Introduction: The Oral Traditions

"In the beginning, we were not called 'Meru.' In fact, no one now living recalls our tribal name. My grandparents may have known, but I was too young to ask. Now I am too old to remember."^[1]
Gituuru wa Gikamata
Kiramana age-set
Age: Early nineties

Sparks snapped away from the flickering cookfire and into an East African night. Rows of seated children, faces momentarily identical in the firelight, grinned for a moment in unison and inched imperceptibly closer to both the speaker and the flames. Behind them ranks of grown men and teenage boys stood quietly in shadow. Beyond them, and farther back in the darkness than I could see, stood groups of girls and women. In theory they were all working, for the air was warm and rich with aromas of millet beer and roasting meat. In practice none were working, for no one laughed. Rather everyone was simply listening. Gituuru wa Gikamata, one of Meru's old, old men and alleged to be the oldest, was beginning to retell one of the people's most beloved oral traditions.

That tale, told around cookfires for more than three hundred years, would last for hours, well into the night. In Meru the phrase "old, old man" implies not a person in decline but one whose age has made him rich in wisdom. To call someone an "old, old man" in Meru is like saying "he who knows the most of all." Gituuru was known for recalling more details of the past, recounted to him by his own grandfathers, than any other elder. He told his stories only rarely, for arthritis had so crippled him that he spent his days in a permanent crouch, unable to stand upright without searing pain.

I recalled a single morning, however, when Gituuru grew so engrossed in retelling a tradition of his warrior years that he forgot his

pains. A small circle of us, in those years still in or near warrior age, had asked how men in the old days fought in single combat. Two tattered leather shields and wooden war clubs lay nearby, remnants of Gituuru's own warrior career. I picked up one set, he, the other. First, he squatted, teaching me the basic moves, while pouring scorn on my clumsy efforts. Then, as I assumed a proper fighting pose and faced him, he suddenly forgot that he was old: he rose to his full height, his club and shield in hand, and attacked me in the classic style. The fight was brief. He struck three times, beat down my defense, then dropped back down again—but for that moment he was once again a Meru warrior, and tradition came to life.

Four months later, however, the old voice quavered as he began the night's long tale, and the mind that led it often lost its way, for Gituuru wa Gikamata, perhaps the last surviving member of Meru's oldest generation, was dying. This was the last time he would ever tell the tale in its rich completeness, and his subsequent death impoverished the entire Meru people: in three hundred years of telling the tale had never been written down.

Each time an old man dies in Africa a library is lost to humankind, for within the memories of the old men lies the history of an entire people. It is a complex tale, as rich in drama, incident, and narrative as the far more widely known drama of Homer's Troy, the Viking sagas, or the samurai epics of Japan. Some African traditions take hours to tell, a few take days; those that make up the body of this book stretched over months. Some traditions are fictional, others are based entirely on fact. Some blend fiction and fact, often so artfully that anyone who listens is held spellbound. Some can be retold only in song, often only by tribal troubadours. These traditions are folk art at its finest; they hold Africa's rich past.

Collecting The Traditions

This book contains the traditions of a single tribe, the Meru of Mount Kenya. They were narrated by the "old, old men" (and a few wives) of the age groups known as Kiramana (men in their early nineties), Murungi (late seventies to early eighties), and Miriti (mid-sixties to mid-seventies). In 1969–1970, when many of these traditions were first recorded, these narrators were the oldest living Meru, in the final decades of their lives.

Their narrations touched on every aspect of their tribal past. The most historically significant traditions, however, are those that deal with the system Meru speakers call Urogi, which English speakers translate as witchcraft . The system has existed for more than three hundred years. It is composed of continuously evolving tools—verbal formulae (curses, incantations), physical acts (rituals), and herbal, mineral, and animal compounds (potions, medicines)—that are used to invoke specific supernatural powers. The words, actions, or compounds themselves, not the person using them, have the power. Nonetheless, from the perspective of observers, successful users are cloaked in an aura of both respect and fear.

