An Uncertain Age. Paul Ocobock
colonial rule, I show how young men looked for new ways to prove their manly mettle and how their feelings and expressions of masculinity changed as a result. The travels and travails of migrant wage labor and town life offered young men new spaces, often outside family life, to reconsider the masculinities they observed in their fathers’ households. As they reformulated what it meant to be male, they struggled to convince their elders back home that new styles of clothes and shoes and gang life were acceptable forms of manhood.63 I also show how African men and women mulled over ideas about manhood in constant contact with non-Africans who weighed in, sometimes quite forcefully, with their own expectations and designs.64 If, as Africanist gender scholars claim, colonial Africa was home to a constellation of dominant masculinities, then it is not enough to study African masculinities in relation to one another.65 Relationships between African and colonial or imperial masculinities must matter just as much. Colonial actors might have had only the faintest influence, and their global ideologies might not have seemed so alien to Africans; yet, even in moments of recognition, of soft power, potent masculinities were made. One of the most forceful actors to intervene in African men’s debates about gender was the colonial state.
Gender historians have long paid particular attention to how colonial states influenced gender relations and how gender altered the trajectories of statecraft.66 States are gendered institutions, and the colonial state was a very masculine one. Its sundry bureaucrats, protocols, cultures, and laws were all products of their own competing masculinities that changed over time.67 These masculinities were made up of the prevailing metropolitan norms back home, the racial paternalism of the civilizing mission, and the lessons learned, or not, from colonial subjects. And these came to bear on African communities when they found themselves face-to-face with or working as agents of the state. Emily Osborn’s study of household building in Guinea shows how the French ignored local connections between marriage and political authority and refused to marry Baté women and build households of their own. Instead, they hid their private lives from public view, denying themselves a powerful cultural component of statecraft.68 Unlike their counterparts in Guinea, British officials in Kenya recognized the power of gender, making men and women to make the state.
Despite very rich, very separate scholarships on gender and statecraft, historians of Kenya have only occasionally connected the two. A few studies, most notably Lynn Thomas’s Politics of the Womb, have shown how chiefs and British officials tried to use women’s bodies and African gender ideologies to underwrite their authority.69 In An Uncertain Age, I explore how British officials’ own masculinities and the kinds of masculinity they wanted their young African subjects to inhabit guided their interventions. Moreover, inside government institutions such as approved schools, youth camps, and youth clubs, very intimate conversations took place between the state and young men about acceptable forms of manliness, sexuality, and maturity as well as the outlets through which to express those feelings: sports, hard work, education, and marriage. Colonial rule in Kenya is the story of how the British leveraged the success of their colonial enterprise on their appeal to and control over the masculinities of young Africans.
THE ELDER STATE
Scholars of Africa have long been interested in how colonial regimes exercised their power. Some cast the colonial state as powerful and authoritarian, transforming the everyday lives of traumatized Africans. The state is a crusher of rocks, a bula matari, as Crawford Young argues, relying on violence, private enterprise, and invested African intermediaries to extract raw materials. No less intrusive is Mahmood Mamdani’s “Janus-faced, bifurcated” state, exerting two forms of power: civil laws governing urban citizens and customary laws controlling rural subjects. This decentralized despot locked some Africans away in ethnic reserves, controlled by intermediaries using customary law, and then placed them in tension with Africans living in urban spaces under a different legal logic.70 Others, including Ann Stoler, Frederick Cooper, and Jeffrey Herbst, argue that colonial statecraft was a more contingent process. “More arterial than capillary,” Cooper writes, state power did not circulate evenly to every corner of colonial society, and periodically it required a little defibrillation to keep it going. African communities living closest to the heart of state authority felt the steady, rapid pulse of rule. Further away, its effects could be but a murmur.71 This unevenness opened a range of possibilities for Africans and many others, such as Christian missionaries and European settlers, to affect the nature of colonialism. As a result, the state was “neither monolithic nor omnipotent.” It was tangled up in “competing agendas for using power, competing strategies for maintaining control, and doubts about the legitimacy of the venture”—debates that government officials had not simply with one another but with those over whom they meant to rule.72
In Kenya, the colonial state wrestled with these issues in its own peculiar ways. Kenya was a settler colony teeming with a diverse, vociferous cast of characters who made claims on and against the state. British officials found themselves constantly reacting to the activism of ordinary Africans, chiefs, and educated elites, as well as European settlers, Christian missionaries, international welfare organizations, and metropolitan superiors in London. Each of these voices spoke of competing, contradictory visions of what life in a settler colony should be like. Under such intense scrutiny both within and outside the colony, the state internalized these contradictions. As Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale argue, to ensure the financial viability of the colony, the state nurtured the economic fortunes of settler families it had encouraged to emigrate. The state alienated vast tracks of the choicest land from African communities like the Maasai, Kipsigis, and Gikuyu, and then coerced them to leave their homes and work for wages. British officials also had to keep the promise, or at least the pretense, of the civilizing mission. Ever fearful of being seen as an accessory to settler exploitation and virulent racism, the state also adopted “the role of evenhanded arbiter, of defender of the weaker, African, interest.”73 With one hand, the state tried to extract African labor, violently if need be. With the other, it sought to shield them from the destabilizing effects of capitalism and Western culture.
For Berman and Lonsdale, considering the welfare of Africans merely made tolerable the dirty work of building an apparatus to coerce them out to work. Cooper has pointed out that their analysis of statecraft in Kenya focused more on securing “profits and peace” than “on the cultural work that colonial states do.”74 Since first conceptualizing colonial rule as a state of struggle, historians of Kenya and elsewhere in Africa have turned to locating the much deeper cultural work that went on to cope with the state’s contending logics. One of the places historians looked for the state’s cultural work was within the African institutions on which the British leaned most heavily to strengthen their authority. The British relied on the practice of indirect rule. Their men on the spot, known in Kenya as the provincial administration, worked with a cadre of chiefs and elders to collect taxes, enforce laws, discipline unruly behavior, and arbitrate local disputes. If African communities had no preexisting tradition of chieftaincy, as was the case in Kenya, then British officials appointed men they felt up to the task.75 These intermediaries offered the British a way to overcome their financial limitations and exert influence beyond the barrel of a gun.76 Together, provincial administrators and their African intermediaries created and oversaw local courts, and codified customary laws, such as marriage or land tenure rights, as well as hardened ethnic affiliations. These kinds of cultural work, Lynn Thomas argues, offered the colonial state ways to resolve the tensions between the crude necessities of coercive exploitation and ideological commitments to the civilizing mission.77
Rather than instruments of colonial domination, these flexible African institutions became sites of intense argument.78 Africans often reappropriated them in ways the British had not intended. Chiefs used newly created courts to reimagine marriage rights and household relationships, yet women and young men used them to challenge the authority of their husbands or elders, respectively.79 Ethnic affiliations solidified after the state carved out African reserves to establish racial boundaries and demarcate chiefly jurisdiction. Yet Africans trying to inspire political unity and agitation hardened ethnicity to challenge state authority.80
Age and gender also served the colonial state well. Almost immediately, the British set out to learn as much about African