# Coming of Age in Samoa/Chapter 3

III
the education of the samoan child
birthdays are of little account in Samoa. But for the birth itself of the baby of high rank, a great feast will be held, and much property given away. The first baby must always be born in the mother’s village and if she has gone to live in the village of her husband, she must go home for the occasion, For several months before the birth of the child the father’s relatives have brought gifts of food to the prospective mother, while the mother’s female relatives have been busy making pure white bark cloth for baby clothes and weaving dozens of tiny pandanus mats which form the layette. The expectant mother goes home laden with food gifts and when she returns to her husband’s family, her family provide her with the exact equivalent in mats and bark cloth as a gift to them. At the birth itself the father’s mother or sister must be present to care for the new-born baby while the midwife and the relatives of the mother care for her. There is no privacy about a birth. Convention dictates that the mother should neither writhe, nor cry out, nor inveigh against the presence of twenty or thirty people in the house who sit up all night if need be, laughing, joking, and playing games. The midwife cuts the cord with a fresh ​bamboo knife and then all wait eagerly for the cord to fall off, the signal for a feast. If the baby is a girl, the cord is buried under a paper mulberry tree (the tree from which bark cloth is made) to ensure her growing up to be industrious at household tasks; for a boy it is thrown into the sea that he may be a skilled fisherman, or planted under a taro plant to give him industry in farming. Then the visitors go home, the mother rises and goes about her daily tasks, and the new baby ceases to be of much interest to any one. The day, the month in which it was born, is forgotten. Its first steps or first word are remarked without exuberant comment, without ceremony. It has lost all ceremonial importance and will not regain it again until after puberty; in most Samoan villages a girl will be ceremonially ignored until she is married. And even the mother remembers only that Losa is older than Tupu, and that her sister’s little boy, Fale, is younger than her brother’s child, Vigo. Relative age is of great importance, for the elder may always command the younger—until the positions of adult life upset the arrangement—but actual age may well be forgotten.
Babies are always nursed, and in the few cases where the mother’s milk fails her, a wet nurse is sought among the kinsfolk. From the first week they are also given other food, papaya, cocoanut milk, sugar-cane juice; the food is either masticated by the mother and then put into the baby’s mouth on her finger, or if it is ​liquid, a piece of bark cloth is dipped into it and the child allowed to suck it, as shepherds feed orphaned lambs. The babies are nursed whenever they cry and there is no attempt at regularity. Unless a woman expects another child, she will nurse a baby until it is two or three years old, as the simplest device for pacifying its crying. Babies sleep with their mothers as long as they are at the breast; after weaning they are usually handed over to the care of some younger girl in the household. They are bathed frequently with the juice of a wild orange and rubbed with cocoanut oil until their skins glisten.
The chief nurse-maid is usually a child of six or seven who is not strong enough to lift a baby over six months old, but who can carry the child straddling the left hip, or on the small of the back. A child of six or seven months of age will assume this straddling position naturally when it is picked up. Their diminutive nurses do not encourage children to walk, as babies who can walk about are more complicated charges. They walk before they talk, but it is impossible to give the age of walking with any exactness, though I saw two babies walk whom I knew to be only nine months old, and my impression is that the average age is about a year. The life on the floor, for all activities within a Samoan house are conducted on the floor, encourages crawling, and children under three or four years of age optionally crawl or walk.
From birth until the age of four or five a child's ​education is exceedingly simple. They must be housebroken, a matter made more difficult by an habitual indifference to the activities of very small children. They must learn to sit or crawl within the house and never to stand upright unless it is absolutely necessary; never to address an adult in a standing position; to stay out of the sun; not to tangle the strands of the weaver; not to scatter the cut-up cocoanut which is spread out to dry; to keep their scant loin cloths at least nominally fastened to their persons; to treat fire and knives with proper caution; not to touch the kava bowl, or the kava cup; and, if their father is a chief, not to crawl on his bed-place when he is by. These are really simply a series of avoidances, enforced by occasional cuffings a deal of exasperated shouting and ineffectual conversation.