From a historian's perspective the witchcraft traditions provide unexpected windows into the Meru past, windows that permit analysis of smaller segments of the social structure. The Meru have never functioned as a single social unit. Throughout their history smaller segments within the body politic have competed constantly with one another. Often, these segments differentiated themselves from competitors by developing their own specific rituals (incantations, rites, potions). These were intended primarily to invoke a response from the supernatural, but secondarily they were used against rival groups. Thus in the 1700s mainstream Meru cultivators contended with Meru hunter-gatherers while migrating. In the 1800s descendants of both groups competed for the exclusive use of land. In the 1900s their descendants competed, in turn, against one another and the newly arrived British colonialists. In all cases the weapons of choice were invocations, potions, and related ritual. Thus can witchcraft become history.

The Urogi traditions are not quasi-fiction. Their narrators spoke in such detail as only actual practitioners (or their victims) could. The hunting magic of "bite" and "blow," the chanted, clanging curse that tribal smiths banged out on iron, the witchman's curse to stop one's breath: these details did not originate in their imaginations but had been taught them by their grandfathers and practiced throughout their lives. To the people of Meru, the "witchman," "witch doctor," "witch finder," and other supernatural practitioners were real. They were men, now very old, with whom one could visit and from whom one could learn.

But why did the witchmen talk with me? I was young, white, academic, and American. In Meru eyes those traits meant I was also "Christian" and thus implacably hostile—like all earlier Chris-

tians—the so-called pagan portion of their past. Since the British conquest in 1906, these supernatural specialists had been lumped together and denounced as witch doctors by contemptuous whites. They had been publicly opposed, periodically beaten, occasionally arrested, and continually ridiculed by both members of the Christian missions and those government officials that represented British rule. After independence the pagan past fell even farther into disrepute, as Kenya's new African leaders, now either secular or Christian, strove to turn their people toward modern ways. There was no longer room in Meru for traditional religion, and still less for practitioners of the supernatural.

Throughout this century those few who battled to preserve the supernatural traditions had fought back with the only weapon available to the militarily defeated: silence. The Meru supernatural became a tribal secret. To disclose its "secrets" to non-Meru—be they black or white—became a sin against the tribal ancestors. Those who sinned were threatened with illness or death, cursed by the anger of an ancestral spirit who heard every word spoken in the realm of the living.

Thus few spoke. The little that whites learned during the colonial era came primarily from Christian converts, trained to despise and thus distort what they revealed. The identity of Meru's most revered figure, the Mugwe (tribal prophet), for example, remained concealed from the British from 1906 until the 1950s. One man alone could be Mugwe. He was foremost among the ruling elders of his age-set. Nonetheless, whoever served as Mugwe lived wholly unknown among the white Christian colonizers, shielded for decades by a wall of silence. That silence was still largely unbroken on my arrival in 1969. So why did they speak out then? Why speak to me, or to anyone?

The problem posed for me by this reticence was compounded by the lack of written data. The Meru-speaking peoples live on and adjacent to the northeast slope of Mount Kenya, a 17,000-foot-high, long dormant volcano near the center of the modern Kenyan nation. Before the colonial conquest in 1906 the name "Meru" was used by only five of the present nine subgroups that now make up the tribe, the Igoji, Miutini, Imenti, Tigania, and Igembe. Soon after the conquest British administrators decided to include the peoples of Tharaka, who live east of the Meru speakers on the adjacent and plains. In the 1920s still other British officials added the peoples of Cuka (then spelled "Chuka"), Muthambi, and Mwimbi, whose regions border the five original Meru speakers to the south. Collectively, these nine subtribes now make up

both the contemporary Meru administrative unit (Meru Province) and the historical Meru "tribe."

These nine subgroups trace their histories back almost three hundred years, long before any of them were known as "Meru." Unfortunately, existing written records cover only the past ninety of these. Worse, those documents that do exist deal exclusively with the problems encountered by the various whites (English, Scottish, Italian, Dutch, Irish) in imposing colonial rule. Within all of these records, almost without exception, Africans play the role of shadows on the fringes of a European play. They appear either in supporting roles (carriers, servants, unpaid labor) or as comic relief (alchoholics, witch doctors), loyal subordinates (converted Christians, tribal police), noncooperators, and finally Mau Mau rebels, fleeing British imperial justice into the safety of the forests. Such records say too little. What can be learned about any of Mount Kenya's "Africans" (Meru, Maasai, Gikuyu,^[2] Ogiek, and so on) during this period, as well in the two preceding centuries, must come not from written documents but from the mouths and memories of the Africans themselves.

