Never said it was. Influenced is not the same as occupied.
The Tripartite Convention of 1899 resulted in the act that formally partitioned the Samoan archipelago into a German colony and a United States territory and was the culmination of years of civil war among Samoan factions and of rivalry between the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom at the brink of war. Forerunners to the Tripartite Convention of 1899 were the Washington Conference of 1887, the Treaty of Berlin of 1889 and the Anglo-German Agreement on Samoa of 1899.
Just saying.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, pacific Islands from Asia to Hawaii were not countries in the modern political sense, and often an island would offer allegiance to whomever the last powerful warship stopped to visit.
that the Germans and the Dutch (among others) had a presence and influence there is beyond debate, and since the Samoans did not have a written language prior to European "discovery", the influence of the European alphabets in the written form of the name were unavoidable.
Of course the Samoans have always pronounced the name of the village as if it had an "n" in it. How that evolved is another story.