The weight of the punishment usually falls upon the next oldest child, who learns to shout, “Come out of the sun,” before she has fully appreciated the necessity of doing so herself. By the time Samoan girls and boys have reached sixteen or seventeen years of age these perpetual admonitions to the younger ones have become an inseparable part of their conversation, a monotonous, irritated undercurrent to all their comments. I have known them to intersperse their remarks every two or three minutes with, “Keep still,” “Sit still,” “Keep your mouths shut,” “Stop that noise,” uttered quite mechanically although all of the little ones present may have been behaving as quietly as a ​row of intimidated mice. On the whole, this last requirement of silence is continually mentioned and never enforced. The little nurses are more interested in peace than in forming the characters of their small charges and when a child begins to howl, it is simply dragged out of earshot of its elders. No mother will ever exert herself to discipline a younger child if an older one can be made responsible.
If small families of parents and children prevailed in Samoa, this system would result in making half of the population solicitous and self-sacrificing and the other half tyrannous and self-indulgent. But just as a child is getting old enough so that its wilfulness is becoming unbearable, a younger one is saddled upon it, and the whole process is repeated again, each child being disciplined and socialised through responsibility for a still younger one.
This fear of the disagreeable consequences resulting from a child’s crying, is so firmly fixed in the minds of the older children that long after there is any need for it, they succumb to some little tyrant’s threat of making a scene, and five-year-olds bully their way into expeditions on which they will have to be carried, into weaving parties where they will tangle the strands, and cook houses where they will tear up the cooking leaves or get thoroughly smudged with the soot and have to be washed—all because an older boy or girl has become so accustomed to yielding any point to stop an outcry.
​This method of giving in, coaxing, bribing, diverting the infant disturbers is only pursued within the household or the relationship group, where there are duly constituted elders in authority to punish the older children who can't keep the babies still. Towards a neighbour’s children or in a crowd the half-grown girls and boys and even the adults vent their full irritation upon the heads of troublesome children. If a crowd of children are near enough, pressing in curiously to watch some spectacle at which they are not wanted, they are soundly lashed with palm leaves, or dispersed with a shower of small stones, of which the house floor always furnishes a ready supply. This treatment does not seem actually to improve the children’s behaviour, but merely to make them cling even closer to their frightened and indulgent little guardians. It may be surmised that stoning the children from next door provides a most necessary outlet for those who have spent so many weary hours placating their own young relatives. And even these bursts of anger are nine-tenths gesture. No one who throws the stones actually means to hit a child, but the children know that if they repeat their intrusions too often, by the laws of chance some of the flying bits of coral will land in their faces. Even Samoan dogs have learned to estimate the proportion of gesture that there is in a Samoan’s “get out of the house.” They simply stalk out between one set of posts and with equal dignity and all casualness stalk in at the next opening.
​By the time a child is six or seven she has all the essential avoidances well enough by heart to be trusted with the care of a younger child. And she also develops a number of simple techniques. She learns to weave firm square balls from palm leaves, to make pin-wheels of palm leaves or frangipani blossoms, to climb a cocoanut tree by walking up the trunk on flexible little feet, to break open a cocoanut with one firm well-directed blow of a knife as long as she is tall, to play a number of group games and sing the songs which go with them, to tidy the house by picking up the litter on the stony floor, to bring water from the sea, to spread out the copra to dry and to help gather it in when rain threatens, to roll the pandanus leaves for weaving, to go to a neighbouring house and bring back a lighted fagot for the chief’s pipe or the cook-house fire, and to exercise tact in begging slight favours from relatives.
But in the case of the little girls all of these tasks are merely supplementary to the main, business of babytending. Very small boys also have some care of the younger children, but at eight or nine years of age they are usually relieved of it. Whatever rough edges have not been smoothed off by this responsibility for younger children are worn off by their contact with older boys. For little boys are admitted to interesting and important activities only so long as their behaviour is circumspect and helpful. Where small girls are brusquely pushed aside, small boys will be patiently tolerated and they become adept at making themselves useful. The four ​or five little boys who all wish to assist at the important business of helping a grown youth lasso reef eels, organise themselves into a highly efficient working team; one boy holds the bait, another holds an extra lasso, others poke eagerly about in holes in the reef looking for prey, while still another tucks the captured eels into his lavalava. The small girls, burdened with heavy babies or the care of little staggerers who are too small to adventure on the reef, discouraged by the hostility of the small boys and the scorn of the older ones, have little opportunity for learning the more adventurous forms of work and play. So while the little boys first undergo the chastening effects of baby-tending and then have many opportunities to learn effective cooperation under the supervision of older boys, the girls' education is less comprehensive. They have a high standard of individual responsibility but the community provides them with no lessons in co-operation with one another. This is particularly apparent in the activities of young people; the boys organise quickly; the girls waste hours in bickering, innocent of any technique for quick and efficient co-operation.
