Meru

The Ameru settled the well-watered eastern slopes of Mount Kenya over several centuries, farming the ridges between the rivers and grazing stock on the drier ground below. Authority rested not with chiefs but with age-sets and with the Njuri Ncheke, a council of senior elders that judged disputes, set the farming calendar and sanctioned ceremonies, and which still has standing in the county today.

British administration reached the district at the beginning of the twentieth century, and Meru grew up around the government station, its early stone offices, a prison and the mission compounds that followed. Methodist and Catholic missions opened schools and clinics on the upper slopes, and the colonial administration pushed coffee, tea and later pyrethrum onto smallholdings, tying the district into the cash economy and the road network. The town became the market where that produce was collected and where officials, traders and missionaries met.

Meru County was drawn into the Mau Mau years of the 1950s through its forest edge and its links with Kikuyu neighbours on the far side of the mountain, and the detention and villagisation of the period were felt here as elsewhere in the central highlands. After independence the town went on growing as a farming and trading centre; miraa from the Nyambene hills became one of Kenya's more valuable cash crops, moved out by fast lorry and by air. Devolution under the 2010 constitution made Meru the seat of a county government, adding offices, a university presence and a fresh round of building along the main road.

Meru is the centre of Ameru life, and identity here is bound up with the mountain, with farming and with the authority of elders. The Njuri Ncheke remains the best-known institution of the community: its elders arbitrate land and family disputes, bless ceremonies and are consulted by politicians who want standing in the county. Age-sets and initiation ceremonies still order social life in the rural locations, alongside a strongly church-going Christianity — Methodist, Catholic and Presbyterian congregations all have deep roots, and Pentecostal churches have grown quickly.

Miraa, the stimulant leaf also called khat, is more than a crop in this part of Kenya. The Nyambene hills grow the best-known grades, the harvest is cut in the early morning and rushed out the same day, and the trade supports growers, graders, drivers and traders across the county. Chewing it is an everyday social activity here in a way that it is not in most of the country, and the trade's fortunes — including foreign import bans — are followed closely in the town.

Kimeru is the language of the streets and markets, with Swahili and English used in offices and schools. The town is proud of its schools and of Kenya Methodist University, and it follows athletics and football as closely as anywhere in the highlands. Traditional Ameru songs and dances appear at weddings, funerals and county celebrations, where elders' red-trimmed robes and staffs mark out the Njuri Ncheke.

The urban centre had about 291,000 residents at the 2019 census, making Meru the sixth largest urban area in Kenya, while Meru County as a whole holds more than a million. Life in the centre begins before dawn, when produce lorries and miraa vehicles move, and the market is at its busiest by mid-morning; county offices, banks and shops keep ordinary working hours, and the town empties back into the surrounding ridges in the evening.

Farming underpins everything. Smallholdings on the upper slopes grow coffee, tea, bananas, potatoes, maize and beans, with dairy cattle kept in stalls; the drier lower zones grow millet, sorghum and cotton-belt crops and keep goats. Miraa money circulates visibly through the town in vehicles, buildings and shops. Government, the county administration, schools, hospitals and the university are the main formal employers, and the informal trade of the market and the boda-boda stages absorbs much of the rest.

Land fragmentation as farms are divided between children, the cost of farm inputs, the volatility of coffee and miraa prices and unreliable rains are the recurring worries. Younger people leave for Nairobi and for work abroad, and remittances show in new houses on the ridges. Water, roads into the hills and the pressure of building on farmland dominate county politics.

Meru eats much as the rest of the Mount Kenya highlands does. Ugali, the stiff maize porridge, is the everyday staple, eaten with sukuma wiki — braised collard greens — beans or a stew of goat or beef. Githeri, maize and beans boiled together, is the ordinary lunch of farms and schools, and mukimo, a mash of potato, maize, beans and greens, appears at celebrations. Bananas are used as a vegetable as much as a fruit here, stewed with meat or beans, and arrowroot, yams and sweet potatoes are common breakfast foods.

Nyama choma, goat roasted over charcoal and cut up on a wooden board with kachumbari — a salad of tomato, onion and chilli — is the social meal, ordered by the kilo at butcheries on the edges of town. Chapati, mandazi fried dough and smoky roast maize are the street foods, and chai, strong black tea boiled with milk and sugar, is drunk through the day. Coffee is grown all around the town but, as elsewhere in Kenya, is more often exported than drunk locally.

The market end of town shows what the county produces: bananas by the stem, avocados, potatoes, tomatoes, beans, greens and miraa in its own tied bundles, wrapped in banana leaves to keep it fresh for the road.