Prior to my own arrival on Mount Kenya, however, I did read all the written records I could find. Most complained about the Meru reluctance to conform to British ways. One colonial officer, in particular, complained that he had never had the bad fortune to administer a people so "thoroughly riddled with witchcraft" that "no one could do anything with them because they refused to tell him anything." Both complaints were repeated in reports written throughout much of the British colonial era. I began to realize that there had to be a better way—even a Meru way—to learn about these people.

Fortunately, there was. But the problems facing my potential sources were severe. In 1969, scores of Mount Kenya's oldest men were scattered throughout the nine subtribes but still connected with one another by mutual friends, kinfolk, and reputation. Nevertheless, each had reached the age where he had begun to contemplate the consequences of his impending death. For these dignified old men, death posed a problem that no prior set of elders had faced. Tradition required they pass on the "wisdom of their eldership" to selected members of the younger generations. This wisdom included many long, relatively formalized narrations, passed from grandparent to grandchild for nineteen generations, dealing with the origins and earliest history of each segment of the tribe. There were also scores of shorter, less standardized descriptions, dramatizations, tales, riddles, chants, songs, and verse—a treasure

trove of oral literature. To historians these works were important for clues to the Meru past. To the Meru they were the raw materials of their entire heritage and therefore precious beyond price.

By the early 1960s, however, all the elders in Meru had become aware that the younger generations were no longer willing to seek them out, perform the rituals required by traditions, then sit and learn the wisdom that the elders had to teach. The younger age-sets had been either exposed to British schooling or aspired to it, thus forming the first generation of Meru's new literates. More and more of them believed that wisdom lay in books and schoolrooms, not in the old traditions.

In consequence, by the late 1960s the prerequisites for transferring tribal knowledge from the eldest to the young were no longer being met, and thus no transfer could be made. Members of the "warrior" or "apprentice elder" age-sets no longer paid the formal visits that custom demanded. No longer did they appear in respectful bands of learners, bearing the gifts required by tradition: the gourds of milk and beer and the meat and snuff and honey that not only sweetened the lives of many elders but also permitted them to live out their final years in economic dignity.

For every prior generation these formal visits had acted as an informal but effective system of social security. Too old for physical labor, the elders still served the tribe by passing on their knowledge to the young. In exchange they received the gifts of food, drink, and tobacco in quantities sufficient to nourish both body and spirit. It was a system deliberately intended to lighten the burden of aging. The older a man grew, the more he was assumed to know, the more often his juniors would seek him out, and thus the more frequent his gifts became. The old, old men of Meru, unlike those in Western societies, were never seen as useless or left to age and die alone.

But this was the 1960s, and these elders made up the last nonliterate age-sets that the Meru would ever know. Without exception those who formed the oldest living age-sets—the groups that collectively called themselves Kiramana, Murungi, and Miriti—were embittered at those younger than themselves. Most, when asked, felt that the younger age-sets had been "bent by the British as though they were twigs instead of men," and "they scratch in books like foolish guinea hens, seeking seeds [wisdom] from white men while ignoring their own." In consequence all elders feared death in a way unknown to prior generations, less for the loss of their own existence than the loss of the entire Meru past.

My earliest investigation, therefore, was made along lines suggested by those aspects of Meru tradition that I learned from the first Meru elders I met. Their initial lesson covered tribal protocol. It was not enough to talk to any elder; both simple courtesy and respect for age required that I seek out the oldest of them all. Thus I should begin with the acknowledged "oldest man in Meru," then work my way down chronologically into men of middle age. In fact I soon found men in every Meru region who claimed that title. In response I arbitrarily divided the current Meru political province into "interview zones," based on what seemed to be the different historical experiences of the peoples therein.

Thus, because all Meru live along the steep slope of a 17,000-foot volcanic mountain, I assumed that honey hunters in the ice-fogs of the upper rain forests would have different historical experiences from those who cultivated coffee in the temperate midlands. Both those groups probably had different perspectives from those who herded cattle on the arid, baking plains. These three areas thus became the interview zones. I then divided these "forest," "midlands," and "plains" Meru into subtribes (e.g., forest, midlands, and plains Muthambi or Imenti), and subsequently redivided even those into smaller segments.