And as the woman who goes fishing can only get away by turning the babies over to the little girls of the household, the little girls cannot accompany their aunts and mothers. So they learn even the simple processes of reef fishing much later than do the boys. They are kept at the baby-tending, errand-running stage until they are old enough and robust enough to ​work on the plantations and carry foodstuffs down to the village.
A girl is given these more strenuous tasks near the age of puberty, but it is purely a question of her physical size and ability to take responsibility, rather than of her physical maturity. Before this time she has occasionally accompanied the older members of the family to the plantations if they were willing to take the babies along also. But once there, while her brothers and cousins are collecting cocoanuts and roving happily about in the bush, she has again to chase and shepherd and pacify the ubiquitous babies.
As soon as the girls are strong enough to carry heavy loads, it pays the family to shift the responsibility for the little children to the younger girls and the adolescent girls are released from baby-tending. It may be said with some justice that the worst period of their lives is over. Never again will they be so incessantly at the beck and call of their elders, never again so tyannised over by two-year-old tyrants. All the irritating, detailed routine of housekeeping which in our civilisation is accused of warping the souls and souring the tempers of grown women, is here performed by children under fourteen years of age. A fire or a pipe to be kindled, a call for a drink, a lamp to be lit, the baby’s cry, the errand of the capricious adult—these haunt them from morning until night. With the introduction of several months a year of government schools these children are being taken out of their ​homes for most of the day. This brings about a complete disorganization of the native households which have no precedents for a manner of life where mothers have to stay at home and take care of their children and adults have to perform small routine tasks and run errands.
Before their release from baby-tending the little girls have a very limited knowledge of any of the more complicated techniques. Some of them can do the simpler work in preparing food for cooking, such as skinning bananas, grating cocoanuts, or scraping taro. A few of them can weave the simple carrying basket. But now they must learn to weave all their own baskets for carrying supplies; learn to select taro leaves of the right age for cocking, to dig only mature taro. In the cook-house they learn to make palusami, to grate the cocoanut meat, season it with hot stones, mix it with sea water and strain out the husks, pour this milky mixture into a properly made little container of taro leaves from which the aromatic stem has been scorched off, wrap these in a breadfruit leaf and fasten the stem tightly to make a durable cooking jacket. They must learn to lace a large fish into a palm leaf, or roll a bundle of small fish in a breadfruit leaf; to select the right kind of leaves for stuffing a pig, to judge when the food in the oven of small heated stones is thoroughly baked. Theoretically the bulk of the cooking is.done by the boys and where a girl has to do the heavier work, it is a matter for comment: ​“Poor Losa, there are no boys in her house and always she must make the oven.” But the girls always help and often do a great part of the work.
Once they are regarded as individuals who can devote a long period of time to some consecutive activity, girls are sent on long fishing expeditions. They learn to weave fish baskets, to gather and arrange the bundles of fagots used in torch-light fishing, to tickle a devil fish until it comes out of its hole and climbs obediently upon the waiting stick, appropriately dubbed a “come hither stick”; to string the great rose-coloured jellyfish, lole, a name which Samoan children give to candy also, on a long string of hibiscus bark, tipped with a palm leaf rib for a needle; to know good fish from bad fish, fish that are in season from fish which are dangerous at some particular time of the year; and never to take two octopuses, found paired on a rock, lest bad luck come upon the witless fisher.
Before this time their knowledge of plants and trees is mainly a play one, the pandanus provides them with seeds for necklaces, the palm tree with leaves to weave balls; the banana tree gives leaves for umbrellas and half a leaf to shred into a stringy “choker”; cocoanut shells cut in half, with cinet strings attached, make a species of stilt; the blossoms of the Pua tree can be sewed into beautiful necklaces. Now they must learn to recognise these trees and plants for more serious purposes; they must learn when the pandanus leaves are ready for the cutting and how to cut the long leaves ​with one sure quick stroke; they must distinguish between the three kinds of pandanus used for different grades of mats. The pretty orange seeds which made such attractive and also edible necklaces must now be gathered as paint brushes for ornamenting bark cloth. Banana leaves are gathered to protect the woven platters, to wrap up puddings for the oven, to bank the steaming oven full of food. Banana bark must be stripped at just the right point to yield the even, pliant, black strips, needed to ornament mats and baskets. Bananas themselves must be distinguished as to those which are ripe for burying, or the golden curved banana ready for eating, or bananas ready to be sun-dried for making fruit-cake rolls. Hibiscus bark can no longer be torn off at random to give a raffia-like string for a handful of shells; long journeys must be made inland to select bark of the right quality for use in weaving.
