Today, we delve into the national anthem of Samoa, titled "Ole Fuā'ā O Le Soifuiga O Samoa," and explore its historical and cultural significance. Patrick takes us on a journey through the rich tapestry of Samoa's past, highlighting the impact of colonialism and the struggles for independence that shaped the nation. He discusses the anthem's creation by Sauni Elijah Carusa in the context of Samoa's newfound self-governance in 1948, leading to the anthem's eventual adoption in 1961. The episode also touches on the themes of national identity, pride, and unity encapsulated in the anthem's lyrics, which serve as a rallying call for the Samoan people. With insights into Samoa's geography, climate, and cultural practices, this episode provides a comprehensive look at the anthem that symbolizes freedom and resilience for the nation.

I know, I know. WWI started in 1914 and not 1948 but that is the year that Samoa was granted self governance. It was in my head and I didn't notice until after I edited the entire thing and I lack the time to go back and add me saying the correct date.

Here are the sources:

1. https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-318925666/view?sectionId=nla.obj-333096340&partId=nla.obj-318987683#page/n81/mode/1up 
2. https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/218049060 
3. https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-317352062/view?sectionId=nla.obj-330039968&partId=nla.obj-317363860#page/n0/mode/1up 
4. http://www.paclii.org/ws/legis/consol_act_2019/ofanaosa1994308/ 
5. https://moanaleilua.wordpress.com/2017/06/05/o-au-o-le-samoa/ 
6. https://catholicoutlook.org/fr-tovia-bears-sign-jesus-died-samoa/ 
7. https://www.samoaobserver.ws/category/samoa/98436 
8. https://ancestors.familysearch.org/en/L6Y8-RJV/malotuto%27atasi-iiga-sauni-ioane-kuresa-1901-1978 
9. https://natlib.govt.nz/records/35402307?search%5Bi%5D%5Bcategory%5D=Music+Score&search%5Bpath%5D=items&search%5Btext%5D=samoa 
10. https://symbolhunt.com/samoa/national-anthem/ 
11. https://books.openedition.org/pacific/126#:~:text=Conversion%20made%20easy%20by%20the,to%20be%20accepted%20in%20Samoa. 
12. https://pmcarchive.aut.ac.nz/pacific-media-watch/samoa-auckland-helps-50th-anniversary-independence-celebrations-7964.html 
13. https://signum-crucis.tumblr.com/post/25281842452/samoan-national-anthem-the-banner-of-freedom 
14. https://slideplayer.com/slide/6127236/ 
15. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=9410+miles 
16. https://www.thecoconet.tv/songbook/learn-language-songs-from-the-pacific/the-national-anthem-of-samoa-samoa-tulai/ 
17. https://www.indiewire.com/criticism/culture/why-moana-the-first-docufiction-in-history-deserves-a-new-life-24631/ 
18. https://web.archive.org/web/20101223022921/http://oceandots.com/pacific/bankx/ 
19. Roberts, J. Timmons; Thanos, Nikki Demetria (2003). Trouble in Paradise: Globalization and Environmental Crises in Latin America. Routledge, London and New York. p. Vii.
20. https://books.google.com/books?id=8V3vZxOmHssC&newbks=0&printsec=frontcover&pg=PA569&hl=en&source=newbks_fb 
21. https://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-TuvAcco.html 
22. https://nationalanthems.info/ws.htm 
23. http://www.nzlii.org/nz/legis/hist_act/wsa19611961n68189/ 
24. https://www.loc.gov/item/global-legal-monitor/2017-06-14/samoa-constitutional-amendment-makes-christianity-the-national-religion/#:~:text=The%20Explanatory%20Memorandum%20that%20accompanied,%2C%20Parliament%20of%20Samoa%20website.) 
25. https://devpolicy.org/christianising-samoas-constitution-religious-freedom-pacific-20170427/ 

https://www.nzjh.auckland.ac.nz/document.php?wid=1669&action=null

Hello and welcome to the Anthems podcast. I'm Patrick and I'm here to tell you the story of a song that helps to tell the story of a nation.

But I digress. We have some options for nations out this way, but the one I picked was Samoa.

After I picked this place, I was reading an instagram post from these travel bloggers that go and get tattoos in cool places from cool people, where this girl found out on camera that this other literal child was doing her first tattoo on her wild stuff. I have some tattoos and I enjoy the cultural narrative that they can have.

