Disaster Years: When Men Ate Thorns

The first of these disasters began outside Africa.^[2] In 1914, England and Germany went to war. Six months thereafter the hostilities had extended to their East African colonies, where whites from both sides set out for what promised to be a glorious campaign. Their African subjects were less enthusiastic. None knew what the war was about, and few cared. The most, the command to mobilize was only one more of the incomprehensible requirements that whites had placed on them since they first appeared.

World War I reached Meru in mid-1915. The first news caused great excitement among the white population—then numbering twelve—and some bewilderment among the estimated 120,000 Africans. Their

initial indifference swiftly disappeared, however, as Horne and two assistant district officers turned their energies toward mobilizing the entire district to aid England and the king.

Within weeks vast numbers of warriors were willingly recruited from every region for service in the karia , or carrier corps. Initially, Meru enthusiasm for the project was quite genuine, as warriors scrambled to recover long-hidden weapons and spoke with satisfaction of the restoration of raiding.

Then, startled rumors spread through every war band that only whites could fight. Those Meru already sent off to the whites' war had been stripped of their shields and spears, then told to carry head loads, the function that tradition still reserved for women.

This first rumor was followed by one still more startling. It was said that Kangangi and his two white helpers had decided to round up "all" the Meru cattle, then send them off in one great herd to feed the whites at war. Resentful, angry, and afraid, warriors on every ridgetop reacted by deciding to devour every cow they owned. Huge bonfires, across the entire region, marked the sudden reestablishment of renta , the bull feast.^[3] For those attending, it must indeed have seemed as if the time before the conquest had returned, when whole regiments of warriors had prepared themselves for conflict by devouring bull after bull provided by their fathers' herds, symbolically drawing strength from their consumption. This time, however, the feasts proved all too brief as district officers, horrified at what was happening, galloped frantically from fire to fire denying the cattle would be taken and commanding them to stop.

The whites did not, however, deny their need for carriers. Sporadic attempts at flight and concealment were punished by collective livestock fines, imposed upon whole ridgetops, coupled with threats to shoot "shirkers" for desertion. In consequence the early recruitment of volunteers was quickly transformed into the seizure of involuntary labor, as long lines of newly disarmed warriors were roped together and marched off to war.

By 1916 they began to return, emaciated, stumbling skeletons, trickling back into their home districts in conditions ranging from exhaustion to approaching death. With them came the dysentery they had contracted while on the campaign, an illness that struck with a virulence no one in Meru had previously experienced.

Meru elders living at that time could recall the appearance of new illness only twice within the history of the tribe. Each had been directly

connected with the simultaneous appearance of whites. In the 1880s, European-led coastal caravans had appeared from Tigania to Mwimbi. Each had been accompanied by the appearance of jiga (chiggers), tiny insects that burrowed into toes and itched until removed with iron knives. In 1913, European entry into Mwimbi had been accompanied by an outbreak of what was later diagnosed as meningitis.^[4] The disease, marked by vomiting, fever, extreme lethargy, and finally seizures, proved terrifying to a population that had never experienced it, the more so since traditional forms of healing proved useless.

That outbreak, however, had been brief and limited to a single region. It had also struck primarily among small children, whom the Meru believed susceptible to illness in any case. The 1916 dysentery epidemic, however, broke out in every Meru region and among those of every age. Within three months after the first groups of karia returned, white administrators began to record scores, then hundreds, and finally thousands of deaths. Three thousand died that year in Igembe alone, despite its almost total isolation from the rest of Meru.^[5] Every other region followed in its path.

In 1917–1918 the rising tide of illness was intensified by famine. Both years were periods of unprecedented drought. During a normal agricultural cycle, all Meru regions experienced two rainy and two dry periods each calendar year and adapted their agricultural practices accordingly. In November 1917, however, the "short rains" failed entirely. Communities nearer to the forest salvaged a portion of their crops. Those in the lowland regions of Muthambi, Mwimbi, Igoji, Imenti, and Tigania are said to have gleaned nothing at all.

The problem intensified in March—April 1918, when the now desperately awaited "long rains" came too sporadically to provide the moisture needed to ripen standing millet, the basic Meru grain crop. By June 1918 even food reserves within the highland regions were exhausted, and people everywhere began to starve. Seeds disappeared from African markets in all parts of the mountain. Work on the roads was almost totally abandoned because of lack of food supplies for those who came to work.

By October—November 1918 the approaching season of short rains was universally looked upon as bringing life or death. But when the time came for weeding many were too weakened by hunger to work. "Nor could starving children successfully sling stones at the endless flock of birds that descended on the millet, nor hurl flaming torches at the baboons and bushbucks that crept through the crops to feed each night."^[6] Mission writings universally reflect the tenure of that time:

The event which eclipsed all others at the opening of the year was the terrible famine. Three successive rains had failed and starvation spread its horrors throughout the land. People died by scores daily. Desperation drove men to crime and violence. Wives were driven away and children sold. For many months our Missionaries were grappling with death. The effect of this condition upon the Mission may be imagined. The school was depleted for want of food. The chief business was to administer what little relief could be obtained.^[7]

In desperation the colonial administration moved to stave off total starvation by imparting two shiploads of yellow maize from colonies in southern Africa. They arrived without incident, only to be rejected by almost all of the elder Meru as inedible and unfit for human beings.