Within each interview zone I began by asking to meet the oldest living men. Discussions with several of these respected elders generally produced a consensus as to whom within their region was believed most knowledgeable about each aspect of the past. From their perspective such men stood out as "spokesmen" for their age-set and thus for them all. Each spokesman, having shared his knowledge, often suggested other (in theory, still older) individuals, from whom they had sought to learn more of the past.

In time, and within each region, this path always led to one final authority on every issue, a "spokesman of (all other) spokesmen," who was locally believed to know the most of all. After several months of interviewing, I found that a number of unusually aged and knowledgeable elders were considered by their age-mates to be spokesmen-of-spokesmen on almost every aspect of history within their respective regions. These specialists, all far too old to leave their homesteads, lived far apart from one another and were therefore personally unacquainted except by reputation. Nonetheless, because their narrations were frequently comparable, they allowed continuous cross-checks on data collected from earlier informants.

My second tactic was to gather together what in the old days would have been called a "warrior band," in this instance allowed by tradition to seek wisdom instead of war. I selected my research assistants from men of what would have been warrior age had warriorhood survived. Among this group, my foreign background was less conspicuous and intimidating. As long as I was nothing more than one member of a band, Meru elders could still feel that they were teaching Meru youth. My added function was simply to record their words.

By tradition the band was required to present specific gifts to each of the elders we encountered. Once assembled, we visited a selected cider in a "respectful band." Behaving as custom demanded, we presented the traditional gifts of snuff, milk, millet beer, honey wine, or cooked meat to both the informants and their age-mates as symbolic gestures of respect for their years and the traditions they wished so much to keep alive. Only then were we permitted to request the eldest among them to teach us of the past.

The final task required of such a "band" was to listen. That might mean sitting cross-legged and almost motionless, however, until each tradition had been completely told. Often the narrations were brief, but sometimes they flowed for hours. We could never know beforehand. Only after the narrator felt his tale was complete were we allowed to question and probe for details. The final injunction was always to place what we had learned "within our hearts" (i.e., memorize) for that day—still too many years ahead to be imagined—when we too would be old and would begin to transmit the "wisdom" of Kiramana and Murungi and Miriti to a younger generation not yet born.

Here is their wisdom, as passed down word for word by no fewer than nineteen generations of grandfathers to grandsons or as remembered by those personally involved. I recorded it in 1969–1970 during three hundred on-site interviews with more than one hundred of the "wisest" Meru elders. I was thirty-two then and had two infant sons. In Meru eyes I was just beyond the years of warriorhood, when men become "apprentice" (or junior) elders (in Meru, "Aruau"), content to lay aside their spears, seek wives, and father children in the night. Their days, however, were to be spent with "ruling" (or "senior") elders ("Azee"), listening for hours to absorb the wisdom contained in the old, old narrations. Because I wished nothing more than to absorb the elders' wisdom, I was accepted as a pseudo—apprentice elder and allowed to listen as well. But now more than two decades have passed until the tens of thousands of worlds that they taught me have become a

book. In Meru terms I am now a senior elder, with two sons of warrior age, and every man who spoke to me has died. It is time to do as I was taught and pass their words on to a younger generation.

Age-Sets: The Meru Dating System

To be meaningful, the stories recited by Meru informants had to be placed within a chronological system, to provide a framework within which individual events could be carefully reconnected. This task was more difficult than it sounds, for Meru chronology was not calendrical but generational. Like other African peoples, before colonialization imposed a different system, the Meru categorized individuals into age groups marked by biological or social events. A Meru male was a "child" until his second teeth appeared. Thereafter, he became a "boy" until his puberty, and so forth (table 1).

During childhood, membership in each stage was reckoned informally, with entry and exit dictated solely by the appropriate biological change. Passage into the initial stage of adulthood (warriorhood), however, was marked by formal and physical ritual, initially by cutting off the foreskin of the penis and thereafter incorporating those undergoing the operation into a warrior age-set.

Within each region there were always boys who reached puberty in time for "the circumcision season." As soon as sufficient numbers had matured to fill one segment of an existing warrior band (in Meru, a "regiment"), a "circumcision night" (in Meru, "a night of cutting") was formally proclaimed. A "set" then consisted of every male of similar age (literally, age-mates), meaning all those who reached puberty within a single season. Only those circumcised within this period could join the group, and they remained in it throughout their lives.

