Chief Mataafa

Category

Museums & Galleries Item

Item no

19723

Title

p. 39b, Chief Mataafa

Description

Mataafa stands in front of a hut and rugs. He is holding a walking stick and wearing beads over a bare chest and a wrap-a-round skirt. Two men are kneeling on either side of him and a woman (perhaps his wife) is sitting in the middle. She is wearing a dress with a grass skirt, beads round her neck and is holding a parasol.

Artist / maker

Andrew, Thomas

Date

1889

Size

14.4 x 20 cm

Type

Photograph

Location

Writers' Museum

Mataafa Iosefo was a rival claimant as King of Samoa during the Civil War.

The Samoan Islands are located in the South Pacific and lie halfway between Hawaii and Australia. The capital Apia, is situated on Upolu one of the largest of the 10 islands.

Born in Edinburgh on 13th November 1850, Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, playwright and travel writer. Although he was plagued by ill health all his life, he was extraordinarily well-travelled, visiting Europe, America and the South Seas. He married American born Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne in 1880 and is best-known for works like Treasure Island (1883), Kidnapped and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (both 1886). From the late 1880s, Stevenson stayed in the South Pacific with his family on his own estate in Vailima in Samoa. He died here on the 3rd December 1894 of a brain haemorrhage at the age of 44, leaving what many consider his best work, Weir of Hermiston (1896) unfinished.

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Related subjects

Homes > Residential buildings > Houses

People > Politics and government > Chiefs

Places > Oceania > Samoa

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