Samoa.
Information.
SAMOA (officially the Independent State of Samoa and until 1997 known as Western Samoa), is a Polynesian island country consisting of two main islands and several smaller, uninhabited islands. Samoa is located 64 km (40 mi) west of American Samoa, 889 km (552 mi) northeast of Tonga, 1,152 km (716 mi) northeast of Fiji, 483 km (300 mi) east of Wallis and Futuna, 1,151 km (715 mi) southeast of Tuvalu, 519 km (322 mi) south of Tokelau, 4,190 km (2,600 mi) southwest of Hawaii, and 610 km (380 mi) northwest of Niue. The capital and largest city is Apia. The Lapita people discovered and settled the Samoan Islands around 3,500 years ago. They developed a Samoan language and Samoan cultural identity. Area - 2,831 sq.km. Population - 205,557 (2021 census) Capital - Apia. Samoa was discovered and settled by the Lapita people (Austronesian people who spoke Oceanic languages), who travelled from Island Melanesia. The earliest human remains found in Samoa are dated to between roughly 2,900 and 3,500 years ago. Contact with Europeans began in the early 18th century. Jacob Roggeveen, a Dutchman, was the first known non-Polynesian to sight the Samoan islands in 1722. This visit was followed by French explorer Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, who named them the Navigator Islands in 1768. Contact was limited before the 1830s, which is when English missionaries of the London Missionary Society, whalers, and traders began arriving. 19th century Cristian missionary work in Samoa began in 1830 when John Williams of the London Missionary Society arrived in Sapapali'i from the Cook Islands and Tahiti. The Germans, in particular, began to show great commercial interest in the Samoan Islands, especially on the island of Upolu, where German firms monopolised copra and cocoa bean processing. The joint commission of Germany, the United States and Great Britain abolished the Samoan kingship in June 1899. The eastern island-group became a territory of the United States and was known as American Samoa. The western islands, by far the greater landmass, became German Samoa. The United Kingdom had vacated all claims in Samoa and in return received termination of German rights in Tonga, all of the Solomon Islands south of Bougainville, and territorial alignments in West Africa. The German Empire governed the western part of the Samoan archipelago from 1900 to 1914. In the first month of World War I, on 29 August 1914, troops of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force landed unopposed on Upolu and seized control from the German authorities, following a request by Great Britain. From the end of World War I until 1962, New Zealand controlled Western Samoa as a Class C Mandate under trusteeship through the League of Nations, then through the United Nations. After repeated efforts by the Samoan independence movement, the New Zealand Western Samoa Act 1961 of 24 November 1961 terminated the Trusteeship Agreement and granted the country independence as the Independent State of Western Samoa, effective on 1 January 1962.[52][53] Western Samoa, the first small-island country in the Pacific to become independent, signed a Treaty of Friendship with New Zealand later in 1962. Western Samoa joined the Commonwealth of Nations on 28 August 1970. While independence was achieved at the beginning of January, Samoa annually celebrates 1 June as its independence day. On 15 December 1976, Western Samoa was admitted to the United Nations as the 147th member state. It asked to be referred to in the United Nations as the Independent State of Samoa. Currency : 1 Tala (WST) = 100 sene .
