Tui Ātua Tupua Tamasese Efi

Who is Tui Ātua Tupua Tamasese Efi?

Tui Ātua Tupua Tamasese Efi is a Samoan paramount chief, politician, and scholar born in 1938, holder of the Tupua Tamasese title, one of Samoa's four paramount tama-a-aiga chieftainships. He served as Prime Minister of Samoa in the late 1970s and early 1980s and later served as O le Ao o le Malo (Head of State) of Samoa from 2007 to 2017. Beyond his political career, he became one of the most influential contemporary voices on Samoan indigenous knowledge and philosophy, serving as a resident scholar at the Pacific Studies Centre of the Australian National University and the Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. He has authored several books and dozens of scholarly articles and keynote addresses exploring the Samoan indigenous reference framework, applying it to subjects ranging from bioethics and climate change to political discourse and traditional navigation, work that has brought fa'aSamoa concepts to international academic audiences. In 2019 he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters by the University of St Andrews in recognition of this scholarship.

Sources: Tui Ātua Tupua Tamasese Efi — Wikipedia biographical summary · University of St Andrews, laureation address for honorary Doctor of Letters (2019) · International Social Science Journal, "Bioethics and the Samoan indigenous reference" (2009)