An Uncertain Age. Paul Ocobock

       Introduction

      ALONG THE COAST OF the British East Africa Protectorate, district commissioners left their posts in the heat and humidity of April 1914 to meet with local elders on an urgent matter.¹ Their task: to investigate when, or if ever, African boys and girls came of age. Their reason: to determine whether Christian missions had the right to keep underage Africans in their custody without parental consent. The issue had vexed British officials since the waning years of the nineteenth century. Christian missions had opened new, alternative spaces for the young. At first, a few sons and daughters converted, attended services, received an education, and worked on mission farms. Others arrived as recently freed slaves, picked up and dropped off by the British abolitionist impulse. And still others came out of desperation, made destitute by disease, drought, and famine. When parents demanded that their sons and daughters be returned home, difficult questions arose over the tangled authorities of families, missionaries, and the colonial state.

      As the long rainy season began, district commissioners and African elders exchanged information about being young and growing old. They then submitted their reports to provincial commissioner Charles Hobley. Some commissioners argued that young East Africans were never free from the power of the old. To carve out a moment of independence, the colonial state would have to draw an arbitrary, entirely novel line, one with untold repercussions. Others claimed that for boys, parental control ceased when fathers helped them marry and settle down. Girls merely passed from the control of fathers to the control of husbands. A few officials felt no need to ask their African intermediaries at all. Imperial laws like the Indian Penal Code already established an age at which nonwhites became adults: fourteen for boys and sixteen for girls. The British need only exert their rule of law.² After reading these reports, provincial commissioner Hobley concluded that “no hard and fast ruling should be made.”³ The administration must leverage its influence carefully. Hobley warned his commissioners against disrupting elder, male authority. They must uphold the power of fathers whenever demarcating the boundaries between obedient childhood and independent adulthood. And they must be ever mindful of the encroaching influences of missionaries and one another into the realm of elders.

      The inquiry failed to unknot the issue of African coming-of-age. While the British determined that boys, unlike their sisters, eventually experienced some degree of independence, they remained unsure of how much. They knew that age was a powerful part of the everyday lives of East Africans, and they presumed patriarchs had strict authority over juniors. Yet the stability of age-relations and the influence of elders seemed worryingly tenuous. For the remainder of colonial rule, and long after, the state in Kenya exerted considerable energy to understand, and then access, the power it believed inherent in age-relations.

      A century later, struggles over age and state authority continue in Kenya. In the first few months of 2008, waves of postelection violence rocked the country, leaving thousands dead and an estimated six hundred thousand internally displaced. The horror called to mind similar episodes in 1992 and 1997. Even after rival presidential candidates Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga shook hands over a power-sharing agreement beside a smiling Kofi Annan, unrest continued in the countryside. Smoldering evidence lay everywhere of the violence perpetrated by young men and orchestrated by political elites. Senior politicians activated age-relations and the lexicon of age to instigate ethnic conflict.

      In the wake of this bloodshed, I conducted much of the research for this book. In nearly all of my more than eighty interviews with Gikuyu, Kipsigis, and Luo men, talk turned to politics and postelection mayhem: an interviewee pointing out the ashy remains of kiosks and schools near his home in Saunet, another giving refuge to a displaced family in Gilgil, and still another comforting his son, who had suffered a stroke after being beaten in Bondo. These discussions gave the men I met an opportunity to vent frustrations and share anxieties. They also made connections across time. Memories of coming of age in colonial Kenya became a way for these men to talk about how generations behave today. These senior men lamented the disrespect the young showed for them but admitted their failure to dictate respectable norms. It had never been so, they claimed, in the “good old days.”

      After these interviews, I returned to the archive, and through the British colonial record I inhabited those “good old days”: letters from fathers to district commissioners worrying about runaway sons, and warnings from chiefs about young people drinking, dancing, and singing lewd songs. The “good old” colonial days seemed a lot like the present. Decades separate the stories drawn from the archive and men’s memories, yet age remains a prism through which Kenyans look to the not-so-distant colonial past to pass judgment on the present and fret about the future.

      An Uncertain Age tells many coming-of-age stories of men who grew up in Kenya from the beginning of British colonial rule in the 1890s until the end of Jomo Kenyatta’s presidency in the late 1970s. This is a book about boys and young men using the colonial encounter to enjoy their youthfulness, make themselves masculine, and eventually earn a sense of maturity. Age and gender drove their pursuit of new possibilities in areas such as migrant wage labor, town life, crime, anticolonial violence, and nation building. They relished being young and used these new paths to reimagine and assert their age and masculinity with one another and other generations.

      Colonialism could also unmake men. British conquest had relied on the violence of British troops, the East African Rifles, and local auxiliaries like the Maasai, who saw profit in the livestock confiscated from fallen neighbors.⁴ Young men who joined the conquest as soldiers or porters imagined their work as part of their coming-of-age.⁵ Yet their violence crushed the manly aspirations of the countless young warriors they defeated. Among those communities that resisted, like the Gikuyu, Kipsigis, Nandi, and Gusii, conquest marked the decline of the young warrior. Although the consolidation of colonial rule and development of a settler economy offered future generations of young men new ways to earn an age, they were not always successful. The racial and economic inequalities of a settler society frustrated young men’s ambitions, especially during and after the depression. As they struggled with stagnating wages and rising costs of living, as well as dwindling jobs and places at school, they endured rather than enjoyed an increasingly prolonged liminal age between childhood and adulthood. Feeling trapped, men saw colonialism as an obstacle that must be removed if they were to ever achieve adulthood.

      Across Kenya, households crackled with tension over these promising new paths and disappointing dead ends. Young men argued with one another, with their parents, and with the young women and age-mates they wished to impress. Did a wage—and the flashy clothing, bicycles, and alcohol it purchased—make a migrant laborer worthy of a potential lover’s attention or an age-mate’s envy? Did a grasp of English and the ability to read the newspaper grant a schoolboy the right to demand from his father initiation into manhood? Were the gangs of boys forged on the mean streets of Nairobi as legitimate as the generations formed along the edge of a circumciser’s blade? Could a married man who fathered children still claim the rights and respect of an adult even if he was poor, landless, unemployed, or, worst of all, uncircumcised?

      The outcomes of these arguments were as complex as the conflicting views that ignited them. Debate could lead to irreconcilable conflict between young men proud of their new ways to perform masculinity and elders disgusted with such displays of disrespect and delinquency. Attitudes could be swayed, though; fathers could forcefully encourage their sons to set aside wages to buy livestock; and sons could convince their fathers to pay for another semester of school fees—each with the understanding that these new avenues would benefit the household. Such arguments never cooled; they roiled on long after colonial rule ended.

      As the din rose up and out of African households, newcomers to East Africa leaned in, listening intently. Colonial rule introduced new actors into the conversation such as employers, missionaries, schoolmasters, police officers, and magistrates. Age and masculinity mattered a great deal to them, too, and they brought their own notions to Kenya. Africans included them in their arguments, borrowing, rejecting, and reappropriating