An Uncertain Age. Paul Ocobock
norms expected of different ages. They imbued themselves with ritual knowledge, demanded respect from acquiescent juniors, and relished the joys of elderhood. They created an awareness of time, a sense of order, and perceptions of masculinity and maturity within the community.13 Yet the power of elders was never absolute. Male age-relations in East Africa revolved around reciprocal obligations.14 An age, and the rights that came with it, had to be earned. Young men expected fathers to work hard for them, to accumulate the wealth needed for initiation and the bridewealth needed for marriage. Meanwhile, juniors had to prove themselves as well, showing respect for their elders and following the codes of conduct laid out to them during their initiations.
But not everyone agreed on what it meant to be a good father or son. Historians of age, following the lead of gender historians, have begun to challenge the earlier scholarship that proposed a linear process of aging that privileged patriarchs. Seniority was not granted to anyone simply for growing old or playing by the rules.15 Arguing was an essential part of age-relations—part of the pursuit and performance of masculinity and maturity.16 Generations constantly debated one another about their biological, social, and economic positions within the community.17 If a boy showed no signs of maturity, then his father could postpone his initiation. Likewise, if fathers failed to initiate their sons, or if elders clung to the privileges of old age for too long, then younger generations could force the elders to meet their obligations.18 Arguments could be violent and short-lived, but they could also take time and operate within the acceptable, creative moral codes of the day. For instance, at the turn of the twentieth century, as thousands of Gikuyu died of famine and disease, a generation of well-to-do men pooled their resources to push ineffectual elders out of political authority, a ritualized process known as ituĩka, or the “breaking.” As Derek Peterson shows us, this generation retired ruling elders by buying them off with livestock. In doing so, they restored peace, stability, and hope to the Gikuyu community.19
Age-relations as well as their norms and institutions were flexible and creative, designed to weather demographic and climactic changes as well as to exploit new cultural and economic frontiers. Age could shift depending on the ideas and eloquence with which a generation argued, with whom a generation argued, and the wider socioeconomic and political settings in which the argument occurred.20 As a result, as Nicolas Argenti argues, “seniority was not calculated simply on the basis of age but by means of a complex, multilayered assessment” of a range of criteria, including wealth in material goods, kinship, or knowledge.21
Colonialism intensified these arguments. It brought new forms of knowledge and wealth as well as alternative, obstacle-ridden routes along which the young and the old explored their age and masculinity both within and outside household, kinship, and generation. It also introduced new players. Missionaries, employers, and British officials introduced their own ideas about age and claimed the role of adults. Recently, historians have shown how ideas about age were reconfigured as young people inhabited these new spaces and argued with these new actors. Some sons and daughters left home, joined Christian missions, and adhered to the authority of a heavenly father over a corporeal one.22 Their newfound faith and access to Western education set them apart from, and often against, their elders. Others left home in search of work and wages as soldiers, farmers, miners, or artisans. The camaraderie of the barracks, the organization of trade unions, and the struggles of town life all allowed the young to forge relationships outside their age-groups and kin groups.23 They spent their wages on what they wanted, striking out on the path to maturity in their own unique ways—buying flashy clothes to attract sexual partners, attending beer halls and dances, or saving up to get married without their fathers’ consent. Still others sought out social and economic worlds deemed distasteful by their families and colonial states. Boys joined criminal gangs, making up their own age-groups using black marketeering, violence, and street culture to express their manliness.24 Girls joined the criminalized underworld, too, using street hawking and sex work to build successful households and families. They also refused to get married, continued their schooling, and demanded or rejected female circumcision.25
These experiences brought the young not only new sources of wealth and authority but also inevitable conflict with their elders and age-mates.26 As Gary Burgess argues, colonial rule gave the young “analytical distance to question the validity and universality of gerontocratic discourse.”27 As they did, conflict often ensued. In turn-of-the-century Natal, young Zulu men embraced wage labor at a time of crippling war and epidemic disease. In time, as Benedict Carton argues, fathers and families back home became dependent on young men’s wealth. Burdened by demanding fathers and colonial taxation, young men rose up against chiefs and fathers in the 1906 War of the Heads.28 Meredith McKittrick shows how ecological and economic uncertainties in Ovamboland at around the same time also compelled the young to seek “refuge not within the familiar but within the exotic,” in this case Christianity and migrant wage labor.29 Meanwhile, elders fumed over their sons’ and daughters’ cultural delinquency.
Yet many of those children poured their efforts into familial goals in familiar ways. Colonialism did not always trigger irresolvable conflict among seniors and juniors or weaken age-based institutions. Having experienced the “exotic” worlds of migrant wage labor and Christianity, the “new men” of Ovamboland became more independent from their fathers and local kings than in decades past. But they still returned home, paid tribute, asked for advice, and courted kingly favor.30 Interference from missionaries, chiefs, and British officials also inspired generations to work together to preserve ritual life. As Lynn Thomas has shown, when missions, the state, and Christian neighbors tried to block Meru girls’ paths to womanhood, they circumcised one another.31 As the price of bridewealth rose in Western Kenya, Brett Shadle argues, Gusii sons and fathers worked together to control rising bridewealth costs and prevent conflict over delayed marriage.32 Parents across Kenya found merit in their sons’ and daughters’ taking advantage of new possibilities or defending old practices. Wage-earning sons returned home ready to invest in livestock and educated daughters fetched better dowries, each serving their parents’ interests.33 By the late colonial period, mothers and fathers who had been among the first or second generation to join a mission, attend a school, or tend a settler’s herd understood the choices their sons and daughters made.
In An Uncertain Age, I argue that dissent and cooperation do not neatly characterize the strategies and outcomes of Kenyan men’s arguments about age and masculinity. Throughout this book, many boys and young men pointedly interrogated and then flatly rejected the expectations of their elders and peers. There were worlds beyond kinship and generation that they wanted to explore and exploit—and it did not matter what their mothers or fathers might say to stop them. Yet even when they did contemplate the legitimacy of “gerontocratic discourse” by taking unusual or unsavory paths, the destinations young men mapped out in their minds could also be recognizable to those around them. They still wanted to enjoy their youthful years, prove their manly mettle, and earn the right to be initiated or married, as well as feel and be viewed by those around them as mature.
As colonial rule ground on, arguments about age intensified. From the 1930s onward, those once new possibilities through which earlier generations of young men had come of age began to lose their luster. The harder it became to find work, pay for school fees, and save wages, the more distant the prospects for enjoying oneself or settling down. On settler estates, African squatters endured draconian restrictions on the herds they kept and the work hours they logged. The reserves, especially in Central Kenya, simmered with frustration over chiefly misconduct, lack of education and employment, overcrowding, and soil erosion. Town life offered little respite as the costs of living soared while squalor spread.34 For some young men, it was their fathers’ poverty that let them down. They lost confidence in their fathers’ ability to usher them into manhood through initiation, or into adulthood through marriage. For others, a father’s prosperity bitterly reminded them that they had yet to succeed in their own right.
Coming-of-age stalled by the 1950s. Changes that might have once been imperceptible to young men were now painfully clear: many felt trapped in a prolonged age between childhood and adulthood. None of their strategies—going to school, picking tea, or fighting