The proclamation of a circumcision night effectively closed the newly forming age-set to further members. In practice each community proclaimed the period closed as soon as a sufficient number of boys reached puberty, which meant that the timing of the proclamations might vary sharply from group to group. Those who reached the age of circumcision after a proclamation were held back for subsequent inclusion in the following set.

Once the regiment's ranks could be filled, its membership was considered "set." As soon as all regiments were filled in one (or more) of the Meru subtribes, which could take several seasons, every warrior

regiment would simultaneously assume a single formal name, which its members would retain throughout their lives. Thus Gituuru wa Gikamata joined a regiment whose members, along with similar war bands within both his and adjacent subtribes, assumed the name of Kiramana. (See table 1 for the sequence of age-set names that applied throughout Gituuru's subtribe of Imenti.)

Working Backward: Age-Sets As Guides To The Past

We are fortunate that the African age-set system can act as a guide to the unwritten past. Though precolonial Meru communities planned economic activities according to the seasons, they recalled historic events by reference to whichever warrior age-set was present at the time the events occurred. The British, for example, date their conquest of the entire current Meru region as having occurred in 1906–1907. The Meru date it "soon after the Murungi [age-set] replaced the Kiramana [age-set] as warriors." Both methods work.

This linking of events and warrior age-sets had significant advantages. First, it proved possible to acquire lists of Meru age-sets from large numbers of elders in every region, as well as to secure agreement as to the order in which all of the earliest were formed. I was then able to compare these with similar lists that had been compiled by earlier European investigators as far back as 1912. 1 was also able to attain a general idea of the time spent by each set in warriorhood by asking elders to recall the number of agricultural cycles that had occurred between successive transfers of power within their lifetimes.

With this information I worked backward from both known events and known dates when new age-sets were formed—such as those occurring after imposition of colonial rule—and estimated the number of years that the sets remained warriors. In Imenti, for example, existing data suggests each set remained warriors for fifteen to sixteen years. In Mwimbi the change is believed to have occurred every twelve to fifteen years. (These intervals, of course, are only elders' estimates.) The actual times of entry into adulthood depended solely on the birth and maturation rates of any given group of Meru males, factors entirely beyond the reach of Western measurements. In addition, either within individual subtribes or throughout the Meru, drought, locusts, war, plague, or fluctuations in the birthrate might reduce the number of males, thereby causing delays in filling the warrior ranks.

Even estimates, however, can illuminate the past. By "working backward," researchers can try to correlate these estimated age-set intervals with alleged historic incidents, remembered to have occurred when specific groups were warriors. Thus the precision of historic dating using Arabic numbers in our society is matched with often stunning accuracy by Meru age-sets. When applied to the list of age-sets provided by elders of Imenti and Igoji, for example, this approach reveals almost three hundred years of corresponding historical events (table 2).

Do These Traditions Reflect Reality?

The mere existence of these oral recollections, however vast and varied, does not suggest that we can accept them entirely as historical records. Rather, we should consider them reflections of past events, as once perceived then reorganized over time within the human mind. Such reflections can be subject to considerable distortion. Perhaps the most obvious distorter is the investigator. I found, for instance, that my own background initially imprisoned me, dictating not only what I talked about and with whom, but also which topics, regions, or individuals I ignored. Like many other 1960s investigators of Africa's past, I was not only "young, white, academic, and American" but also "educated and urban." All these factors could have affected the choice of my African assistants and thus everything I learned and recorded.

At first I looked for only those who lived in urban centers and with higher education, primarily because they were more like me and thus seemed easier to talk to. Not surprisingly, they preferred working with educated elders and in cities and simultaneously tried to keep me away from the wilderness and rural regions, which they either looked down on or feared. If as an investigator I had absorbed those feelings (without eventually hiring both less urban and less educated staff), I might never have moved far away from city centers, and my results would have been overurbanized and distorted.

