An Uncertain Age. Paul Ocobock
who these young men were as about why the British felt compelled to discipline them.
The third database is made up of 381 case files of inquiries made by the probation service into the lives of young male offenders committed to approved schools between 1947 and 1954. These reports are incredibly rich. I used these investigations by probation officers, who were often Africans, to glimpse the everyday lives and histories of Kenya’s most serious young male offenders. Probation officers interviewed offenders, visited family homesteads, spoke with parents, and debated forms of punishment with one another and magistrates. The details are sometimes extraordinary—parents asking the state to incarcerate sons; offenders describing their first job, favorite subject in school, or life on the streets; and, most intriguing of all, probation officers’ own biases and the characteristics they sought to aid in their decisions of whether boys should be institutionalized by the state. Together, my reading of the documentary evidence, conversations with Kenyan men, and analysis of these three data sets offer a rich, complex, and compelling history of young men’s coming-of-age and their encounter with the state.
CHAPTER OUTLINE
An Uncertain Age begins when a boy’s manhood begins: his initiation. In chapter 1, I explore the ways British provincial administrators and chiefs altered male initiation practices and the effects of these changes on young men’s coming-of-age. During the interwar years, though likely in the years before, district officials and elders lowered the age of initiates, eliminated important ritual practices, and curbed or ended young men’s time as warriors. The elder state became an active participant in the most intimate moments among male generations, trying to push newly made men into the wage labor market and discipline their behavior. The crucible of manhood shifted away from a constellation of ritual practices to circumcision, which became the primary indicator that a boy had become a man. Despite these changes, men defended this diverted path, claiming that it still allowed them to enjoy their youth and strive for manhood.
In chapter 2, I examine the experiences of young men from Western Kenya who left home and traveled the colony working for wages from the 1920s to the early 1950s. Leaving home and earning wages led to tense negotiations among male generations. Sons viewed their newfound financial and spatial independence from kin as a chance to rearticulate age and gender. They enjoyed themselves in new ways, including buying Western clothes, drinking alcohol, and trying out new dance styles. Many fathers and chiefs disapproved of such cultural deviance and tried to prevent them from going back out to work. Other young men returned home with their wages, prepared to contribute to the household. For their part, provincial administrators and labor officers encouraged, and sometimes outright compelled, young men to live and work beyond their fathers’ households. Wary that boys picking tea far from home might weaken elder authority or ignite international outrage, the elder state trod carefully. It drafted child labor laws, carried out workplace inspections, and investigated families’ complaints of runaway sons.
The elder state did not encourage every avenue young men took to earn an age. In chapter 3, I follow the lives of young men living and working on the streets of Nairobi, the capital city of the colony, from the 1920s until the early 1950s. On this urban frontier, young men eked out livings in the legitimate urban workforce, the black market, and the criminal underworld. Street life afforded young men new ways to form masculinities, bonds with age-mates, and relationships with seniors and juniors beyond kinship. The British tried to restrict young men’s urban migration, believing that town life made them undisciplined and uncontrollable. Municipal authorities rounded up the underemployed or homeless, magistrates charged them with vagrancy, and police repatriated them home. Repatriation became the elder state’s first, furtive step to inculcate in young men alternate, colonial models of appropriate mature, masculine behavior.
In chapters 4 and 5, I turn to the elder state’s efforts to define and punish perpetrators of the most serious crimes through corporal punishment and institutionalization. Corporal punishment was a widespread, age-specific practice in the colony. Both African communities and colonial courts relied heavily on physical violence to punish boys. The young found caning terrifying and painful, and they conceptualized corporal punishment, whether meted out by parents or colonial officials, as part of a broader effort by adults to discipline their immaturity. Magistrates also institutionalized the most serious young offenders in approved schools. I trace the methods staff used to transform hardened house burglars and recidivist vagrants into obedient subjects. They drew on the latest techniques developed in Britain and the United States, such as vocational training and rigorous work-time discipline, as well as the very local practices of male circumcision and age grading. Young men rejected and reappropriated these efforts as they went about their own journeys toward adulthood behind bars. Some parents even negotiated for and demanded from colonial officials the incarceration of their delinquent sons.
By the 1940s, inadequate education, chronic underemployment, and debilitating poverty pushed men’s plans for marriage and adulthood further into the horizon. In their frustration and confusion, they turned to violent protest. In chapters 6 and 7, I narrow the focus of the book for a moment to examine the Mau Mau war and the brutal British counterinsurgency of the 1950s. Mau Mau was one of many violent uprisings led by young men during the colonial period, yet it offers historians a useful case for how men argued over age and competing masculinities. The war became a new means for young Gikuyu to express their masculinity, lay claim to maturity, and capture the mobility that had eluded them. Their efforts ran aground against the violent, surging tide of the British counterinsurgency. A handful of influential British officials—in concert with conservative loyalists as well as Christian elite Gikuyu—identified Mau Mau as a conflict about age-relations. Together they framed Mau Mau as a form of juvenile delinquency and the failure of elders and the state to adequately discipline them. Their solution to Mau Mau led to a dramatic expansion of the elder state, in which the British sought to wield generational authority more forcefully, quite literally certifying young men’s maturity in return for their acquiescence.
This work began at the Wamumu Youth Camp, built by the department of community development in 1955 to “rehabilitate” nearly two thousand Mau Mau detainees under the age of eighteen. In chapter 7, we visit Wamumu, where camp staff tried to unmake the masculinity of former Mau Mau insurgents, infantilizing them as undisciplined boys. Then, using circumcision rites, education, sports, propaganda, and job placement, they reimagined them as mature, disciplined subjects. Wamumu became a state-sponsored rite of passage aimed at defeating Mau Mau and entrenching the state’s authority through age and gender. But the elder state did not stop at Wamumu. In the late 1950s, officials believed they faced a colony-wide “youth crisis.” The issues that had driven the Mau Mau generation to war remained unresolved: underemployment, lack of education, poverty, political disenfranchisement, and racial inequality. Officials feared that they faced a new, rising young generation of frustrated insurgents. And so the elder state tried to piece together a youth service, massive in scope and size compared to those found in other colonies. The Wamumu program was distributed throughout Kenya in approved schools for young offenders and in hundreds of newly built youth clubs serving tens of thousands of poor young men and women in the countryside.
As the sun set on the British Empire, officials lamented the failure of this new network of institutions they had built for the young. Yet the elder state found new life in the postcolony, and age became a powerful tool of the state in newly independent Kenya. In chapter 8, I show how young men demanded action from Jomo Kenyatta and other politicians whom they had carried to power. In response, Jomo Kenyatta, the first president of Kenya, created the National Youth Service and preserved late colonial programs and rhetoric. Through the elder state, Kenyatta and the first generation of Kenyan leaders recast themselves as political