Restoring Ntuiko: The Transfer Of Power

Hopkins had begun by restoring the traditional cleansing oath. Although the oathing ceremony had been somewhat retailored to British sensibilities, his efforts had been warmly received by the Meru. The experiment intensified his interest in Meru tradition, and he began to search out other aspects of the past that might be revived, with modifications to fit the district's current needs.

In 1929, for example, he was increasingly perplexed at the degree to which the entire Meru region had seemed to slip into lawlessness and apathy. Despite suppression of the witchcraft bands, many areas remained in an abnormal state, in which disobedience both of government and tribal authority remained widespread. Hopkins was especially alarmed about the rising passivity of many elders. Many members of the oldest age-sets, perhaps disheartened by the removal of their ritualists, now showed unprecedented apathy.^[4] Many no longer helped women work the fields, even when such work was required by tradition. Others moved between sporadic brawling and a daily alcoholic stupor.

Hopkins was equally concerned with the behavior of the former warriors. All of them seemed to have taken to drinking, in universal defiance of the tradition restricting millet beer to ruling elders. Worse, many had formed themselves into the traditional war bands and taken up new forms of raiding, seizing livestock with equal determination from both family heads and ruling elders. Departing from tradition, they inflicted constant damage on homesteads, groves, granaries, and gardens. Nor did they return the captured livestock to their own fathers, as custom required. Rather, they drove entire herds into the forests or rock-strewn hills on the district's desert fringes and devoured them all.^[5]

Hopkins reacted initially to both aspects of the problem by inquiring among the more prominent elders as to its probable cause. Perhaps to his surprise, several declared that at least part of the current unrest was due to a delay in Ntuiko, the ritualized transfer of administrative authority between those age-sets currently in power (ruling elders and their warrior sons) and those whose turn it was to rule (family heads and their sons approaching warriorhood).

Before the conquest this formal handing over of authority had taken place in two stages, one involving the two sets of elders; the second, their two sets of sons. The military transfer took the form of limited and stylized combat. It began at some moment when the younger age-set felt numerically strong enough to expel physically the remaining senior warriors from the war barracks and seize it for themselves. Expulsion was inevitable as the older warriors gradually abandoned warriorhood to seek wives and their juniors reached physical maturity. On reaching numerical superiority, the juniors would revolt against their seniors, with the older warriors' expulsion serving as a symbolic end to their time of warriorhood.

In practice these ritualized expulsions usually began among the clans of Tigania and Igembe, then moved southward, ridgetop by ridgetop, until every war barracks had changed hands, usually over a single season. Each expulsion was followed by a brief period of permitted anarchy within each ridgetop area as the former warriors were allowed to band together one last time. Once united, they raided at will, but this time among their own kin, despoiling groves and gardens and harrying flocks and herds. There was a social purpose in this lawlessness. It symbolized the fact that "no one" ruled, since the family heads had not yet taken power from the ruling elders. By "raiding" the gardens, flocks, and herds of both those age-sets, the former warriors symbolically prodded them into completing the transfer of power.

The expelled warriors' continued depredations probably did spur spokesmen from both age-sets to initiate Ntuiko's second stage. At some point spokesmen for the family heads in each community would approach the ruling elders bearing gifts. Assembled in a joint Kiama, they would agree to the transfer. Custom required each elder to provide a sheep and millet beer for a communal feast to symbolize the reconciliation of both age-sets with those of the ancestors and thus complete the formal transfer of administrative power.^[6]

Hopkins's inquiries established that the first stage of the transfer—the military expulsion of the senior warriors—had begun a year earlier

and was now virtually complete. Much of the raiding that concerned him was thus at least partially due to the tradition of interim lawlessness. But because completion of these rites had been indefinitely delayed according to the elders, the condition of permitted anarchy persisted as well.

Hopkins, unwilling to permit anarchy of any sort, demanded the reason for such delay. He was told that because the millet harvests of the last two years had been lost to locusts, too little grain remained to brew beer. Without beer no feasts of reconciliation could occur because beer alone was used to bless those assuming authority. Without the proper blessings the ancestors would disapprove. Without their approval the entire process of transfer would remain incomplete.

Meru elders found the explanation wholly logical and an ample justification for indefinite delay. Eventually new millet could be harvested, and the rituals would begin again. Hopkins sharply disagreed. Negotiating for small amounts of millet from districts outside Meru, the district commissioner moved from ridgetop to ridgetop, cajoling, explaining, and commanding that it be brewed and used symbolically to complete the rituals. Gradually, the communities complied. The feasts took place, the blessings were proclaimed, and the age-set of Murungi—warriors at the moment of British conquest—assumed authority as ruling elders of Meru.^[7]