The Day That Did Not Happen
On the night of 29 December 2011 Samoa crossed the international date line and deleted Friday the thirtieth from its calendar. It was the second time the country had changed which half of the Pacific it kept time with, and it came two years after it changed which side of the road it drives on.
Samoa went to bed on Thursday 29 December 2011 and woke up on Saturday 31 December. The Friday in between did not occur. No wages were earned on it, no flights left on it, and nobody was born on it. At midnight the country moved from UTC−11 to UTC+13, hopped westward across the international date line, and lost a working day it has never got back. Tokelau, five hundred kilometres north and administered by New Zealand, went over the same night.
What makes this more than a piece of trivia is that it was a reversal. Samoa had crossed the same line in the opposite direction in 1892, for the same kind of reason and at the urging of a different set of foreigners. And it had already, two years earlier, changed the side of the road it drives on. Three decisions that look eccentric from outside are one decision taken repeatedly: which of the countries around it Samoa arranges its daily life to match.
Two Fourths of July
In 1892 Samoa kept the Asian side of the date line, which put it a day ahead of California. American traders in Apia, whose ships and ledgers ran to San Francisco, wanted that gone. On 4 July 1892 the date was simply repeated — a kingdom that would not be independent for another seventy years kept the American Independence Day twice over, which was either a courtesy to the merchants or a statement about who was in charge, and 1892, already a leap year, ran to 367 days. The kingdom at that point was in the middle of a civil war and under a three-power protectorate agreed by Germany, Britain and the United States in Berlin in 1889. Seven years after the calendar changed, in 1899, those powers divided the archipelago: the western islands to Germany, the eastern ones to the United States. The date line had been moved to suit the party that ended up with the smaller half.
The side of the road
At six in the morning on Monday 7 September 2009, on a signal broadcast on national radio, every vehicle in Samoa pulled over and moved to the left. It was the first sovereign state to change the side of the road since Ghana in 1974. The Road Transport Reform Act had gone through parliament the previous year over an opposition that organised itself into a group called People Against Switching Sides, took the government to court and lost. The government declared two public holidays around the changeover so the roads would be empty, banned alcohol sales for three days, lowered the speed limits, and left the country with a fleet of buses whose passenger doors now opened into the traffic.
The stated reason was cars. A little over two hundred thousand people live in Samoa; New Zealand's census counts more than a hundred and eighty thousand people of Samoan descent, and Australia counts tens of thousands more. Those countries drive on the left, as does Japan, and all three have deep markets in cheap second-hand right-hand-drive vehicles. Left-hand-drive cars had to come from the United States at several times the price. Remittances have been worth somewhere between a quarter and a third of Samoa's GDP in most recent years, among the highest shares anywhere in the world, and a substantial part of what that money buys is vehicles. The switch was a decision to make the family in Auckland able to ship a car home.
Neither reversal was really about time or about traffic. Both were about which country the money comes from — and the money has changed direction exactly once in a hundred and twenty years.
Two working days a week
The date-line argument was the same argument in a different unit. On UTC−11 Samoa sat almost a full day behind New Zealand and Australia: when it was Friday in Apia it was Saturday in Auckland, and when Samoa was at church on Sunday, Sydney was already at work on Monday. The prime minister who drove both changes, Tuilaʻepa Saʻilele Malielegaoi, put it as the loss of two working days a week with the countries Samoa actually trades with and where most of its emigrants live. Parliament had to legislate around the hole the fix left — what becomes of a contract falling due on a date that does not exist, and whether anyone was owed a day's pay for it — and congregations whose worship is fixed to a named day rather than to the position of the sun had to decide, one by one, whether the Sabbath followed the calendar or the sky.
A line nobody drew
None of this required anyone's permission, because the international date line is not a treaty and has no legal existence. It is a convention drawn on maps after the fact, tracing whatever each state has decided about its own time zone. Kiribati had demonstrated this in 1995, shifting the line east so that its far-flung islands would share a single date and putting its Line Islands on UTC+14, ahead of everywhere else on earth. Cartographers redrew; nobody objected, because there was no body to object to. Samoa's 2011 move worked the same way: a domestic decision that the rest of the world then had to accommodate on paper.
What it did and did not do
Some of it took. Samoa now shares a working week and a date with Auckland and Sydney, which is what was asked for. Some of it did not: remittances arrive whatever day it is, and trade with Australasia was already dominant long before the clocks moved — the real reorientation had happened decades earlier, when people left. And there is a residue that nobody quite planned. American Samoa is about a hundred and thirty kilometres away and stayed on UTC−11; since Samoa dropped the decade of daylight saving it had adopted in 2010, the clocks in Apia and Pago Pago read the same hour on different days. Families split across that strait now hold birthdays and funerals twice, or a day apart. The clearest place to see it is Cape Mulinuʻu, on the western tip of Savaiʻi, which spent a century advertising itself as the last place on earth to watch the sun go down and is now among the first to see it come up. Nothing there moved. The country decided which side of the line it wanted to be on, and the geography stayed exactly where it was.