Under these circumstances, tax collection also became increasingly sporadic, a problem caused not only by the shortage of coins (the rupee) within the district but also by the drastic decline in livestock, particularly cattle. There were at least three reasons for this. One was a striking resurgence of cattle rustling in every region. It bore, however, little relation to the carefully regulated livestock raiding that had formed the core of precolonial warfare. Rather, many raiders were elders, because hunger forced men of all age-sets to seek food. In 1918, for example, a new district commissioner expressed his surprise at having run down and jailed a "large gang of elderly cattle thieves."^[8] No doubt his surprise decreased as the pattern grew common over time.

Livestock also declined in response to the Meru tradition of seeking shelter from catastrophe with distant kin. After mid-1918 hundreds of starving Meru, particularly from lower sections of the mountain, trekked raggedly away from their communities to seek shelter among kin within neighboring tribes. With them, as required by tradition, went their wives and children and only whatever sheep, grain, and cattle were required for them to survive. The clans who sheltered them would be repaid through acquisition of the young born to livestock that the famine victims had left behind. Yet what was tradition among Meru meant constant loss in taxes to the British, who watched whole herds move off the mountain with no promise of return.

The final blow, however, was yet to fall upon those herds that still remained. An outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in neighboring regions jarred the colonial administration into imposition of a quarantine upon all Meru cattle. This was followed by a rather too hastily organized campaign to inoculate all remaining herds. Not surprisingly, the concept of inoculation was opposed by Meru in every region, at least partially as a means of expressing a generalized resentment of the

British themselves. In Tigania, however, dissenters voted with their feet. Whole clans raced their cattle in darkness over the Meru borders and into adjoining regions, thus perhaps beyond the Meru commissioner's reach. Unfortunately, this brought at least a portion of the herds into the very areas from which the original disease had come. Once infected, they swiftly passed the sickness on to others still within Tigania. In time herds in every region felt its full effects, and the decline in livestock intensified.

The situation was further compounded by the worldwide influenza epidemic, which struck Meru in November 1918. Among a population already reeling from famine, dysentery, and drought, this final blow proved overwhelming. Colonial records suggest that more than ten percent of the population died in every region, and another ten percent fled the district seeking refuge with adjoining tribes.^[9]

The British administration, for all its goodwill, could do almost nothing to stem the tide. In early 1919 the whites made an initial effort to delay what they foresaw as regionwide starvation until the coming crop of millet could be harvested. Learning, through a messenger, of a successful maize harvest in the Gikuyu region of Nyeri, on Mount Kenya's eastern slope, the Meru district commissioner sent "almost every man in Meru" to fetch a portion of the crop.^[10]

Unfortunately, the influenza epidemic had already reached Nyeri. It spread immediately from the stricken Gikuyu to the arriving Meru porters, disabling them in such numbers that only a fraction of the anticipated surplus could be carried back. Some porters, of course, returned not only with maize but influenza as well, reaching Meru just before the virus struck them down. The disease therefore followed them back to their home communities, leaving many previously isolated regions worse off than before.

The whites responded with whatever resources were at hand. Over the next three years, collection of the hut tax was intermittently suspended in recognition of the Meru plight. Famine relief camps were established on the district's northern and southern boundaries, to which those in need could come for maize meal that might save their lives. Mission stations also evolved into oases for the starving, sowing land in their immediate locations to the limits allowed by their supplies.

In desperation the Meru administration began to send large contingents of the remaining able-bodied men to the European districts that by now had begun to encircle what had become the Kikuyu Native Reserve. By late 1919 no less than 10,396 former warriors and family

elders had been collected and sent off to settler farms. The intent of those officials who organized the program was almost certainly benevolent, since those transferred could work for the whites in exchange for food. That meant fewer mouths to feed at home and those who left it could survive.

Unfortunately those settlers to whom the former warriors were sent proved so strongly in favor of the innovation that they decided it should be permanent. Accordingly, as the work contract of various Meru contingents expired, a growing percentage found themselves indefinitely detained. A series of increasingly angry letters from the Meru district headquarters had no effect on either the government or the settlers concerned. In consequence the practice of exporting warriors in search of sustenance ground sharply to a halt.

By the early 1920s the worst was finally past. Conditions in the highland regions returned quickly to normal. Many of the lowland areas, however, remained dangerously close to a subsistence level, and elements of the Tharaka, trapped on their almost waterless plain, were reduced to stripping bark from the trees. No homestead in Meru escaped those years unscathed, and elders still recall them as "the time when men ate thorns."