From Pioneers to Pragmatists

Times were also hard, however, for the British. The war alone had impoverished the entire colony. The subsequent sequences of medical, climatic, and economic disasters had brought the entire colonial structure to the point of collapse. British administrators responded to each individual crisis with energy and determination, mobilizing whatever resources were at hand. Unfortunately Kenya colony possessed neither the funds nor personnel to cope with disasters of such magnitude. The best that the administrators anywhere could achieve was a series of stopgap solutions, shifting existing colonial officers back and forth among the various tribal districts like small boys rushing endlessly to stick their fingers into leaking dikes.

Stopgap administration was nowhere more apparent than in Meru, remote from colonial headquarters in Nairobi and thus perhaps low in its administrative priorities. Certainly, the Meru District tradition of long-term rule by a single administrator was snapped like a twig after 1918. Horne had ruled Meru for almost the entire decade of 1907–1917. During the next ten years, he was followed by no fewer than fourteen successors. Few of these stayed in the post for more than one year. Some left after six months; one, after three. Assistant district commissioners, district officers, and cadets were assigned along the same pattern. Tours were brief; transfers were frequent. Not one officer stayed.^[16]

The frequency of this turnover led to the total loss among the administrators of much that had been common knowledge about the Meru culture. Horne had been a gifted linguist who also took great pride in his increasing knowledge of the Meru social structure. He had, however, an outspoken distaste for written records, an antipathy that led him to set down as little as permitted in the required district annual reports and nothing at all outside them. The same applied, for different reasons, to other members of the pioneer administrative generation. Orde-Browne preserved his voluminous knowledge of the Cuka-Mwimbi peoples in private ledgers for publication on his return to England.^[17] Others disposed of their written materials on leaving Kenya, turning their energies wholly toward learning about other tribes.

Men of that first decade were the pioneers, priding themselves on their knowledge of and empathy with the peoples they ruled. Those of the next decade might be labeled the pragmatists. Collectively they had neither the time, linguistic skills, nor personal inclination to probe deeply and searchingly into tribal societies. Their pride lay not in knowledge and empathy but in administrative efficiency, a concept they defined in terms of inducing Africans to get tasks done. Thus, during the second decade, huts were to be counted in record time, taxes collected in record amounts. Roads were to appear. Living standards were to rise. British standards of law, religion, morality, and civilized behavior were to spring up in the wilderness. Above all, in exchange for this introduction to civilization, England's subject peoples were to be taught to show a profit.

The pragmatists relied on interpreters, not merely to convey orders but also to gain information on those they ruled during the first years of British rule. Few Meru learned Swahili (the colonial lingua franca) and none learned English. Thus, the first generation of interpreters to

appear in Meru were drawn initially from among Swahili and Kamba peoples and subsequently the Gikuyu.

None of these "aliens" loved Meru. The Swahili, Gikuyu, and Kamba alike felt themselves forced to live among savages. Members of all three groups identified wholly with the fortunes of England and felt themselves far above the peoples they now helped rule. The Meru fully reciprocated this hostility, having learned from their earlier experiences with the British that their interpreters were to be distrusted, hated, and feared. Several carved reputations for themselves that have become part of traditional lore. "Salimu the Small," for example, one of the Gikuyu who interpreted for Horne, distinguished himself both for his disregard of the intricacies of Meru culture and his unrelenting greed. "To see the white man [Horne]," informants recall, "Salimu demanded a goat. To argue your case in front of him [Horne], Salimu demanded a girl. He loved best eating other peoples' property and being bribed. When you complained, he asked his white man to put you into prison."^[18]

Although Horne had soon learned the Meru language, a long series of Gikuyu interpreters who worked for his assistants and successors are recalled as having "left no moment undisturbed to convince their employers that Meru social institutions were both primitive and dangerous."^[19] The institution of Njuri was no exception. Horne, absorbed in learning Meru ways, had actively sought out its meetings and members. His successors, lacking his linguistic and ethnological inclinations, sought information from their interpreters instead.

Tradition suggests that the interpreters often focused on those aspects of Meru life of which whites were least likely to approve. They had no need to lie, only to describe the requested customs while neglecting to explain their psychological and social context. The Meru traditions regarding execution provide an interesting example. Usually, newly appointed colonial officers were appropriately horrified to learn, from their Gikuyu interpreters, that acts of theft, adultery, and "bewitchment" (cursing) were punished in Meru by death through public stoning. In fact isolated instances of any antisocial act were usually punishable by livestock fines and then only after long deliberation by the elders.

Habitual offenders, however, whether thieves, adulterers, cursers, or other types, might indeed become more than the communities could bear. They could on order from an elders' council be put to death by stoning. An interpreter might neglect to mention, however, that such punishment was reserved for the incorrigibles. Nor did they often

bother to explain that each stoning was preceded by a "prayer song" sanctified by generations of use, imploring everyone who sympathized with the offender to come forward and "buy him." Should someone stand forth, he could shield the offender from execution by placing cows between the judged and his judges, in whatever numbers they might require.

The stoning could begin only when offense had been given so often that no one in the whole community stepped forward. The first stones were always cast by kin, the missiles symbolizing the dissolution of their common bond. Thereafter, each man in the community cast a stone in turn, symbolically proclaiming his commitment to the execution as the only way in which communal harmony could be restored. The Meru procedures were cautious, deliberative, and rational, and they differed only slightly from those of the Gikuyu. By emphasizing those differences, however, or omitting the more humane aspects, interpreters could cast doubt upon the entire Meru judicial process and, beyond it, upon Meru tradition.

This sense of alienation from Meru ways was transmitted, at least in part, from the first generation of interpreters to their successors. By the 1920s the series of Gikuyu interpreters had been replaced, in part, by men of Meru. Many of these, however, had spent long years outside the district, working for Europeans. Having mastered either Swahili or English, they had also become partially detribalized, having acquired sufficient interests in Western ways to abandon some of their own.

This was particularly true for young men who had begun to make both a career and the beginnings of wealth out of working for whites. By the mid-1920s, for example, the earliest Meru interpreters had worked for the British for at least ten years. Many had originally been plucked by Horne from warriorhood to become askari , or tribal police. Others had served as messengers, hut counters, porters, or guides. Still others had worked over long periods with other British, whether in wartime or on settlers' lands.

All of these men shared several perceptions in common. One was the belief that their fortunes lay with the British. A second was the feeling that they were "modern" men and as such disdainful of their own "primitive" traditions. A third was based on the desire to provide whites with only that information that might best enhance themselves. Often that corresponded with precisely what white administrators wished to hear.

If, for example, a newly appointed Meru district commissioner decided that his "natives" were "sunk in superstition . . . and . . . abominable practices," as one reported in 1923, or "backward due to their belief in witchcraft and curses," as recorded by still another new appointee in 1924, his interpreters did what was required to reinforce those beliefs.^[20] Small wonder, therefore, that colonial knowledge of Meru ways disappeared. What little was learned came either from aliens or the alienated, men either foreign to Meru or who had abandoned its ways.