Wameru Erotic

Ask someone in Arusha about the Meru and the answer starts with the mountain. The Wameru are the Bantu farmers of the southern and eastern slopes of Mount Meru, the volcano that stands over Arusha town in northern Tanzania. Their country runs through Usa River, Tengeru, Nkoaranga and Poli. It is a crowded patchwork of small farms where bananas shade coffee bushes and a few cattle are kept close to the house. They are not the Meru of Kenya. The names match, but the two peoples speak different languages and have separate histories. Their language, Kimeru, also called Rwa, belongs with the Chaga languages of nearby Kilimanjaro. Their closest neighbors on the mountain, though, are the Arusha, a Maa speaking people who settled the western slopes in the nineteenth century and took up farming. The two communities have traded, intermarried and borrowed from each other ever since. Swahili now dominates school, church and market, and Kimeru is under steady pressure from it. Most Meru are Lutheran, and the church had a hard start there. In 1896 two missionaries from the Leipzig Mission were killed on the mountain, and German colonial forces answered with a punitive expedition. The mission came back a few years later, and Lutheran congregations became one of the institutions Meru life is organized around. The Lutheran university at Makumira sits in Meru country, and Catholic parishes and other churches operate alongside.

Clan still counts. Surnames such as Nnko, Pallangyo, Kaaya and Mbise mark a person as Meru to other Tanzanians, and clan ties carry weight in questions of land and marriage. Land is also the turning point of modern Meru history. In 1951 the British administration evicted Meru families from Engare Nanyuki to make room for European settler farms. The Meru Citizens' Union refused to let it pass quietly and sent Kirilo Japhet to argue the case before the United Nations Trusteeship Council in 1952. The appeal did not win the land back at the time. It did turn a local eviction into an international embarrassment for colonial rule, and it gave early Tanganyikan nationalism one of its clearest grievances. That history still shapes how the Meru talk about land, on a mountain where family plots get smaller with each generation and Arusha keeps spreading toward the villages.