Distortion can be compounded by African geography. Rarely do the Gituurus of a region to be researched live conveniently along the major roadsides. My most knowledgeable informants invariably lived in isolated rain forest villages best reached on foot. This sounds romantic when the work is being planned in California. It grows less so during heavy Meru rains at night in the rain forest, or when an icy fog cloaks the volcanic mountains. In consequence the urban, educated investigator may be all too often tempted to restrict inquiries to accessible

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informants while ignoring those in more remote locations. The result may be a "history of the accessible center" of an African tribe, again distorting the past.

More serious distortion may occur for sexual reasons. In Meru the sexes traditionally meet separately in their own Kiamas, or councils, to resolve those matters that concern themselves alone. The other sex is rigidly excluded. As a man I could direct my inquiries into the Meru past primarily toward other, older men. Their replies could deal only with subjects considered "suitable" for men (e.g., war, colonial conquest, or "male" curses). My efforts to inquire among elderly women (about uniquely "female" curses, for example) were usually rebuffed with declarations that I sought to learn things "no man should know." Only rarely did a woman of great age consent to talk to me, and then either in secrecy or with her husband present. Thus my data are both massively incomplete and subject to a masculine distortion.

In at least two areas, however, the investigator should distort, if only to enhance the reader's understanding. The first involves reshaping local dialects into the forms required for a book. This becomes particularly important when no exact equivalent exists between the languages. A man of Meru (Mu-Meru), for example, would find himself linguistically unable to translate "nuclear fission" or "genetic splicing" into the

Meru language (Ki-Meru) with precision. Nor would several Meru (Ba-Meru) be able to translate precisely the concept of "corporate merger" into Ki-Meru, though they could achieve one without difficulty. The verbal equivalents simply do not exist within this language. Similarly, American English has no linguistic equivalents for the most common Meru terms. Several of those used early in this book,. for instance, are in table 3.

Worse, the plural forms of these common terms have no equivalents in English, because Bantu-speaking peoples (who predominate in much of East, South, and Central Africa) change the initial letters to form plurals. One "Kiama," for instance, becomes two "Biama." One "Mwiriga" can break into several contending "Miiriga." One "Murogi" may meet with other "Arogi," but their combined curse may be lifted by either a single "Muga," or several "Aga" acting in cooperation. In such cases linguistic distortion becomes so inevitable that one must gulp, sigh, and provide approximate (if inaccurate) equivalents.

In addition, the investigator of Africa's "unwritten" past must "distort" the use of footnotes. Academic practice calls for writers to cite their written sources of information, thereby allowing others access to the wellsprings of their thought. This guideline proves difficult when presenting research in which those wellsprings are aged men in rural

regions. To ignore them as sources of history, however, does disservice to the past. Meticulously detailed descriptions of the "spells" once used by secret witchcraft guilds, for instance, could only have been learned from the practitioners. Not to cite these men dishonors their contribution and disappoints their descendants. Saying nothing of the circumstances wherein they learned and practiced what they now retell leaves the descriptions historically incomplete. Accordingly, in addition to providing conventional citations, I also cite the men (and women) that I interviewed for this book. Along with their names, I have indicated a "MOS" (Meru oral source) number, which corresponds to a listing in the Bibliography that describes each informant. There I note relevant facts about them, including full name, approximate age, precolonial status, and so forth.

Do Africans Distort Data?

Informants may also distort information. In Meru they often desire to upgrade their historical roles. In Tigania, for instance, few elders described their warrior years without claiming they were once commanders, even when their relative youth (or sheer lack of size) cast doubt on the claim. In Imenti some elders glorified their lineages by claiming descent from "exotic" peoples (e.g., Egyptians) or by extending their family genealogies, recalling individual ancestors older than the tribe itself. Conversely, some informants, raised to power under colonialism, sharply magnified their roles in spreading English ways, as was the case with one former Mwimbi chief who claimed to have "stopped all tribal customs" in his area.

Informants may have also reshaped their recollections out of tribal, traditional, or religious patriotism. In narratives recounting a decade of "civil war" (actually, reciprocal cattle raiding) between Imenti and Tigania in the 1890s, for example, all the informants claimed victory in every battle, a problem for any investigator. Informants may have also minimized (or omitted) those portions of their past of which they thought non-Africans might disapprove. In Mwimbi, for instance, descriptions of contact with ancestral spirits (Nkoma) may have been altered because prior experience with whites taught informants to be wary of their Christian bias. Conversely, Christian informants may have magnified those aspects of their histories that dealt with the early missions, speaking ecstatically about the spread of the faith but omitting all mention of the social disruption it may have caused.

