December 28, 2007

By Michael Field 

A seven-year-old who witnessed a horrific moment of New Zealand history - the assassination of a Samoan paramount chief - has 78 years later spoken of it.

Aucklander Agnes Heeney, now 85, revealed her story to cousin Tony Brunt who several generations later played a role in New Zealand political history. He has also revealed the role of a self-effacing American priest.

Today  is the anniversary of Black Saturday, 1929, when New Zealand Police killed nine people on the streets of Apia and wounded dozens of others. Among the dead, killed by police snipers, was Tupua Tamasese Lealofi III, the grand uncle of Samoa's Head of State Tupua Tamasese Efi.

Mrs Heeney recalled how the chief fell, mortally wounded, and looked up to her mother near by.

"They knew each other well. He lifted his hand slightly and waved it from side to side at her," Mrs Heeney said.

Agnes Henney" Photo Tony Brunt

A German colony from 1900, soldiers from Wellington seized Samoa in 1914, at the start of World War One. Inept military rule climaxed in 1918 when officials let Spanish influenza in. Within a month, 25 percent of the population, over 7500 people, died. In neighbouring American Samoa quarantine held and nobody died.

Other blunders alienated Samoans, prompting the creation of the Mau - "opposition". Wellington tried crushing it with military rule. Tupua Tamasese was locked up in Mount Eden Gaol for six months; his crime was to ignore an order to cut down a hibiscus hedge that was offending New Zealand plans for more controlled villages.

Others were banished, including remarkable businessman Olaf Nelson who was the intellectual leader of the movement.

Several of the minor deportees were to return from Auckland on December 28, 1929, and the Mau, an unarmed, pacifist movement, marched along Beach Road that morning to greet them. Part of their strategy was a refusal to pay tax but the administration, led by lawyer and soldier Stephen Allen, decided they would arrest any tax dodgers.

In an ambush, the armed police moved on a prominent leader near the Central Police Station. A fight broke out and a pistol bearing constable was fatally hurt, prompting armed police, kept in waiting, to attack.

A machine-gun was set up at the police station, commanding the intersection where the marchers were.

Tony Brunt's father, Jack, then 17, was there driving a baker's van. He saw the policemen firing into the Mau, and people falling.

Tupua Tamasese was a big man, dressed in white. He was a tama-a-aiga, one of Samoa's most powerful chiefs. He had reluctantly joined the Mau.

When the shooting started at the inter-section of Beach Road and 'Ifi'ifi Street, he strode into it, holding his hands up high and calling out "filemu,  filemu", peace, peace. He called out to the Mau to finish with the march, to be patient. He spoke of the New Zealand Police: "They are few. We are many. They are guests in our country."

Just down the road, at the police station one of three policemen, aimed a Lee Enfield rifle at him and fired. The bullet tore through him in the upper right thigh, shattering the femur and pelvis. Five men ran to his aid but were cut down by the machine gun, two fatally.

Hellesoe home

Hellesoe family members watched from their upstairs balcony, overlooking the intersection.

Tony Brunt, an Auckland marketing executive, says Mrs Louisa Sasse (nee Hellesoe), her seven-year-old daughter, Agnes, niece Karen Hellesoe and nephew Christian Hellesoe, both young adults, saw it all.

"Tamasese fell in such a way that as he lay on his back he could see my mother on the balcony," Agnes told Brunt.

He lifted his hand slightly and waved.

"I remember tears were streaming down her face.

"She was yelling at the nurse to take me inside. Once I got there I ran out of another door to keep watching.

"Karen and Christian ran to the back of the house, to the kitchen, to see where the shots were coming from. They could see muzzle flashes through the trellis on the police station balcony."

Brunt uncovered the role of Joseph Deihl. He was an American Catholic priest in a predominately Congregational society. It is known that he was the only one willing to minister to the wounded Mau. Fearing the reaction of New Zealand authorities at the time, he was discreet. Deihl burnt most of his private papers before leaving Apia in 1948.

Brunt speculated the priest may have watched the Mau pass the Cathedral several minutes beforehand and then seen shooting. He would have climbed into his green, two-seater Model A Ford coupe.

Joseph Deihl

Mrs Heeney told him how Karen and Christian saw the priest drive into the scene of bloodshed.

"He must have squeezed it down an alleyway which ran down the western side of our house. It took him to within a few metres of the police station. We all knew Father Deihl as we attended the Catholic Church.

"He jumped out and ran towards the police, holding out his arms and yelling at them. Words like, 'Stop it, stop it, they're human beings!' He kept yelling and waving until they stopped. Karen and Christian always said that he was the man who had stopped the shooting."

What he did next is unknown; rumour has it he took the wounded Tamasese home, then to hospital and then burying him.

One month after Black Saturday Deihl wrote to Chicago's Bishop William O'Brien.

"I rushed out to the village to administer to the dying - and the cries of the women and children, the pitiful shrieks, heart rending I should say, with the sight of the wounds from which some were dying and others but promising to hold out a little while, these things must have unnerved me," he wrote.

His Apia bishop told him to be careful of his criticism.

"I told the bishop flatly that jail or deportation didn't worry me, that I would somehow relish deportation these days. However, for the sake of the Mission I must hold down and keep doing my work.... Don't worry about me. I am a missionary and therefore keeping out of beach politics; but I have a mind and can think (and do) pretty hotly, as you can judge."

The different worlds of the priest and the administrator were revealed in their correspondence.

Allen, the administrator, wrote in his reports of the limited mental capacity of Samoans, saying they had the "mind and intellect of a child, reasons like a child, and behaves like a spoilt child - as he actually is. The Samoan has never had to think for himself."

Deihl wrote of being truly happy.

"I am quite prepared to believe that few native races in the world can compare with the Samoan for fineness of physique, cleanliness of habits, and for generosity and hospitality....There is something exquisite and refined in the social intercourse of Samoan with Samoan."

Samoa eventually gained its independence in 1962 and today remains the only country New Zealand has a Treaty of Friendship with.

In 1972 Brunt, then a young Victoria University student, and several others created the first national environmental political party, the Values Party. Under the first past the post system they could never achieve a parliamentary seat. Eventually it morphed into the Green Party, and Brunt went on to serve on the Wellington City Council and quietly slipped from the national political scene.

In June 2002 Prime Minister Helen Clark visited Samoa.

"On behalf of the New Zealand Government, I wish to offer today a formal apology to the people of Samoa for the injustices arising from New Zealand's administration of Samoa in its earlier years, and to express sorrow and regret for those injustices," she said.

In the audience Tupua Tamasese Efi let tears run down his face.

"It's a very emotional moment, it was a struggle not to cry ... This gesture is historic, and I accept in it the spirit it is given."

Copyright: Michael Field