Granted brief respite from the seemingly ceaseless cycle of English cricket the Spin, like the Walrus, has decided that the time has come to talk of other things. A way away from India and further still from Lord's a row is taking place that will be recognizable to anyone who regularly reads about cricket. On one side of the divide are the modernisers and on the other, unsurprisingly, the traditionalists.

So far, so familiar. The sharp end of this particular squabble, though, is on the far side of the planet. 1,798 miles as the crow flies, in fact, from the nearest Test match ground, out towards the centre of the south Pacific on the island of Samoa.

Ten days ago the Samoan International Cricket Association (SICA) picked its first-ever women's squad. On 2 February they will host their debut fifty-over game against local rivals Fiji, the first of a three-match series. The reward for the winner is a place in the ICC East Asia-Pacific Women's Trophy, in Japan this May. The series against Fiji is the latest step in SICA's drive towards attaining Associate member status of the ICC.

Samoa were awarded the junior Affiliate status in 2000. This secured them an annual development grant of $40,000 from the game's governing body. Becoming an Associate member would triple that amount. It is a steep leap up. There is a long list of strict criteria to be satisfied, including a clear three-year development strategy. That last must include a program for growing women's cricket, hence the series against Fiji.

Last September Samoa's men hosted the fourth East Asia-Pacific Trophy, which, for the first time, included a Twenty20 competition. Samoa finished third, and thrashed both Japan and Vanuatu despite being ranked below both teams.

"Twenty20," explained Matthew Weisheit, the ICC's head of development for the region, "is tailor-made for Samoa, it is fast, exciting, entertaining and time-friendly too." The trouble is that, for some Samoans, Twenty20 is not the game they grew up with. Never mind whether it is or isn't cricket, Twenty20 just isn't kilikiti.

Samoans have been playing kilikiti, their own version of cricket, since 1884. The British consul in Samoa at the time was William B Churchwood. Three years after finishing his posting he published a memoir of his time overseas, calling it My Consulate in Samoa: Four Years Sojurn in the Navigators Islands. So far as The Spin is aware, the fascinating insight it provides on the history of cricket on the island has not been published since. Churchwood recalled how "For the first two years [1881-1883] of my stay in Samoa, neither I nor any of the few British residents could ever persuade one single Samoan to join in our cricket." They were, he suggested, more interested in wave-riding and pig-hunting.

In 1884, though, the Samoans had a dramatic change of heart. "All at once," he wrote, "the village of Apia Samoa was seized with a most frantic desire to fathom the mysteries of the game, and to become proficient in its practice."

The reason for the switch was local rivalry. The Tongans had taken to cricket with such fervour that a law had to be passed preventing them from playing it for more than one day a week. The Samoans found themselves, in Churchwood's words, "being twitted on the subject of their ignorance of so grand an amusement" by a party of visiting Tongans. Deputations of local elders were duly sent to both Churchwood and the crew of the HMS Diamond, a British corvette moored off Apia. HMS Diamond's crew, 225 men under captain Alfred Taylor Dale, began to organise matches against the locals. As Churchwood remembered it:

"The Samoans explained that as it was a British sport, we as British were likely to know more about it than the Tongans, and they thought that we could teach them in such a way that they might be able to beat these boasting men. We accordingly took them in hand, and soon succeeded in instilling the initial idea into their heads. For a time all went on very smoothly, but the quiet and serious English style did not suit them long. One by one, innovations of their own manufacture crept into the game, until soon nothing remained of cricket, pur et simple, but the practice of one man bowling a ball to another man trying to hit it. Samoan cricket found great favour all round, giving as it did in its improved form the excuse, always welcome, and never rejected, for feasting and parade, so dear to all Samoans. Soon all the neighbouring towns were playing, and cricket at last becoming quite an epidemic."

The Samoans named their bespoke version of the sport kilikiti (or kirikiti), a Polynesian transliteration of cricket. The major change was in the number of players per side, which was increased to allow greater participation. "It is nothing unusual to see 30 or 40 opposed to one another," Churchwood wrote, "and I have known them to play as many as 200 odd a side. The fact is, that these matches are of one town against another, in which all insist upon taking a hand. These huge meetings, as may be readily imagined, last a week or more, junketing going on the whole time, and generally wind up with a big feast."

Kilikiti is a prime example of sporting syncretism, the melding of traditional culture with elements imported by outsiders. In areas of the globe where British influence was both more pervasive and more concentrated, such mutation in Laws of the Empire's own game would have been arrested and corrected. Across the south Pacific however, cricket was adopted and then adapted, turned towards the population's own ends. Samoa was not the only nation to develop its own form of the Laws. The Trobriand Islands invented their own version of cricket, the subject of the fascinating documentary Trobriand Cricket - An Ingenious Response to Colonialism.

As with Trobriand cricket, kilikiti acted as an a new conduit for village rivalries which had previously been expressed in ritual warfare. It was rich in pageantry, dancing and procession. Philip Snow, who joined the Fijian civil service after a brief career in first class cricket at Cambridge in the late 1930s, later recollected that:

"Cricket's set-up seemed to the Samoans such an opportunity for carrying on feuds under a thin veneer of courtesy and laws that the men of entire districts grappled on village greens, 200-300 a side, with three batsmen at each end and a new bowler to deliver each ball with all his unsapped frenzy."

So popular did the sport become that, as Snow archly put it, "work and Wesleynism and women all suffered in these amplitiduinous struggles, renewed weekly to stretch over months." In the end, cricket was banned in Samoa after 1900, when Britain ceded control of the country to Germany. The Germans saw the sport as a kind of "British-induced mania".

