Taʻisi Olaf Frederick Nelson

Who is Taʻisi Olaf Frederick Nelson?

Taʻisi Olaf Frederick Nelson was a Samoan businessman and political leader born in 1883 in Safune, on the island of Savaiʻi, to a Swedish trader father and a Samoan mother connected to the prominent Sā Tupua chiefly family. He became one of the wealthiest merchants in Samoa and, from the 1920s, one of the founding leaders of the Mau, the nonviolent anti-colonial movement demanding self-government for Samoa under New Zealand administration. In 1927 he founded the newspaper the Samoa Guardian to advance the Mau's cause. His prominence and effectiveness led the New Zealand colonial administration to exile him from Samoa in January 1928 alongside two other part-European Mau leaders; during his five years of exile he carried the movement's appeal as far as the League of Nations in Geneva. He returned to Samoa in 1933 but was soon convicted on charges connected to his Mau activities and sentenced to further exile and imprisonment in New Zealand. He died in 1944, eighteen years before Western Samoa finally achieved the independence he had spent his life pursuing, becoming in 1962 the first Pacific island nation to do so.

Sources: Olaf Frederick Nelson — Wikipedia biographical summary · Nelson, Olaf Frederick — Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Te Ara · O'Brien, Patricia, "Tautai: Sāmoa, World History, and the Life of Taʻisi O. F. Nelson", reviewed in Pacific Affairs (UBC)