An Uncertain Age. Paul Ocobock
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in April 1914 to ascertain when the young became independent of their elders. The chief secretary prefaced his request by writing that he was “strongly of the opinion that native minors of both sexes should remain under the control of their parents during the period of their minority and that they should not be permitted to leave that control without express sanction.”12 In short, the British colonial state and its African intermediaries should not allow children to leave their families. But if commissioners could determine a definitive moment in which children came of age, then the state might allow them the freedom to leave home and attach themselves to a mission station, join the ranks of the tribal police, or work on a settler’s sisal farm.
As field reports trickled in, it became clear that no two ethnic communities along the coast were exactly alike or two district commissioners in agreement. The district commissioner of Mombasa did not even bother to ask local intermediaries. Rather, he felt that the Indian Penal Code, from which the protectorate took its laws, sufficiently fixed the end of male childhood at fourteen years of age and the end of female childhood at sixteen. Bending to African custom, he argued, merely weakened the penal code, thereby “rendering inoperative” imperial rule of law.13 Other commissioners, eager to dabble in a little ethnographic research, did pose the chief secretary’s question to local elders. The commissioners at Shimoni and Rabai learned that among the Nyika, puberty and marriage determined the transition from childhood to adulthood, and this usually occurred between the ages of fifteen and nineteen. The Rabai commissioner added that coming of age did not depend solely on the age of a boy or a girl, but rather the wealth of his or her family. Well-to-do fathers could marry children off at an early age, usually at fifteen, while poor parents withheld marriage, sometimes until nineteen or older. Colonial taxation, he noted, had forced parents to marry children earlier so that they could use dowry to pay off their taxes. Both commissioners saw a young man’s coming-of-age as highly adaptable to economic conditions. Given this flexibility, they felt that boys should be allowed to leave home at any time, as long as they had parental consent.14
The commissioner at Malindi offered a much different perspective. He argued that an African child “does not come of age in our sense of the word,” nor was there a precise moment when parents relinquished authority over children. The commissioner at Njale concurred. No young Giriama, he argued, was ever independent of his or her elders. Strict generational control ensured that no child at any age left his or her parents behind without consulting them first. Both men believed that parental consent and unbending generational authority lay at the heart of African social life. If the chief secretary wanted young people to ever be truly free of their elder kin, then the colonial state would have to draw an “arbitrary line.”15
Despite these differences of opinion, a consensus formed around four significant points. First the commissioners believed that African boys did in fact come of age, though the timing depended on the community’s fortunes and customary practices. They also identified initiation and marriage as the two most pivotal moments in a young man’s life, precise markers differentiating childhood from adulthood. Initiation graduated boys into manhood and an interstitial space before adulthood that introduced a host of new responsibilities. Marriage matriculated them into adulthood as they began their own families. Third, commissioners sanctified parental authority as essential to controlling young men who had left childhood but not yet settled down into adulthood. Finally, they positioned the state as the guarantor of the rights of parents over their children, of the rights of the old over the young.
Once the district commissioners’ reports were in, the final word fell to their superior, provincial commissioner Charles Hobley. Hobley argued that young African men and women might come of age through initiation, but they never really became independent of family life and generational authority. Girls, he argued, merely passed from the control of one male, the father, to another male, the husband. As for boys, marriage provided the pivotal moment of independence; yet, even then, they remained beholden to their fathers and the new families they created. To reject the “definite duties toward his clan and family” because he “wanders off permanently to a Mission or a town” put a young man at risk. “He may become automatically detribalized,” Hobley warned, “and cannot according to native law claim to come back and participate in the division of the family wealth at his father’s death.”16 To allow a young African man to stray from his age-defined duties so he could join a mission or enter the migrant labor market might, Hobley argued, unravel the entire structure of generational authority and African social life.
For Hobley, the authority of fathers over sons, of parents over children, and of seniors over juniors was an essential component of African and colonial order. The task of his provincial administration was to preserve generational authority. Hobley stressed that as “the question of control of the family is so fundamentally connected with the whole organization of an African tribe, I would strongly urge [. . .] that each case be dealt with [. . .] by the District Officer, the matter being mutually arranged between the guardian and the other party.”17 District authorities, with their knowledge of local norms, must partner with parents and elders to maintain the harness of generational authority to which the young were yoked. To favor the Indian Penal Code or any other non-African legal structure over the authority of parents and elders, to even imagine a scenario by which young men were free of parental responsibility, risked detribalization. And yet Hobley and some of his commissioners ignored the creativity and contingency in the institutions of age and family life that allowed parents in time of crisis to pawn a starving daughter or send a son to a Christian mission for education.
The district commissioner’s findings and Hobley’s caution were also refracted through their own ideas about age, ones that had undergone very recent renovation back in Britain. Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the British embraced the idea, drawn from biologists and burgeoning fields of social science like child psychology, that a distinct phase of the life course existed between childhood and adulthood, one marked by growing independence. Words such as adolescent, juvenile, and youth became first scientific and then cultural ideas, created so they could be studied, understood, and ultimately controlled. By 1914, a vast literature describing the age between childhood and adulthood had been published, and new legislation to regulate it had been passed in Britain, Europe, and the United States.18
The young, especially men, were characterized by a near limitless energy as well as an inability to cope with their rapid physiological and psychological development. Yet when all that kinetic, unstable energy was bottled up or misdirected, it led to indiscipline, delinquency, and rebelliousness. This potential for disorder made young men all the more fascinating and frightening to social scientists and reformers, leaving girls well outside their scholarly field of view. When young men succumbed to this baser nature, it was often because they lacked firm familial discipline and had come into contact with destabilizing influences outside the home. This interstitial period between childhood and adulthood quickly became associated with all manner of socioeconomic ills: poverty, urbanization, and criminality, as well as a breakdown of the family, of tradition, and of an idyllic, rural past.19
Yet this new age could also be “the new ‘raw material’ of the future [and] a potentially awesome power.”20 Channeled and controlled by the state, young men could build nations, expand empires, and reinforce racial and national superiorities. For the British these had been hard-won lessons learned on the battlefield of Southern Africa. Stunned by their near failure in the Second Boer War, the British witnessed the possibilities of imperial collapse and national weakness.21 Emerging from the besieged town of Mafeking, the so-called savior of the British effort against the Boers, Robert Baden-Powell, returned home with a solution to British anxieties: the mobilization of the young.22 As Baden-Powell encouraged his readers in Scouting for Boys, “We must all be bricks in the wall of that great edifice—the British Empire—and we must be careful that we do not let our differences of opinion on politics or other questions grow so strong as to divide us. We must still stick shoulder to shoulder as Britons if we want to keep our present position among the nations.”23 Young men became a means to reinvigorate British masculinity, militarism, imperial purpose, and racial superiority. Years later, during World War I, ideas about age and youth were on the tips of tongues the world over as European nations channeled