Scion and head of a Sāmoan royal house

Invincible Strangers 46 Chapter 20.2

Westbrook felt the SMP were tactless and made up of men of a mentality that should have kept them out of Sāmoa. He reckoned that on marches out of Āpia they sang insulting songs: ‘I have heard one of them talk of Sāmoans as “black bastards and bloody niggers’. He was probably right but there were also other SMP members who, over time, became close to Sāmoans. As scattered photographs show from the era, romances and social life between military police and Sāmoans did form. Local white women did not socialise with SMP.

‘A few, I believe, became attached to those women with whom they had been intimate and would have married them,’ Westbrook said. ‘Others abused the hospitality of those who entertained them and seduced their daughters.’

Tupua Tamasese socialising with Military Police. PapersPast