Perhaps they were right to be leery. According to Churchwood, in 1885 a team of 200 men sent by sea from Apia to play a cricket match in a nearby territory was in fact a Trojan Horse war-party of royal loyalists planning to ambush a pretender to the throne who lived in the region.

"No one had the smallest idea 'but that it was the peaceful expedition it was stated to be," Churchwood wrote, "Nothing more dangerous than cricket-bats and balls were seen going on board their boat; but I am afraid that if the mats had been lifted, it would have been found that for every bat there was an accompanying Snider or Winchester rifle, and that balls of not quite so harmless a nature formed the principal part of the ballast." The coup was foiled thanks to the indiscretion of one of the players, who let the secret slip.

Despite the ban, kilikiti continued to grow in popularity. In 1949 the English writer CHB Pridham provided a more detailed comparison of how the sport differed from 'English' cricket.

"The wicket-keeper stands close to the wicket, which consists of three rods fixed close together without bails, with about four long-stops behind him. Then come the batsmen - six of them (three for each end - one to bat and the other two to act as running relays). The bowling is all throwing - very hard and straight. The striker tries to make every ball into a full-pitch, and hits his hardest at everything with no idea of defensive play. The pitch is about twenty yards long. The scorers use a pin and a banana leaf. Barracking is not of the Australian model, but consists of pious invocations of the Deity."

Pridham goes on to tell how "an official unknown in English cricket presides over the field armed with a long whip, which he uses quite relentlessly on the backs and legs of any fielder who fails to do his part well."

The armed fielding-coach is one custom which did not survive the passage of time, but Kilikiti is still played in Samoa, between mixed-sex teams of 20-a-side. The ball is smaller than the equivalent used in cricket, made out of pulu tree rubber, and the bat is more akin to a cudgel than a willow blade. It is 1.2m long, and has three sides, one of them rounded, meaning a well hit shot can disappear in any direction. Chiefly though, a good stroke will send the ball soaring high over cow corner or shooting backwards over slip. The batsman is obliged to swing at every delivery - otherwise he is out.

Given that the players wear coloured clothing - traditional lava lavas - rather than whites, your average kilikiti player sounds rather well suited for Twenty20. Indeed, SICA launched their inaugural domestic Twenty20 competition in 2008. One lesson they learned was that in future they would have to set aside a separate budget to pay for lost balls, because the local batsmen were so keen challenge each other to see who could hit the longest six.

And that cross-over appeal is partly the problem. Until 2001 Samoa hardly bothered with cricket as the rest of the world knows it. The island's most conspicuous contribution to the sport had been when a Samoan bouncer clocked the half-cut Ricky Ponting with a right hook outside the Bourbon & Beefsteak Bar in Sydney, leaving him with a black eye and a three-match ban. Kilikiti, old-fashioned as it seemed to the younger generation, was still the national game.

One man decided to change that, and devoted himself to the task of bringing cricket back to Samoa. He is Seb Kolhlase, a Samoan of German ancestry. In the 1960s he played first class cricket for Northern Districts as a medium-pace bowler. The recent work done by the Kolhlase, who is now president of SICA, to grow the game in Samoa has been remarkably successful. It is one of the ICC's great unsung, unseen success stories, with SICA now boasting eight pitches, 16 senior teams organised into two domestic leagues, their youth programs and women's sides.

Crucially, the prime minister, Tuilaepa Malielegaoi, has thrown his (considerable) weight behind cricket. According to an interview with Kolhlase in the Samoa Observer, Malielegaoi has been sold cricket on the logic that it and rugby "are the only two sports that can earn the type of money our players can achieve professionally and support their families because we have the talent.

And so, with kit donations and coaching help coming from Australia, the popularity of cricket has sky-rocketed. Undoubtedly the speed with which the development has taken place owes something to the ingrained kilikiti culture on the island. Roughly 95% of SICA's registered players came to cricket through kilikiti. But the worry for the traditionalists is that cricket is growing at kilikiti's expense. Kilikiti has already begun to change in response, with standardized rules being introduced to enable a regional competition.

For the last 10 years Samoa's grand national jamboree, the Teuila festival, has featured a game of kilikiti. In 2009, for the first time, kilikiti was replaced with a cricket match. Prime Minister Tuilaepa defended what was described in the local press as "a snub" by saying that "the country should get more involved in developing international cricket because it would provide financial benefits for the players and their families."

Kolhlase told Radio Australia that the traditionalists are "are so used to kilikiti they treated us with apprehension as if we would stop them." He insisted there is room in Samoa for both: "I don't want kilkiti to stop, but we are sending people to Savai'i to hold [cricket] clinics." Kolhlase has made it clear that he has had to battle against the more conservative older generations who are seeking to protect kilikiti from the threat of Twenty20. The two versions of the sport, Kolhlase points out, are competing for the attention of the same set of talented younger players.

Wherever it is played it seems cricket, rapidly evolving and yet still so attached to its own history, has an essential tension between old and new. Twenty20 has increased the divide. The growth of cricket in Samoa is heart-warming, but just as in England and the rest of the cricket world, it has a cost which some fans are loathe to pay. Samoa's match against Fiji will certainly herald the dawn of a new tradition, but it may also signal the decline of an older one.

• Taken from The Spin, guardian.co.uk/sport's weekly take on the world of cricket. Subscribe now, it's free.