Transcript
"There is sickness on this boat," a passenger cried from theTalune as it sailed into Apia on the 7th of November, 1918.
Some of its passengers, who had boarded in Auckland, had come down with the virulent strain of flu that was raging across the world.
Auckland University's Damon Salesa says New Zealand authorities, who had wrested control of Samoa from Germany four years earlier in the first act of the First World War, appeared to turn a blind eye.
As the Talune's passengers and goods fanned out from the wharf, so did the disease.
Passengers returned to their homes on the other side of Upolu; a missionary walked from village-to-village, bringing his hacking cough with him.
Within days, people were dying. Within weeks, entire villages were dying. Within two months, about 8,500 were dead.
The renowned Samoan author Albert Wendt, who researched the epidemic in his book The Mango's Kiss, says it was devastating.
Tony Brunt is a photographer who works with the Samoa National Museum.
Dr Salesa said of the 30 Faipule -- the equivalent of a parliament -- only seven survived the epidemic.
But the epidemic also destroyed knowledge, culture and society.
Professor Wendt says a lot of the dead were matai, leaders whose knowledge was passed down orally.
But what exacerbated the suffering was how the New Zealand rulers reacted, particularly the administrator, Colonel Robert Logan.
He ordered aid stations shut, and rejected an offer of help from neighbouring American Samoa, which had set up quarantine and had zero cases of influenza.
When the principal of a boarding school asked for food for sick children, Colonel Logan was quoted as saying:
Winnie Laban, a former New Zealand minister who's now at Victoria University, says Samoans have not forgotten New Zealand's response, which was a catalyst for the independence movement there.
Today's been declared a public holiday in Samoa. The prime minister will lead a church service, and a new fence will be unveiled at the main mass grave in Vaimea, in part funded by New Zealand.
In this country there's community events, talks and dances, but no official commemoration.
In 2002, then Prime Minister Helen Clark apologised to Samoa, for the government's actions in the epidemic and other atrocities it committed.
But Damon Salesa says that doesn't mean New Zealand can forget its colonial past.