Samoa definitely has a strong association with that aspect of tattooing, a pea or a malu.

The male and female traditional pieces are impressive and visually stunning expressions that, unlike many other traditional forms of tattooing, actually managed to survive colonialism. But cool tattoos are not what got me to pick this anthem for the episode.

This is another that was generated by the random country picker because I couldn't think of a nation in time to get started. That's why I mentioned I'll take requests. This beginning part is way less rambling when I've got another person making the initial decision for me.

Look at me complaining about having a little more work to do. Sorry about that. Regardless, it's a good enough excuse to tell you about ole fuah ole sa ola toga o samoa or the banner of freedom.

One thing that you might be wondering if you're in a part of the world that Disney's gotten to is when I'm going to mention Moana because there is a guy getting a paja in the opening scene of that movie. Well, this is the only mention of it, and that's just so I can bring up the fact that there is another movie titled Moana that I just learned about.

Because gender norms for names are fluid through time, docu fiction is a type of film that does documentary stuff, but introduces fictional elements into the narrative of the movie in order to strengthen the plot and tell the story. I think its a strange way to make a film but people seem to love them.

I bet the music was alright though and even if it wasnt, it was probably still better than the Segway into playing the anthem that youre experiencing literally as I speak. Its pretty great.

I know you cant see it but you might be able to hear that im smiling because I know how jarring this might be and im hoping that you were surprised. Seriously though, I am looking forward to you hearing this song. It's a minor spoiler but you know so be it.

Settle in for less than two minutes, but more than 155 seconds of today's song. My initial reaction is a smile because 155 seconds is definitely more than two minutes.

So I did my math wrong but I like this song or at least the version that I played here. This group is called Tone six and they're out of New Zealand as far as I can tell from their facebook page. Anyway.

I know essentially nothing about them, but they've got good pipes and they did this song justice.

Again, we've got an anthem that's on the shorter side of things and someday I'll learn what the length distribution of these songs is and I will share all of that information with you. I enjoy that this is sung in samoan and not in a language of a colonizing country. It feels more authentic when that's the case.

We are however, going to learn about some colonial interests making a right mess of things in the area. But first we need to know where exactly in almost the middle of the Pacific Ocean they had to sail to to do it.

When I say middle of the ocean, this time I am talking about the geographic center.

So it's kind of pretty much in the middle of nowhere spot. But people got there and they survived there. Once you're there, it's not so bad.

It's tropical and the average temperature is nearly 85 degrees fahrenheit. It's about 26 and a half degrees celsius, but it rains like a lot, at least compared to where I live.

Samoa gets very nearly 10ft, about 3 meters of rain a year. It seems like an awful lot to me, but it has to be an amazing place to live despite that.

Also a place that, as an island in the middle of an ocean, was brought to us by volcanism which is a fun word to say. Volcanism. Try it.

My undergrad in physics understanding is basically a fount of magma at a fixed location through a lower part of the plate and a moving upper part generates an island chain. Pretty cool if way outside my wheelhouse. That gets me way, way further back than I need to be when I'm starting to think about a national anthem.

But recall that it was pretty cool, so I kind of had to mention it. The story of this anthem, like, like a lot of them, man, a lot, uh, has to do with colonialism again and hence a massive injustice.

This is episode 15 and it's like the 15th country that I could do an entire series of podcasts on because if I let it be, literally everything is fascinating. So Samoa is definitely not an exception to that.

The Samoans killed twelve people.

But they arrived at a time of local fighting and they helped put a damper on that when the people that were tired of fighting heard about a gospel of peace. It didn't stop the fighting, as we'll see, but it didn't make it worse.

The thing that did that were the multinational business interests of the United States, Britain and Germany. That came with the notice of the missionaries.

Over the course of the next 50 or so years, the three countries established a business footprint and expanded their footprint.

I mentioned that company specifically because when I looked up the owner, I learned about a terrible thing that I didn't know about and he did it. I didn't know it existed before this. And it is called blackbirding.

It's a slavery or poorly paid forced labor situation that occurs far from one's homeland and you're either coerced into it or straight up kidnapped. Blackbirding is a practice that incredibly enough, continues into the 21st century. And unfortunately I'm not shocked that people are still terrible.

However they got there and whatever means they used to lay their claims, the US, Germany and Britain laid those claims and made some of the islands their own.

I say largely political even though there were skirmishes with western provided troops and bombardments of villages from offshore and warships are involved in my reason for bringing it up.

