The "Nativist" Administrators

The 1929 selection of J. Gerald H. Hopkins as district commissioner marked the beginning of Meru's "Golden Age," an era in which the adherents of ancestral tradition, mission Christianity, and British colonialism reached new levels of tolerance and understanding. It was a notable shift, for the ten years prior to Hopkins's appointment had been characterized by the rule of an administrative generation of self-proclaimed pragmatists, men less concerned with native traditions than in running their districts efficiently and at a profit. In contrast the fifteen years following Hopkins's appointment were shaped by the rule of a series of self-declared "nativists", men who saw themselves as administrator-anthropologists, dedicated to the understanding and even reconstruction of native ways of life.

Meru was fortunate to have drawn no fewer than three of these men in near succession. Hopkins, having crushed the fringe societies in 1927–1929, worked tirelessly from 1929 to 1933 to restore other aspects of Meru tradition. He was followed in mid-1933 by Hugo E. Lambert, an African linguist, anthropologist, and tireless researcher, who ruled Meru until 1935 and again from 1939 to 1942. Lambert was followed—after a brief return to pragmatism—by Capt. Victor M. McKeag, who ran the district from mid-1937 to 1939 and again (following Lambert's second term) from 1942 to 1945.^[2]

The three administrators were alike in several ways. All were born near the end of the 1800s and had attended English public schools. Each had had early military experience, having served with the King's African Rifles during World War I. Each then entered the colonial service, passing through a number of regional postings during the 1920s. At some point each man became fascinated with the customs, cultures, and (in Lambert's case) languages of the African peoples they ruled, a fascination that enabled all three to cast off prevailing stereotypes regarding the "savage and simplistic nature" of Kenya's tribal cultures and seek instead to understand and restore them in their full complexity.^[3]