He was an elegant man, charming, smiling, half Chinese and half Samoan, sleekly built, with immaculate hair. We chatted about more or less absolutely nothing for ten minutes. He said he had studied at Waikato University. He reckoned he had the best job in the world. He walked to the window and pointed out his house in the hills. He said he worshipped at the Assemblies of God. Then he looked at his watch and I looked at my watch. He stood up and I stood up. Simultaneously, though, we shook hands, and as we walked back past TODAY’S CANTEEN SPECIAL I asked about the possibility of meeting Prime Minister Tuilaepa Lupesoliai Sailele Malielegaoi. He said the PM was due back in his office at two o’clock and I should come back at that time and wait. ‘He sees everyone,’ smiled the attorney general of Samoa.
I had a bit of time to kill before returning to have more time to kill so I mooched downtown, where I starved rather than tackle the Samoan burger, or eat at a food hall where the menu advertised something called PUMKIN MUTTON. In the waterfront reserve I made out the figure of Lealafia Tolai, still at rest; Asofa Suti and her gang of Worship Centre missionaries were nowhere to be seen. The midday heat chased me out of the sun, and soon I was in the air-conditioned offices of law firm Kruse, Enari and Barlow, talking with the office manager. Aigaga McNeely was coy about her age. I told her she couldn’t have been more than forty. She immediately rang her husband to pass on this minor flattery and then she passed me the receiver. ‘I’m a Kiwi,’ the voice said. ‘I went to Rongotai College.’
Aigaga said New Zealand was a nice place to visit but she’d never want to live there. She had lived in Australia for twelve years and been most homesick for the Samoan sense of humour. ‘Typically, what happens is that someone will start with a little detail and build on it, and then someone else will add to it, and it will grow and grow, and before you know it you’ve totally lost the plot and the whole thing just becomes completely absurd.
‘It’s all in Samoan. I’ll translate it for my husband, who sits there looking gloomy while we’re rolling around with laughter, but it doesn’t work in English.’ I thought about the ex-pupil of Rongotai College puzzling over Samoan humour. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘that’s what I missed most in Australia. The food, no, I didn’t miss the food at all. It was the chat and the laughter. That’s the way we live.’
I imagined these great farces being played out as a feature of village life. She said she wasn’t all that interested in village life. She gave a speech. It began, ‘Okay. Here’s a story. I’ve made my commitment to a certain kind of life; I’ve made my choice about it. I shouldn’t be telling you. My father was an ex-prime minister.
‘Okay. We grew up on Savai’i. My father had a cocoa plantation. That was his wealth. We were very advantaged as children. We had a generator – electricity, you see. We had lights! We ate with knife and fork! What I’m saying is, we were brought up palagi. We had the big Her Majesty’s Voice gramophone. We had a flush toilet!
‘Okay. And my father read books to us every night. We had shelves and shelves of books. We had Treasure Island! I don’t know where he found them all. He was a gentleman, my father. We never saw or heard him beat our mother. It was a privileged life, a civilised life. So what I’m telling you is that he believed an education is more important than,’ she concluded, ‘this village thing.’
I spent all afternoon with her father. A photograph of Va’ai Kolone, twice voted in as prime minister of Samoa in the 1980s, stared down from the wall in an anteroom set aside for visitors waiting to see Prime Minister Tuilaepa Lupesoliai Sailele Malielegaoi. There were photos of all Samoa’s prime ministers from the time the country achieved independence in 1962. The gallery ended with a portrait of Tuilaepa Lupesoliai Sailele Malielegaoi. He looked to be in his forties, dark-haired, healthy, mirthless.
The walls were done in wood panelling. There was a wilting pot plant in the corner, big, comfortable, cracked leather chairs, and a quartz clock from Japan. Two o’clock … three o’clock … four o’clock … His secretary on the tenth floor said, ‘He sees everyone.’
I waited with nine businessmen who had made prior appointments. We sat in silence. The secretary opened the door and said, ‘Mr Benjamin, please.’ A small Indian who wore a gold watch jumped to his feet. The door closed. I wore a watch from the $2 Shop and dozed. When I woke up I was alone. I killed the next hour by rifling through a metal filing cabinet behind the pot plant. There was a request from a primary school for two additional classrooms. ‘The village has access to electricity and piped water.’ It asked for $58,760 from the Samoan Government Small Grant Scheme funded by the Australian Government. There was a proposal for operating a 60-cabin, double-hull, twelve-million-dollar cruise ship that had come to nothing, and a letter from a thirteen-year-old girl in Esko, Minnesota, asking for souvenirs from Samoa to present to her social studies class.
Next, I read an internal memo headlined A WORD FROM THE PUBLIC SERVICE COMMISSION. ‘Following the melancholy reflection of Good Friday, many of us may still be pondering the hideous evils of