That reason is the samoan crisis, wherein warships from three countries that should really have been butting out of what was happening in Samoa got involved in an intense dispute about who would get to claim the place. Three american ships and two german ships were bristling their cannons at each other while they were being monitored by a 6th british ship.

And I will resist the rabbit hole of ship classes in the 19th century Royal Navy. Regardless of the negotiations and the pauses, the conflict continued and resolved in the installation of one king and the exile of another.

It's also a war that makes me sick about imperialism.

As far as I can tell, this is basically a single battle where the british and american forces were supporting the prince and the chiefs forces were defeated in kind. What blows my mind about the entire thing is that the end result of this battle is not in fact the Prince of Samoa taking power in Samoa.

The actual result is an injustice to the people of Samoa and an event that basically gets repeated again and again through history. What we get is a negotiation among the US, Britain and Germany about how they were going to split things up and end the hostilities in the region.

But then the three countries also took it upon themselves to dissolve the existing government entirely, abolish the monarchy, arbitrarily established new nations, and asked exactly zero Samoans what they thought about the process.

I'm learning a lot about how the world ended up like this in my reading, and sometimes it's some eye opening stuff, but I do need to get around to talking about the song, though.

National anthems have this weird spot in history, and they're not like important when it happens. They're important sometimes way after the fact, or maybe not at all.

It's very similar to a trumpet, and he's playing it with his band during the very competition that he won to have the song become the anthem. You can see item three in the show notes if you want to look at the picture.

We know that he was able to play two coronets at the same time and could play two different parts that way. It's wild to think about that.

What I find really fun is that he figured out how to perform that feat because his friend said he saw a man do it over in Tonga. And Sami thought to himself, I bet I could do that if a man in Tonga could do it, and he figured it out.

Then it turned out that his friend was lying to him and he never saw another person play two coronets at once. But I found it. There's a couple of actually real videos out there on the Internet of this.

There's some fake kind of hilarious ones, but there's some real ones. None that I can find are of the anthem rider.

Regardless, it's a cool trick, and it figured into his act when he was touring around the region of the Pacific that he was in. I can also confidently say that he died age 77 in Apia. At the time, he was the choir master of the 7th day adventist church.

A man that, like I said, is probably far more interesting than a couple of rambling paragraphs can show, and a man that also lived long enough to see the stable independence of the country he wrote for the song for become a reality again. We end up with the anthem not really being the main event of the creator's life. It's sort of a feature for a bunch of these guys.

Now to catch up with the timeline and get us an anthem.

So the big western powers divide up the islands like they had a right to, and everything west of 170 degrees west longitude officially becomes German Samoa.

Pretty immediately after the war started, Britain's government asked New Zealand to seize the communication facilities in german occupied Samoa. Coincidentally, a previous prime minister, their longest serving, actually Richard Seddon, really wanted his country in control of Samoa.

The generals figured if hostilities with Germany happened, this would be a logical use of the military in Samoa. So they already had a pretty detailed plan drawn up on how to move in and take over.

Germany offered no resistance when they did actually go over there, so they didn't need the plan they had. But the german government refused to officially surrender the country.

It turns out that it was in fact their fault because they did not quarantine the ship that brought the flu there and American Samoa managed to actually contain everything and not infect their people.

You can probably feel a distaste from yourself no matter where you live or when you grew up.

That helped fuel their independence movement and there were enough repeated efforts that eventually New Zealand just stopped resisting and let Samoa become independent. Not immediately though, and quite a few people were shot by the police at a peaceful demonstration.

They also exiled critics of their administration off to New Zealand. So this country does not get a pass on imperialism either. That's not all right.

None of that officially made the banner of freedom the official national anthem.

I do know that it's in the key of c and it's moderato like 130 bpm. Most of the full band versions of the song seem a little processional and not quite a march, but honestly I can't really tell with this one.

At any rate, it's not an incredibly complicated tune when you look at the music and it lends itself to many interpretations. Lyrically there's a little bit more to say about it, even if the entire song is just seven lines long.

I'm going to read it in English, but the original is written and sung in Samoan. Samoa, arise and raise your banner that is your crown. Oh see and behold the stars on the waving banner they are a sign that Samoa is able to lead.

Oh Samoa, hold fast your freedom forever do not be afraid as you are founded on God, our treasured, precious liberty Samoa, arise and wave your banner that is your crown. And that's it. Just seven lines. Two of them are in fact the same. Given the brevity of the banner of freedom.

