ABSTRACT
In the independent State of Western Samoa, a large debate is involving politicians in town as well as villagers from the 300 villages of this country. In Samoa, the traditional system of sacred chiefs has never been discontinued. At the time of independence, the people of Samoa insisted on setting up a parliamentary system where only the chiefs would be the electors and the eligible people, where only they would vote and be elected to represent a district and sit in Parliament. In Samoa, the person coming to live on one’s family land quickly becomes a ‘child of the land’ and as such a ‘brother’, a new member of the group, and hence a true ‘heir’ to the name. Samoans do not deny that a consensual decision, faatasi, does not mean that there was total unanimity from the start.
