The elevators in the ground-floor car park were beside a stall selling cream doughnuts and pineapple pies. The stairwell was blocked by an old metal safe with a sheet thrown over it. There were vacant spaces beneath parking signs reserved for the deputy prime minister, the minister of natural resources and other government officials, but the attorney general had come to work – there was his big shining Toyota Hi-Lux 3.0, with its licence plate AG01.
A man sat with his legs wide apart on a hard wooden chair inside the elevator. This didn’t leave a lot of room, and it seemed rude to travel in silence in the intimate box. ‘How are you today?’ I asked. ‘Busy, uh,’ he said. He was very good at pushing the button. He made it look easy.
That was at two o’clock on Friday afternoon. I didn’t have an appointment to see Prime Minister Tuilaepa Lupesoliai Sailele Malielegaoi. I had something more powerful: a grievance. My leg throbbed. I limped out of the elevator. A man sat behind a desk. There was a sign above his head on the wall with an arrow and the words PRIME MINISTER. I hobbled towards the sign but stopped in my tracks when I caught the view from the large bay windows, the wide blue yonder of Apia Bay. There was so much of it that it looked as though it could be the entire Pacific. There was more of it than sky.
I eyed it with wild surmise. What was out there, beyond the sea, over the horizon? What promised land glittered, signalled, lured, over the rainbow? New Zealanders look to Australia for that answer; Samoans look to New Zealand.
Where there’s a Pacific Islander in New Zealand, there’s a statistic. In 1921 there were 164 Samoans in New Zealand. In 2006 there were 131,103, more than half the total population of Pacific Islanders in New Zealand. The browning of New Zealand continues: it is officially estimated that by 2051 sixteen percent of children under fifteen will be European, 30 percent Māori, and 33 percent Pacific Island.
One final statistic: more than half of New Zealand’s Samoan population live in South Auckland. All I needed to do to go to Samoa was catch a bus, but I had decided to go the long way round and fly to Apia.
It was the end of the wet season. Muddy water collected in the potholes and slowed traffic to a bumpy crawl of about 35 kilometres an hour. Samoa was lush and squelchy, gorgeous to behold with its coral reef and blue lagoon, its plantations of taro and coconut. I stayed on the main island of Upolu. The other island, Savai‘i, was just beyond the reef.
The Lady Samoa II passenger and car ferry left from a wharf near the airport. I wandered over on Sunday afternoon to have a look at the boat, with its two yellow chimneys. Motorists queued at the wharf, and now and then got out of their cars and strolled across the road to buy a cold drink. Earlier, for about two hours from midday, the heat had chased everyone on the island into shade. The roads had been even emptier than in the morning, when the churches opened for singing and business. God is a nosy, constant presence in Samoa. A sign at the ferry terminal shop read GOD BLESS THE HAND THAT GIVES TO THE POOR. I needed a cold drink. The most delicious and also the cheapest on offer – for two tala, just over one New Zealand dollar – was a coconut. It took up room in the fridge alongside Coke and Fanta.
Nutty, palmy Samoa. In downtown Apia, dragonflies touched pink and gracious water lilies on the surface of an open drain. There were stores specialising in providing supplies for the popular drug of bingo. There were a lot of buses – old, brightly painted jalopies that bounced up and down like toys on a trampoline. There were a lot of taxis, churches, barefoot children, and empty coconut shells scattered on the side of the road. There was a lot of diabolical food cooking in large vats at roadside stalls – chop suey, mutton curry, soup bones. There was one McDonald’s, packed at lunchtime; its nod to local cuisine was the Samoan Burger. At 17.80 tālā it had ‘everything’, which possibly included mutton curry.
There was a lot of gold and black – the colours of Western Union’s money transfer bank. Just about every village had a branch to handle the $128.2 million of remittance money sent to Samoa by families who had emigrated to New Zealand. ‘Remittance money’ – it was a difficult piece of English but every Samoan had mastered it. It accounts for 24 percent of Samoa’s GDP and is the country’s biggest source of income.
There were a lot of dogs. I didn’t see the one that went for me until it was too late. I didn’t see the one that went for me because it was dark, about ten o’clock at night, and the dog barked once, from beneath a tree, then ran out fast, its jaws open like scissors.
Sending Samoans to New Zealand is a trade. I knocked on the door of a travel agency in a dimly lit shopping arcade in Apia and talked with a consultant, Lotu Auapaau. Slender, welcoming, 22 years old, he said he dealt on average with three people moving to New Zealand every week. Right now, though, he was waiting to see a family who just wanted to fly over to attend a wedding. They’d already paid for the fare from Apia to Auckland. ‘Most people pay one way and get their family in New Zealand to buy their return ticket.’
I asked when the family was due to see him. ‘I don’t know.’ How long would he wait? Lotu wore a red T-shirt and smiled happily. ‘If they don’t turn up,’ he said, ‘I’ll just sit here
