall poppy syndrome at work, or is this simply a case of a once proud school without a parent in the corridors of power?

However the school that bears Samoa's own name came to be in this sad situation, the school's 50th anniversary celebrations were a ringing success. The three day remembrance festivities started off on December 15 with the launch of 'Samoa College, 50 years of service to Samoa' a 500 page publication specially compiled for the occasion. The book is an oftentimes emotional walk down memory lane by former students and staff, as they reminisce about memorable and not so memorable moments and during their own times at Samoa College. The book is a must read for anyone with an interest in Samoa College or with education in Samoa for that matter.

The march, or it was more like a stroll rather by a large body of former students and staff along Beach Road from Aggie Greys Hotel to the Government complex at Matagialalua, followed by the official commemorations at Samoa College were the highlights of the first day. Many fine words were said about the school and its contribution to Samoa. Promises were made about the future, but only time will tell whether the times of neglect are over.

The second and final day was reunion time as Samoa College former pupils from as far away as the US, Australia, NZ and from the Pacific region came together to remember and celebrate old times, and to pay homage to fifty years of service and to absent colleagues. The celebrations were a combined effort by the school and by the former students association, SCOPA. One can imagine the students of today in 25, 50 years from now, coming together in similar fashion, and in turn remembering this year's celebrations. What will the school be like then? Will there still be a Samoa College given the present rate of decay, in fifty years time?

"The anniversary has brought every one closer again,' Taulesulu Malifa, a member of the organizing committee said. 'The whole thing has been very positive for the morale and unity of the former students and of the school. In recent years, and simply because of the sheer number and age spread of those who went to Samoa College, former students have tended to focus on their own particular class year rather than on the group as a whole. That is understandable, and it is also beneficial for the school provided we all work towards the same goals. There is always a danger of individual groups working at cross purposes." 

The celebrations have also been a shot in the pocket for the multipurpose hall project former students and the school have been working on. The project entails construction of a multipurpose hall for use by the college, and as a home to former students. It will also be available to the community to use. Some $200,000 of the $800,000 price tag was raised from donations and pledges during the festivities. And construction officially started with the Minister of Public Works, Faumuina Liuga turning over the first clod of earth during the celebrations.

But the lean years that Samoa College has seen might as well be a mirror image of the difficult years and struggle Samoa itself has known since independence. For no sooner had the small island nation gained independence then one by one, the mainstays of her agriculture and economy, started falling to disease, to cyclone damage, to international competition, and to declining economic returns. 

Bananas, one of Samoa's major export crops before independence succumbed to new diseases from outside, then to hurricanes, and finally ceased to be exported altogether. Cocoa fell to falling overseas prices, and then to mismanagement as agricultural experts stripped Samoa of its premium price fetching cocoa varieties and in their place planted a dud tree. Coconut products continued to be at the mercy of a merciless downward spiral in price of coconut oil. 

The newly independent nation struggled on, as a Least Developed island country, a euphemism for poorest of the poor, with little likelihood of ever supporting itself. Samoa had been the first Pacific nation to gain political independence, but with such unpromising economic prospects, it was seen as something of a basket case. It did not help that like other Polynesian societies, Samoa also had its own concept of government that involved a chiefly based social system. Outsiders thought this was at best rather quaint, but at worst, a barrier to progress and dynamic change. 

Other nations that followed on the independence trail, especially the larger Melanesian islands were endowed with many more of the natural resources that the rest of the world wanted. Understandably, their prospects for economic development and becoming useful partners were much brighter. 

But as agriculture stagnated, Samoans started migrating overseas, legally when possible, but illegally when not They found employment overseas and sent money home to their families in Samoa. And as agriculture faltered, remittances of money and goods increasingly became a significant source of foreign exchange and of cash incomes for Samoan families. Emigration also cushioned the crushing impact of a high birth rate on services and jobs, on living space, and on Samoa's pristine natural environment.

Remittances cannot last, the expatriate experts and advisers would caution. Samoan migrants, like other migrants will adopt the ways of their new country and will soon forget the ways of their forbears, and of their country of origin, the advisers advised But after advising for two or three years at the most, the experts left the country, but the remittances still came in even larger amounts and volumes.

As so did something new called foreign aid. Aid from the rich to the poor nations had started off as a stop-gap measure, to fill the shortfall in resources needed to develop poor economies. But the gap was never filled as development policies failed to develop much else but aid dependence on the part of the recipients. Increasingly, foreign aid became a permanent part of relations between the rich nations and the poor nations and between the world's haves and have-nots. 

In any case, giving aid was easier to do for the rich nations than reforming the world's economic system that heavily favoured them. So the practice continues as one of the tools of international diplomacy today.

Samoa received foreign aid at first from New Zealand and the United Nations. Then other countries joined in. Japan joined the ranks of the industrialized and the rich and started giving aid. Australia's focus on Melanesia and PNG in particular widened as she saw a bigger role for herself in the region, but not necessarily as Sheriff of the South, as President Bush suggested recently. She started giving aid as well to Samoa, and is today one of the major aid donors. 

The European Common market experiment became a rampant success and turned itself into the European Union. Instead of giving aid individually, the members pooled their aid resources and gave Samoa some of it. Regional and international organizations also dispensed aid, but they were merely redistributing other people's aid money.

And so Samoa was able to manage on the strength of weak and declining agricultural base, a small and confused tourism sector, surging remittances from Samoans overseas, and foreign aid. But whereas many other aid receivers squandered and allowed some of their aid to be stolen, Samoa with one or two exceptions, managed hers carefully, directing much of it to shoring up her infrastructure and human resource base.

But developing people and infrastructure take time, like half a century for instance. And by the end of the century, when the other high flyers in the region were beginning to succumb to ethnic division, militarism, and years of mismanagement and bad governance, Samoa started to stand out as a beacon of hope, in a Pacific that started out with high hopes, was looking more and more like Africa. The basket case economy had become the model case economy. The aid donors started singing Samoa's praises, as much because they were deserved, as because there was not much else in the Pacific to sing about. They also had to show to their own tax payers that their governments had been wise with their money.

But what has all this to do with Samoa College you may ask? A great deal. Because Samoa College, as we saw, was one of the corner stones upon which the new Samoan nation was built. And even if through no fault of her own, the stone had lost some of its shine, at least in the eyes of administrators and leaders that did not share the vision of Samoa's founding fathers and mothers, Samoa College is still producing the educated men and women to manage the affairs of an increasingly self confident, if not yet economically independent nation. 

But that will be the subject of the second and concluding installment of this part homage to Samoa, and part homage to the school that carries its name.