Samoa

The first Pacific island country to become independent, and the site of one of colonialism's worst public health failures. Samoa was settled around three thousand years ago and is plausibly the homeland from which eastern Polynesia was navigated; its faʻamatai system of titled chiefs still governs village life and supplies most members of parliament. Three powers - Britain, Germany and the United States - competed over the islands in the late nineteenth century, nearly fighting in Apia harbour in 1889 until a cyclone destroyed the warships of two of them. The 1899 partition gave the western islands to Germany and the eastern to America, a line that still divides Samoa from American Samoa. New Zealand seized the German portion in 1914 and, in November 1918, allowed a ship carrying influenza to dock unquarantined; roughly a fifth of the population died within weeks, while American Samoa, which quarantined, lost nobody. The Mau movement that grew from that grievance was met with troops firing on an unarmed march in 1929, killing the paramount chief Tupua Tamasese Lealofi. Independence came on 1 January 1962. The country switched sides of the international date line in 2011 to align with Australia and New Zealand. Remittances from Samoans abroad are a large part of the economy. Apia is the capital, on Upolu. Robert Louis Stevenson spent his last years there and is buried above the town. Samoan is spoken by nearly the whole population. The country drives on the left, having switched from the right in 2009.

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