OUR MANUSCRIPT OF BROTHER HENRY'S
HISTORY OF SAMOA
AND A SHORT BIOGRAPHY OF BROTHER HENRY
By John L. Fuhring
During the period my parents and sisters were
on American Samoa, my father became friends with a good and scholarly
man known as Brother Henry. Doctor Fuhring, my father, shared
Brother Henry's love of Samoa and so Brother Henry entrusted him with a
manuscript of the cultural history of the Samoan people that he
gathered over the years and was only available to him because of his
status as a Samoan Orator (or Talking Chief). In that manuscript
was many secret legends and sacred stories that other Samoan Chiefs did
not want the common people to know, so in deference to their
objections, Brother Henry requested that my father not publish this
manuscript within his (Br. Henry's) lifetime.
Dr. Fuhring was a highly literate and educated man,
but he was no anthropologist or literary scholar and had no means of
transcribing the manuscript that Brother Henry had given him.
Besides that, the advent of World War Two caused my father and
Brother Henry to loose all contact and my father knew that Fr. Henry's
fatal disease would soon end any future collaboration they might have
had in arranging for the publishing of the manuscript. Of course,
by the time the war was over, Brother Henry was dead and my father was
an unalterably changed man, but the manuscript remained in the
possession of my family as it does to this day.
Back in the early 1960s, when I was in high school
I was given the manuscript and asked to do something about it someday
probably because I had a keen interest in mythology and ancient
history. However I have always been a quintessential dilettante
in everything I have ever done and I was certainly unequipped (to say
the very least) to prepare such a work for publishing. With me, Brother
Henry's work languished for several decades until about 10 years ago
when the advancements in personal computer technology began to make it
possible for me to do something about it.
I began to attempt to prepare Brother Henry's work
for self-publication when I noticed that I was heavily redacting his
work in an attempt to make it more readable, to make the sentence
structures more in keeping with standard practice and remove what was
basically 19th Century racial notions and theory that Brother Henry
unconsciously included in his work. In other words, what I was
writing was no longer Brother Henry's words, but mine. I
did not think that I had either the scholarship or the right to change
what Brother Henry had written and yet the work needed editing before it could possible be published. I
felt stuck and did no further work on the manuscript.
After this, I thought I would discharge what I
considered my duty to Brother Henry's work and memory by publishing
on-line, scanned copies of his work and let people read his work
directly and take from it what they could without redaction. It
was about this time that I discovered that Brother Henry had not died
soon after he and my father parted for the last time, but had lived on
for a full two years and during that time he had become very
productive. Indeed, he wrote a second manuscript and a dictionary
of the Samoan
language. I furthermore discovered that the work of his final
years was in the possession of scholars at the University of Hawaii and
that they had published his work.
When I learned of the existence of Brother Henry's
published work, I compared it with the manuscript in my possession and
discovered that they were essentially the same. Now that I knew
that Brother Henry's work was published, the burden of responsibility
that had weighed on me for so many decades was now moot and I no longer
felt any need to do anything with my copy except to preserve it and to
eventually have it given to the University of Hawaii after my death.
Now I would
like to say a few
words about what I have learned regarding Brother Fred Henry and reiterate how
his manuscript came into my father's possession.
Brother Fred Henry
Known to all
simply as Brother Henry, he was
born Frederic Antoine Gerken in Westphalia, Germany in 1879.
He
entered the Marist Brothers in 1897 and began his life with the Samoans
in 1914 with whom he lived and learned and taught until his death 30
years later in 1944. Obviously he immersed himself in the
history, culture and especially the language of the Samoans to an
extent that he was the equivalent of a Samoan Orator. Through
his
learning and command of the language, Br. Henry gained the full
confidence and trust of the Samoan people, their Chiefs and the Samoan
Native Scholars who knew and kept their sacred stories. From
these sources and from his extensive research into the existing
ethnographic literature, he became an expert in Samoan history as is
testified by this and the other manuscript written during WW2. After a very productive and
useful
life, Brother Henry's life was cut short by disease and he is today
buried in the Leone Cemetery not far from where he spent so many years
teaching and administering the Leone Boys School (which unfortunately
closed in 1946).
In the
summer of 1941, just before the
outbreak of WW II, Brother Henry, then the principal of the Leone Boys
School, gave to my father, Dr. S. A. Fuhring, MD, the manuscript I have
already mentioned. Navy Lieutenant S. A. Fuhring, MD was a
specialist in Ear, Eye, Nose and Throat (EENT) and was practicing
medicine as a physician with the U. S. Navy at the time.
After
examining Br. Henry, my father had the sad duty to tell him that he had
terminal throat cancer. My father was a kindly man and had
great
respect for the Religious Orders. I am sure that he did
everything he could and treated Br. Henry with every solicitude for
which Br. Henry was obviously grateful. In return, Br. Henry
could only give my father his most precious gift; the manuscript of the
History of Samoa that he had poured so much research and scholarship
into.
END
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