In the house the girl’s principal task is to learn to weave. She has to master several different techniques. First, she learns to weave palm branches where the central rib of the leaf serves as a rim to her basket or an edge to her mat and where the leaflets are already arranged for weaving. From palm leaves she first learn to weave a carrying basket, made of half a leaf, by plaiting the leaflets together and curving the rib into a rim. Then she learns to weave the Venetian blinds which hang between the house posts, by laying one-half leaf upon another and plaiting the leaflets together. More difficult are the floor mats, woven of ​four great palm leaves, and the food platters with their intricate designs. There are also fans to make, simple two-strand weaves which she learns to make quite well, more elaborate twined ones which are the prerogative of older and more skilled weavers. Usually some older woman in the household trains a girl to weave and sees to it that she makes at least one of each kind article, but she is only called upon to produce in quantity the simpler things, like the Venetian blinds. From the pandanus she learns to weave the common floor mats, one or two types of the more elaborate bed mats, and then, when she is thirteen or fourteen, she begins her first fine mat. The fine mat represents the high point of Samoan weaving virtuosity. Woven of the finest quality of pandanus which has been soaked and baked and scraped to a golden whiteness and paper-like thinness, of strands a sixteenth of an inch in width, these mats take a year or two years to weave and are as soft and pliable as linen. They form the unit of value, and must always be included in the dowry of the bride. Girls seldom finish a fine mat until they are nineteen or twenty, but the mat has been started, and, wrapped up in a coarser one, it rests among the rafters, a testimony to the girl’s industry and manual skill. She learns the rudiments of bark cloth making; she can select and cut the paper mulberry wands, peel off the bark, beat it after it has been scraped by more expert hands. The patterning of the cloth with a ​pattern board or by free hand drawing is left for the more experienced adult.
Throughout this more or less systematic period of education, the girls maintain a very nice balance between a reputation for the necessary minimum of knowledge and a virtuosity which would make too heavy demands. A girl’s chances of marriage are badly damaged if it gets about the village that she is lazy and inept in domestic tasks. But after these first stages have been completed the girl marks time technically for three or four years. She does the routine weaving, especially of the Venetian blinds and carrying baskets. She helps with the plantation work and the cooking, she weaves a very little on her fine mat. But she thrusts virtuosity away from her as she thrusts away every other sort of responsibility with the invariable comment, “Laititi a’u” (“I am but young”). All of her interest is expended on clandestine sex adventures, and she is content to do routine tasks as, to a certain extent, her brother is also.
But the seventeen-year-old boy is not left passively to his own devices. He has learned the rudiments of fishing, he can take a dug-out canoe over the reef safely, or manage the stern paddle in a bonito boat. He can plant taro or transplant cocoanut, husk cocoanuts on a stake and cut the meat out with one deft quick turn of the knife. Now at seventeen or eighteen he is thrust into the Aumaga, the society of the young ​men and the older men without titles, the group that is called, not in euphemism but in sober fact, “the strength of this village.” Here he is badgered into efficiency by rivalry, precept and example. The older chiefs who supervise the activities of the Aumaga gaze equally sternly upon any backslidings and upon any undue precocity. The prestige of his group is ever being called into account by the Aumaga of the neighbouring villages. His fellows ridicule and persecute the boy who fails to appear when any group activity is on foot, whether work for the village on the plantations, or fishing, or cooking for the chiefs, or play in the form, of a ceremonial cail upon some visiting maiden. Furthermore, the youth is given much more stimulus to learn and also a greater variety of occupations are open to him. There is no specialisation among women, except in medicine and mid-wifery, both the prerogatives of very old women who teach their arts to their middle-aged daughters and nieces. The only other vocation is that of the wife of an official orator, and no girl will prepare herself for this one type of marriage which demands special knowledge, for she has no guarantee that she will marry a man of this class.
