An Uncertain Age. Paul Ocobock
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clubs for poor, illiterate country boys all tried to temper criticisms by missionaries and social reformers. If the work of the myriad people and institutions that made up the elder state was mere performance, then to tell this story risks perpetuating the very self-serving, face-saving publicity the British hoped to project all those years ago and perpetuate through a tampered archive. Much of my work, then, has been to get backstage, away from the pageantry. And there, the sources reveal much more. I found that the elder state was often at odds with itself, unsure how to best handle young African men. Sometimes, I met true believers: British officials who genuinely took interest in the well-being of young Africans and the civilizing mission.115 Their work, often in collaboration with Africans themselves, resulted in policies and programs generated locally, from within the state, rather than as the result of unwelcome, external pressure. But the best way to tease out such troublesome sources was to corroborate them with the memories of Kenyan men who had encountered the elder state in their youth. Regardless of the propaganda inherent in so much of the elder state’s work, it had real, lasting consequences for the young men it circumcised, caned, incarcerated, educated, or wounded in battle. Listening to their voices, rarely heard during the performance, as well as the murmurs of dissenting officials arguing backstage, allows us to see past the theatricality of the elder state and its archive.
I conducted eighty interviews, nearly all of them in 2008, with men who came of age during colonial rule. Several Kenyan researchers helped me recruit these men and then facilitated and translated our conversations. John Gitau Kariuki, an experienced researcher who has worked with Robert Blunt and Daniel Branch, among many others, assisted me with my work in Central and Rift Valley Provinces. In Nyanza Province, I worked with the indomitable Henry Kissinger Adera, who had previously worked with Matthew Carotenuto and Derek Peterson. He recruited Luo and Kipsigis participants. Before each interview, we asked all our participants to use the language with which they felt most comfortable, and while most chose to speak in their first language, a few opted to speak Kiswahili or English.
We began our interviews only after I had completed most of my archival work. I had waited because I wanted to recruit men with firsthand experiences of the issues and institutions I found most compelling in the documentary evidence. Once I realized how important spaces like the Kabete Approved School and the Wamumu Youth Camp had been to British efforts to shape African age and masculinity, I sought out men who had been incarcerated there. When I learned of the colonial state’s preoccupation with the recruitment of young people in and migration out of Western Kenya, I conducted interviews with Luo and Kipsigis men who had left home in search of wages and a little adventure. Waiting in this way afforded me opportunities to speak with men such as Simon Kariuki, Alan Kanyingi, Thomas Tamutwa, and many others who could speak with authority about the thrill of buying clothes with their first paycheck or the agony of being caned by a prison official. In a few instances, I was able to interview men whom I had first encountered in the archival material. Take, for example, Simon Kariuki: I had read of him several times in letters among officials in the department of community development as well as a memoir of a former official, Geoffrey Griffin. Sitting with Simon in his small apartment in the three-story building he owns in Ongata-Rongai, we teased out the tensions between his memories today and colonial records filed away over sixty years earlier. Opportunities such as these revealed to me just how closely life histories and the documentary evidence aligned with one another. When I shared with men what the archive had to say about them, it gave them a chance to challenge and correct their recorded pasts.
Yet challenges shaped my research as much as these opportunities. The fading memories of the very old limited my work just as the vivid accounts of men like Simon Kariuki enriched it. I struggled to recruit men of advanced age who might tell me something of their lives in the 1920s and 1930s. When I did, I often found them too old or infirm to participate in an interview. First person life histories of men and women who lived through the early years of colonial rule are increasingly closed off to my generation of scholars. Nearly all of my interviews were with men who came of age in the 1940s and 1950s. The stories that follow are those of only a few generations; and within these generations, of a privileged few who thrived and survived. From these life histories alone, I cannot adequately track how ideas and practices surrounding age and masculinity changed over the course of the colonial period. Although I routinely asked the participants to tell me about how their forefathers came of age, I often found them using their fathers’ and grandfathers’ lives as a way of legitimizing their own struggles for manhood and maturity. In the end, I have relied on the archival record to show how different generations of men thought about age and masculinity over the course of the twentieth century.
I conducted these life histories in the immediate aftermath of the brutal postelection violence of 2007–2008 that left hundreds dead and hundreds of thousands displaced. The violence cast a long shadow over my conversations. I did not interview anyone who had been displaced by the violence. For some men, speaking about their pasts was a welcome distraction from the crisis. For others, age became a way of contextualizing and making sense of the violence. Numerous interviewees spoke of Kenya’s most pressing problems in terms of generation, not ethnicity. Our discussions ended in refrains about the disrespect generations now had for one another, of rudderless young men run amok, and of corrupt elder politicians desperate to hold on to power.
Perhaps the most difficult challenge I faced was being mindful of the age-relations and generational politics at play during my interviews. I quickly realized that elder men felt deeply uncomfortable speaking with me until they had a better sense of my own maturity. Often after spotting my wedding ring, they nodded approvingly and explained that I could clearly understand such things. Likewise, elder men did not want to discuss the intimate details of their initiations in front of young interpreters. Take for instance a very awkward group interview I conducted in Saunet. I had agreed to work with a young Kipsigis student from the area named Sammie Kiprop Cheruiyot. During our first interview with a local elder and his age-mates, they made it clear that they could not be entirely forthcoming. He was too young, they argued, to learn such things. Sammie was also hesitant to ask his seniors probing, personal questions.
From then on, I recruited and interviewed Kipsigis men with Henry Adera, a Luo who lived nearby in Awendo. Elder Kipsigis men found it much easier to discuss their experiences with two seemingly mature outsiders than with young members of their own community. A few times, Kipsigis men would gently rib Henry that they could share their initiation stories with him because Luos did not circumcise their sons. In my conversations with Gikuyu men in Central Kenya and the Rift Valley, I had the good fortune of being joined by John Gitau Kariuki, whose own maturity facilitated my conversations with elder men. In fact, Gitau eagerly established his own generational bona fides before each interview, a strategy that put elder men at ease with talking about sometimes very difficult, intimate subjects. Such generational tensions underscore the centrality of age in Kenya and the importance of this book. They also give me pause, as they should other researchers, when relying on young, educated men and women to help us conduct research with their elders. Moreover, these still-visible frictions should call on historians to reevaluate and think more critically about earlier ethnographies by anthropologists, who often used underage interpreters to probe elders about things they had no right knowing. It begs the question of whether what we know from these early studies requires a more critical analysis of the age-relations embedded in their results.
The final method I employed in writing this book was analysis of three databases that I compiled using materials from the Kenya and British national archives. The first database consists of 10,410 cases of court-ordered corporal punishment of young men from 1928 to 1955. The second contains 7,423 cases of young offenders from 1938 to 1950 who were punished in a variety of ways, not just by corporal punishment. All these cases had been recorded into annual registers by officials in Nairobi and then sent to the Colonial Office for review. Unfortunately, the registers are incomplete. I could not locate those for the years during World War II, though it is possible that officials in Kenya did not submit them. Although incomplete, the cases provide historians with a great deal of information: among other things, an offender’s age and ethnic background, the crime for which he was charged, and the location of the court where he stood trial, as well as the kind of punishment he received and its severity. I have used this wealth of information to provide rough sketches of those young men the colonial state found most threatening. The data provide