My story of Solomona and his two-storey house is a parable of the situation in contemporary Samoa. It illustrates my contention that the political rhetoric about rural development and self-reliance which accompanied the introduction of universal suffrage in 1991 has little substance. These changes have in fact disguised the potential for the abuse of chiefly power. Although we may now elect our Parliament, the matai who run the country have given themselves a five year term of office, and increased powers at village level. There are few checks on the abuse of rank privilege, which allow leaders to invoke their rank privileges to suppress dissent or competition.

I do not accept that this has always been a feature of our political system. My earlier example of Solomona’s grandfather was just one of many that I can give to show how achievement was recognised and rewarded. I think what is occurring is symptomatic of a moral vacuum which has arisen among a people who are trying to live in two worlds. We have two concurrent sets of social and political values, either of which may be appealed to as it suits us.

In Western Polynesia, we are no longer small nations of people belonging to a few small islands. Today we are nations of people without borders. We extend, as Hau’ofa has pointed out, across seas; operating, as Bertam and Watters (1985:511) have put it, as transnational corporations of kin. We now draw unconscious distinctions between society and the state. People are both citizens of the state and members of society, but the rules of being a citizen and a member of society are not always the same. Take the case of the two chiefs in my story. They were attempting to defend traditional principles of society and the rank order of their village, even though, paradoxically, they were appealing to an agency of the state, in the form of the Lands and Titles Court. However, Solomona might equally well appeal to the state to uphold his rights as a citizen and his rights as an individual to build the house of his choice. The outcome of my story is still not known.

The idea of the state, of the common good on a national scale, was introduced at independence. Before that, the state was seen as the possession of the colonial power. Government was what they controlled, and families and villages were what we controlled. Before we had time to develop a consensus about what it was to be a citizen, as distinct to being the member of an extended family or a village polity, there was mass emigration. This led to the further objectification, for want of a better word, of Samoan-ness, to defend against outsiders. Emigration increased this process as we formed little islands of Samoan-ness in seas of palagi society around the world. Thus the petition of the two chiefs against Solomona’s house is based on the convention that no one in the village—other than the holders of its paramount titles—may build a two-storey house. Since none of the high chiefs had ever owned a two-storey house, in effect the rule is that no one in the village of lower rank may build a house of greater height than the houses of its high chiefs. Two-storey houses of course are not ‘traditional’ but they have been common in Samoa for the past century and are generally seen as being more prestigious than one-storey houses. In the past, Samoan houses displayed the rank of the occupant by the number if tiers (or the height) of the stone foundations (paepae) on which the house was built. Therefore the modern status equivalent to a house built on a high foundation would be a two-storey house, and thus this indicator of rank was reserved for the high chiefs of the village. Local by-laws to protect the dignity of the high chiefs are quite common. For example, in my mother’s village in the 1970s, only chiefs were allowed to use umbrellas, carry brief cases, or to use fans in church.

In the case of Solomona’s two-storey house, the village council of matai, the fono, did not take action against him. It could have ordered him to stop building his house, or it could have fined him, as is usually done when someone breaks a village convention. It was noteworthy that the two high chiefs did not appeal to the fono, but took their case against Solomona to the Land and Titles Court themselves and in so doing they were shifting the grounds for complaint. If Solomona was in breach of local convention, then the matter should have been for the fono to adjudicate, but by taking the case to the Land and Titles Court, the two high chiefs were, in effect, asserting that the building of a two-storey house is a traditional perquisite attached to the defence of those elements of culture that have come to be seen as a virtue. The questioning of them is seen to be an attack on our integrity as a people. For those of us who live in Samoa, this has retarded the evolution of a sense of citizenship, with the ill-effects on governance that I have discussed previously.