A small circle of us, in those years still in or near warrior age, had asked how men in the old days fought in single combat. I recalled a single morning, however, when Gituuru grew so engrossed in retelling a tradition of his warrior years that he forgot his He told his stories only rarely, for arthritis had so crippled him that he spent his days in a permanent crouch, unable to stand upright without searing pain. To call someone an 'old, old man' in Meru is like saying 'he who knows the most of all.' Gituuru was known for recalling more details of the past, recounted to him by his own grandfathers, than any other elder. In Meru the phrase 'old, old man' implies not a person in decline but one whose age has made him rich in wisdom. That tale, told around cookfires for more than three hundred years, would last for hours, well into the night. Gituuru wa Gikamata, one of Meru's old, old men and alleged to be the oldest, was beginning to retell one of the people's most beloved oral traditions. In practice none were working, for no one laughed. In theory they were all working, for the air was warm and rich with aromas of millet beer and roasting meat. Beyond them, and farther back in the darkness than I could see, stood groups of girls and women. Behind them ranks of grown men and teenage boys stood quietly in shadow.

Rows of seated children, faces momentarily identical in the firelight, grinned for a moment in unison and inched imperceptibly closer to both the speaker and the flames. Sparks snapped away from the flickering cookfire and into an East African night. My grandparents may have known, but I was too young to ask. 'In the beginning, we were not called 'Meru.' In fact, no one now living recalls our tribal name. Men of Meru, thank you for what you have given me. Their love of this region and its people also makes them 'men of Meru.' Sillitoe, and several others, all of whom had served in Meru long before I began my work there. Howard Brassington, Father Bernard Bernardi, Rev. Their willingness to pass on their wisdom to a stranger will have preserved it for Meru generations yet to come. To M'Thaara M'Mutani, Matiri wa Kirongoro, Hezikiah M'Mukiri, M'Muraa wa Kairanyi, Gituuru wa Gikamata, and more than one hundred others, all men of the Miriti, Murungi, and Kiramana age-sets and thus in their seventies, eighties, and nineties when I collected this data. Their total dedication to the Meru people led to the recovery of this portion of their past. Bengi, Franklin Mugambe, Gerrard Kithinji, and a dozen others, all young men in their early twenties when I began my research in 1969. My thanks and thoughts go out to them, for their wisdom: Whatever this book contains is the result of the knowledge shared with me by the men of Meru, old and young. When We Began, There Were Witchmen: An Oral History from Mount Kenya.В Berkeley: University of California Press, c1993 1993. Continued abuse of our services will cause your IP address to be blocked indefinitely.ClosestВ friend,В sharpestВ critic,В dearestВ wife, Please fill out the CAPTCHA below and then click the button to indicate that you agree to these terms. If you wish to be unblocked, you must agree that you will take immediate steps to rectify this issue. If you do not understand what is causing this behavior, please contact us here. If you promise to stop (by clicking the Agree button below), we'll unblock your connection for now, but we will immediately re-block it if we detect additional bad behavior. Overusing our search engine with a very large number of searches in a very short amount of time.Using a badly configured (or badly written) browser add-on for blocking content.Running a 'scraper' or 'downloader' program that either does not identify itself or uses fake headers to elude detection.Using a script or add-on that scans GameFAQs for box and screen images (such as an emulator front-end), while overloading our search engine.There is no official GameFAQs app, and we do not support nor have any contact with the makers of these unofficial apps. Continued use of these apps may cause your IP to be blocked indefinitely.

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