Finally, the narratives may have been affected by the informant's age. The spokesmen-of-spokesmen are Meru's oldest men. The very fact of their advancing years qualifies them to speak of the past. All, however, were ill, infirm, and subject to memory lapses. When asked to identify a term connected with his warriorhood, for instance, one Mwimbi elder threw back his head and laughed in sheer joy at the pleasure the memories gave him. He settled down to describe them, opened his mouth, closed it, and then declared that he had forgotten what he knew. Nor did he ever remember.

Oral History Is Swiftly Dying

Possible distortions, however, do not diminish the fact that each narration is a window, however fragile, through which we can glimpse aspects of the Meru past. In Imenti, for example, no fewer than twenty aged and respected elders recited the story of an "alien" (non-Meru African) said to have accompanied the tribe on its migration to Mount Kenya in the mid-1700s. Upon arrival, tradition states that he was executed ("lest he betray the tribal location to his own people") and buried with all his tribal ornaments at a specific spot. The twenty elders all agreed upon that spot. Their agreement, however, guarantees neither that such a man existed nor that his burial in fact took place. It does, however, provide the investigator of such narrations a basis for deciding whether to buy a shovel!

This oral history, therefore, is not presented as a faithful record of the Meru past. Rather, it is a collection of verbal beacons suggesting its existence. Thus, if a search such as that urged by the twenty elders were successful, it would still be incomplete. One would need to identify any artifacts found and link them to other cultures, to learn which ones had been in contact with the Meru at that time. Nevertheless, without consideration of the existing oral record, no search would be conducted and we would have nothing to identify.

Thus in Meru, as in other societies across Africa, all verbal communication contains potential clues. A child's riddle, a grandmother's cookfire tale, the quavering chant of a curse detector, or a circumcision song may all allude to some fragment of data, which once recognized and related to other fragments may lead to reconstruction of the African past. The continued presence of these fragile verbal clues motivated this investigation. But the inquiry is near its end, for in the words of one informant, "we Murungi are like sparks within the cookfires. One by

one we are going out." His statement is both correct and prophetic, for the oral history of Meru is swiftly dying.

The demands of tradition were unrelenting and clear: the young were required to solicit knowledge from the old. The acquisition of the elders' wisdom was prerequisite to their own entry into elderhood. Only by visiting the eldest men in Meru, to "buy their wisdom" through presenting the traditional gifts, could they learn enough about the Meru past to guide the future.

Today, however, the oldest men in Meru wait out their years alone, but still hoping that younger men will once more come to seek them out. I once sat for seven hours listening to a spokesman-of-spokesmen tell the story of every battle in the history of his region. The narration began in the mid-1800s and dealt with a seemingly endless sequence of raids and counterraids between Maasai and Meru, Imenti and Tigania, British and African. His words spilled out across an afternoon and stretched back a century. They flowed past sundown and well into the night. As the moon rose, four pots of glowing coals were placed silently around the squatting elder to keep him warm and thus prevent an interruption of the chronicle. He continued until the moon was high. Finally, the flow of words came to an end and the spokesman-of-spokesmen sat crumpled in near exhaustion. Awed, I softly asked how often he had recounted the entire chronicle. "Twice," he answered bitterly, "and the other one who asked was white like you. Our young men have forgotten that elders have wisdom. They have been taught it lies in books and root in them like bush pigs."

But books do not contain the elders' wisdom. Few studies of the Meru have ever been published, and almost none deal with the precolonial past from their own uniquely African perspective. After conquest by Britain, much of Meru culture was dismantled. Christianity absorbed the Meru spirit world. The revered elders' councils were either anglicized or driven underground. Warrior bands were replaced by battalions of youths who sought adventure on colonial tea plantations and fought for shillings instead of military glory. The core of Meru childhood shifted from the hearth and family flocks to the blackboard of a Christian mission school.

In short, much of what was uniquely Meru has been obliterated. It now exists only within the memories of those few aged men and women who still recall the tribal past. This book is intended, therefore, not as the "definitive" history of Meru but as its oral history, the past as perceived by those who lived it. This book is their collective voice.