I'm just gonna sort of talk my way through the lyrics and hope that that method works for this anthem. We'll see. The song opens with a call to action for the people to arise and display the flag. It's a symbol of honor and sovereignty.

Referring to the banner as a crown and placing it in the first line is an indication of the importance associated with the national identity. Stars on the flag can sometimes mean guidance and direction.

That makes sense here for people that lived somewhere that the Europeans named the navigator islands because they had such a prowess at sea navigation, so we're going to go with that. The second line is trying to instill confidence and assurance in the nation's potential because the nation will lead well, but is also well guided.

The third line is a more anthem appropriate line, and it shows that the writer is indeed singing of the country holding on to the freedom that was gained and never ever letting go of it shows the importance of independence. Then we get an explicitly christian line in honestly, what is not that religious of an anthem compared to what we've already seen?

They were, and presumably still are, a group of Samoans that were actually vocally displeased that the anthem was not far more religious than it is, and there is a set of alternate lyrics that is sometimes sung. It makes sense that the song would invoke the blessings and protections and guidance of their lord.

Surely with him showing the way the nation can overcome any adversity, then Sauni focus is right back on liberty and has the most anthem esque of the lyrics. His choice of words implies not just an appreciation of the nation's freedom, but a reverence for it. They must be cherished and saved for posterity.

The last line is a refrain of the first it makes the tune nice and circular for me. Actually, I like circularity in songs and it reaffirms the sense of unity and pride that Samoans should feel as they continue their journey forward.

Overall, the lyrics of ole fuah o le so ola to gao samawa encapsulate themes of national identity, pride, leadership, faith and perseverance.

While it is a short song, Sauni very much understood the assignment and delivered for his country with a song that seeks to inspire and unite the people. They should be reminded by the lyrics that as a nation, their people share values and aspirations.

It functions well as an anthem and seeks to inspire a deep sense of solidarity among the people and instill a deep commitment to the collective well being of the nation.

It makes it fairly obvious why it was the song that won the contest, although to be honest, I've heard exactly none of the other entries, so there's a chance that personally, I would like a different one better. I don't know. I'm not disappointed in the song this time, though.

It felt a little more disjointed as far as the story goes, than I would like it to sometimes does on the show.

But Sawney was an interesting guy, at least in the context of what I was able to find out, and Samoa is a very interesting place, even if history is light on the details about the author of the anthem. But it's a hard to find archetype. I haven't found it yet. I'll get there eventually. Maybe. We'll see. It's a future topic. Turnover for now.

We're gonna hear the credits and I'm gonna get to preparing for a record. Well, I'm making one. It's weird. I said I'm gonna prepare for one, but that was when I was writing it and I'm currently making it now.

Now it's awkward, but anyway, awkward's kinda. It's kinda my thing. The writing, recording and production for the show are done by me and I wrote and played the theme music.

The music was used by me with my permission. Unless otherwise noted, the anthems I play are public domain or some other equivalently free to play license.

And here I am indeed noting that I did not yet get permission to play this song. I have tried though, and reached out to tone six via Facebook, email and YouTube, but as of the time of this recording, I have not heard from them.

My sources and the specific items I mention in the show are contained in the show notes, and the most direct way to get to those show notes is@anthemspodcast.com you can find me on Facebook and WhatsApp as the Anthems podcast. You should follow me on Facebook. It'll be a rare post in your feed, but it'd be better to subscribe on your favorite podcast player.

That is the best way to listen to me for now. I tried to get the episodes shared onto whatever platform I can with the hashtag anthemspod.

It would be cool if you also hashtag the post like that, and I heard it will actually make you cooler too. You can email me corrections, comments, suggestions, ideas, instructions, concerns, and even ask me questions.

Maybe no one's done it yet, but you could. You could ask them@anthemspodmail.com.

No one's told me yet. Give me a rating on your podcast app. Ratings and reviews matter to the algorithms people.

Perhaps there's a chance that you bring up the show at your next family gathering, because they're all into this really specific kind of history too, and as such are also awesome people. If you have any suggestions for future episodes, the best way to get them to me is at the emailanthemspodmail.com.

but even if all you do is listen to this show once in a while, thanks, because that's really cool. And I do notice I keep track of all this stuff. It's fun, and I hope you enjoy it. I'll be back.