[5][8] During his earlier career, he worked for several years alongside Tupua Tamasese Meaʻole, serving in multiple conventions related to constitutional reform as part of the transition to independence.

[2] Upon Samoa's independence in 1962, Malietoa and Tupua Tamasese became O Ao o le Malo (heads of state), jointly appointed under the constitution for a lifetime term.

[11] Additionally, he visited Australia, Fiji, Tonga, Nauru, Hawaii, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and West Germany.

[7][12] In 1999, amid the fallout from the murder of a reformist politician and cabinet minister, Luagalau Levaula Kamu, Malietoa commuted the death sentences which were handed out to the two perpetrators to life imprisonment, and reportedly also visited them in prison.

[2] On 9 August 2004, he bestowed the chiefly Seiuli title upon professional wrestler and actor Dwayne Johnson, when the latter visited Samoa with his mother Ata Maivia.

[13][14] Malietoa died at the age of 94 on 11 May 2007, at the Tupua Tamasese Meaʻole National Hospital in Apia, where he was being treated for pneumonia, and was buried on 18 May.

[2] In 1977, Elizabeth II visited Samoa for a single day as part of her tour of the South Pacific on board the Royal Yacht Britannia.