The London Missionary Society’s presence in Samoa dates from the first Pacific explorations of the celebrated John Williams, who had first visited the three Samoan islands (Tutuila, Savai’i and Upolu) in 1830. The LMS had established missions by 1836 and in the biased opinion of Goodall, the LMS’s chief modern chronicler, ‘from this point onwards the history of Samoa became the story of a people’s development from barbarism to civilisation, chiefly through the impact of Christian missions’ (Goodall, 1954, 352). Garrett’s more recent account (Garrett, 1994, 180-6) makes the LMS position more equivocal, indicating that the LMS maintained influence before World War One through judicious co-option of the traditional mataipower structures, and more particularly through the tulafale, the oratorical chiefs who spoke on behalf of the nobility and held various kinds of ‘active, executive power’ (Shore, 1982, 59). However intact the old power structures remained, the Christianity of almost all Samoa was not in any dispute: Samoans had zealously (if idiosyncratically) adopted Christian teaching during the nineteenth century, and Samoan pastors swiftly became the LMS’s most effective evangelists in the Pacific region.

Williams had been one of the first Europeans to set foot on the islands. As elsewhere in the South Pacific, the nineteenth century saw growing European settlement in Samoa (mostly in the form of traders), and a concomitantly greater involvement in Samoan affairs was taken by America and by the European powers. Samoan society itself was convulsed by wars during the mid-nineteenth century, and these disputes were utilised by foreign powers and land-grabbing settlers to manoeuvre the various Samoan groups toward accepting their claims. The Germans were the eventual victors in this game of strategy, and between 1900 and 1914 Samoa was under German colonial control. In Western Samoa, this state of affairs drew to a close in August 1914, when troops from New Zealand occupied the islands without encountering any German resistance; the control they established was formalised in 1920 by a League of Nations Mandate over Upola and Savai’i (Meleisea, 1987a, 21-42, 102-3); Tutuila and the smaller eastern islands had been under US administration since 1899.

The mid-1920s saw the beginnings of the ‘Mau’, a largely peaceful popular uprising against the New Zealand administration, whose ostensibly benevolent rule had deprived Samoan communities of a variety of important traditional and local powers. This movement would run on into the 1930s, until new legislation in 1936 made concessions to the Mau, and opened the door for a greater amount of Samoan participation in governance (Meleisea 1987b, 132-40; see also Field 1991).

Conrad George Stallan, the photographer of Here and There in Samoa, had been appointed as an LMS missionary to the Pacific in 1931. His first station was at Tutuila in American Samoa, and he moved between the Samoan islands throughout the thirties before he retired from missionary service in 1939 (LMS Annual Report 1938-9, 110; LMS Annual Report 1939-40, 67). Stallan made at least one other LMS film (Everyday Life in Samoa: Sinnet Making), and may well be responsible for the uncredited Pacific Schooner. This latter film, unlike Here and There, has a rough date attached to it, as the December 1938 issue of The Chronicle mentions that it has been added to the newly established Film Library (hire fee: 2s 6d. Chronicle 1938a, 268). It is thus probable that Here and There was produced slightly earlier, and it is likely to have been one of the 18 ‘short interest films of India, Samoa, Madagascar and Papua’ that were held by the LMS Film Library when it opened in September 1938 (Chronicle 1938b, 213).