For the boy it is different. He hopes that some day he will hold a matai name, a name which will make him a member of the Fono, the assembly of headmen, the which will give him a right to drink kava with chiefs, to work with chiefs rather than with the young men, ​to sit inside the house, even though his new title is only of "between the posts" rank, and not of enough importance to give him a right to a post for his back. But very seldom he absolutely assured of getting such a name. Each family hold several of these titles which they confer upon the most promising youths in the whole family connection. He has many rivals. They also are in the Aumaga. He must always pit himself against them in the group activities. There are also several types of activities in one of which he must specialise. He must become a house-builder, a fisherman, an orator or a wood carver. Proficiency in some technique must set him off a little from his fellows. Fishing prowess means immediate rewards in the shape of food gifts to offer to his sweetheart; without such gifts his advances will be scorned. Skill in house-building means wealth and status, for a youngman who is a skilled carpenter must be treated as courteously as a chief and addressed with the chief’s language, the elaborate set of honorific words used to people of rank. And with this goes the continual demand that he should not be too efficient, too outstanding, too precocious. He must never excel his fellows by more than a little. He must neither arouse their hatred nor the disapproval of his elders who are far readier to encourage and excuse the laggard than to condone precocity. And at the same time he shares his sister’s reluctance to accept responsibility, and if he should excel gently, not too obviously, he has good ​chances of being made a chief. If he is sufficiently talented, the Fono itself may deliberate, search out a vacant title to confer upon him and call him in that he may sit with the old men and learn wisdom. And yet so well recognised is the unwillingness of the young men to respond to this honour, that the provision is always made. "And if the young man runs away, then never shall he be made a chief, but always he must sit outside the house with the young men, preparing and serving the food of the matais with whom he may not sit in the Fono." Still more pertinent are the chances of his relationship group bestowing a matai name upon the gifted young man. And a matai he wishes to be, some day, some far-off day when his limbs have lost a little of their suppleness and his heart the love of fun and of dancing. As one chief of twenty-seven told me: “I have been a chief only four years and look, my hair is grey, although in Samoa grey hair comes very slowly, not in youth, as it comes to the white man. But always, I must act as if I were old. I must walk gravely and with a measured step. I may not dance except upon most solemn occasions, neither may I play games with the young men. Old men of sixty are my companions and watch my every word, lest I make a mistake. Thirty-one people live in my household. For them I must plan, I must find them food and clothing, settle their disputes, arrange their marriages. There is no one in my whole family who dares to scold me or even to address me familiarly ​by my first name. It is hard to be so young and yet to be a chief." And the old men shake their heads and agree that it is unseemly for one to be a chief so young.
The operation of natural ambition is further vitiated by the fact that the young man who is made a matai will not be the greatest among his former associates, but the youngest and greenest member of the Fono. And no longer may he associate familiarly with his old companions; a matai must associate only with matais, must work beside them in the bush and sit and talk quietly with them in the evening.
And so the boy is faced by a far more difficult dilemma than the girl. He dislikes responsibility, but he wishes to excel in his group; skill will hasten the day when he is made a chief, yet he receives censure and ridicule if he slackens his efforts; but he will be scolded if he proceeds too rapidly; yet if he would win a sweetheart, he must have prestige among his fellows. And conversely, his social prestige is increased by his amorous exploits.
So while the girl rests upon her “pass” proficiency, the boy is spurred to greater efforts. A boy is shy of a girl who does not have these proofs of efficiency and is known to be stupid and unskilled; he is afraid he may come to want to marry her. Marrying a girl without proficiency would be a most imprudent step and involve an endless amount of wrangling with his family. So the girl who is notoriously inept must take her ​lovers from among the casual, the jaded, and the married who are no longer afraid that their senses will betray them into an imprudent marriage
But. the seventeen-year-old girl does not wish to marry—not yet. It is better to live as a girl with no responsibility, and a rich variety of emotional experience. This is the best period of her life. There are as many beneath her whom she may bully as there are others above her to tyrannise over her. What she loses in prestige, she gains in freedom. She has very little baby-tending to do. Her eyes do not ache from weaving nor does her back break from bending all day over the tapa board. The long expeditions after fish and food and weaving materials give ample opportunities for rendezvous. Proficiency would mean more work more confining work, and earlier marriage, and marriage is the inevitable to be deferred as long as possible.