Samoa’s oldest newspaper and one woman’s mission to keep a piece of Pacific history alive

Pacific academic and University of Otago PhD candidate Wanda Ieremia-Allan. Photo / Supplied

As a little girl and the daughter of a church minister, Wanda Ieremia-Allan vividly remembers the pile of newspapers in her father’s office and what that meant - they needed to be delivered.

O Le Sulu Samoa was not like any other newspaper, however, with its history linked to Samoa’s roots to Christianity and the fact that the paper was the first of its kind to be published in the gagana Samoa, or the Samoan language.

In 1830, Christian missionaries from the London Missionary Society - led by Reverend John Williams - arrived with the Good News on the shores of Samoa.

Nine years later, they would set up a dedicated Printing Press to print Bibles that would help spread the gospel in the island nation.

That was also the year O le Sulu o Samoa printed its first edition; including news and writings by LMS missionaries that were translated to Samoan.

“That was the year that Ioane Viliamu (Rev John Williams) went to Vanuatu and was eaten,” Ieremia-Allan says matter-of-factly.

“The Sulu reported what actually happened with Ioane Viliamu, of course, because he went with Samoans. Some went on that trip as well and died.”

The first O Le Sulu Samoa edition published in 1839, nine years after Christianity arrived in Samoa. Photo / Wanda Ieremia-Allan

Ieremia-Allan is a University of Otago PhD candidate and has spent the last four years researching the writings and historical records reported in the Sulu Samoa since the 19th Century.

Her work will see her head to the prestigious University of Cambridge, in England, next month after being offered the Pacific Islander Visiting Fellowship.

She follows in the footsteps of her father, Rev Elder Lale Ieremia, who was one of the first Pasefika students to attend the university in 1970.

Many of the Sulu’s reports, writings and news of the day were written by faifeau (church ministers), missionaries or teachers from the Malua Theological College, which was set up by the LMS in Samoa in 1844 to educate young men who would become church ministers for the Congregational Christian Church of Samoa.

Those reports came from missionaries stationed in parts of the Pacific including Papua New Guinea, Kiribati, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Tokelau, Tuvalu and Niue in the mid-1800s and early 1900s.

A connection to a famous author: Tusitala

“It’s particularly moving because these are the early scholars who’d been travelling the Pacific and recording events and putting some really critical thought as to what their place in the world was like.

“Well before the Pacific was broken up into different colonial networks or divisions, Samoans were in that place writing about the histories, recording who was in the churches, who was born [and] where people were moving to.

“It’s this incredible record of movement, of indigenous knowledge and our first [record] of forging communities in those islands.”

One treasure that can be found in the Sulu Samoa archives is a number of stories written by one Robert Louis Stevenson; who arrived on Samoan shores in 1889 already a famous author of the likes of Treasure Island and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Known as Tusitala (Teller of Tales) to the locals, Stevenson’s short story The Bottle Imp was first published in the Samoan language and appeared for the first time as O Le Fagu Aitu in 1891 in O Le Sulu Samoa, before it was published in English.

Ieremia-Allan acknowledged that many people do not know this - that Stevenson trialled his literature in the Sulu.

Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson. Photo / Archive

“Robert Louis Stevenson was a Sunday School teacher in Malua and he wrote for his Sunday School kids - this is why the Scottish literature people are just fascinated - that he actually wrote stories in Samoa.

“He wrote them in English and then he got his missionary friends to translate them into Samoan.”

Stevenson’s The Bottle Imp has a particularly funny story that goes with it, Ieremia-Allan explains.

“The story itself is about a bottle imp - a small ghost that lives inside a bottle. Once it was published, he woke up the next morning and looked out under the trees of his fale. All these people had come from afar to see the aitu (ghost) that he kept in a fagu (bottle).

“This is a really critical part of the story: For us, those things are real. For us, aitu are a part of our religion - we see them in our rocks, we see them in our fauna, we see them every place. So it’s not unusual. It’s not a literary story, it’s the truth.

“It was actually more of a lesson for Robert Louis Stevenson, because he was stunned. When you talk about aitu, that’s real. It’s a clash of mindsets and ideologies. The joke was on him.”

The 1900s was buzzing with English literature - snippets of which were shared by palagi missionaries and translated by Samoan church ministers for locals to read in the Sulu.

‘This is the work of our ancestors’

“Our people were reading Shakespeare, Odyssey, Tolstoy - these English, Greek and Russian literature - in Samoa at the turn of the century.

“There’s this incredible body of work. It’s not just literature, it’s a historical record.”

Wanda Ieremia-Allan acknowledges her father, Rev Elder Lale Ieremia and her late mother, Tifilelei Ieremia, for her life's work. Photo / Wanda Ieremia-Allan

Stevenson would sign his stories “RLS” or “O le Tusitala”. The translators would also be named.

“Our people were translating a lot of that work. We were linguists, we were translators, we were literary specialists in our own language and in other languages too.”

“This is the kind of richness and the level of education people were...producing back in the day.”

So far, Ieremia-Allan has collected 430 editions of the Sulu Samoa and hopes her work will be useful to generations to come.

“We don’t really prioritise our histories written in our own languages because we wait for the English versions.

“This is the work of our ancestors. It’s not really about me. It’s about continuing and profiling the work of our elders. This is their work - this is our collective history. Everyone in the LMS Samoa church had a connection to the Sulu.”