An Uncertain Age. Paul Ocobock
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seclusion to become junior warriors of a mumo, a set of youths. Over the next six or so years, they spent their days dancing, singing, and devoting themselves to military activities.57 Their time as warriors became a way to “divert their excess energies and their strength to more profitable channels, such as raiding Maasai stock, and thereby enriching the family.”58 Out west, Maasai and Samburu initiates became moran and lived apart from the community in separate compounds known as manyattas, out of which they trained, prepared stock raids, and enjoyed the luxuries bestowed upon them as warriors. Communities who had to defend against Maasai moran raids, such as the Kipsigis and Nandi, prepared their own young warriors fresh out of the menjo for raids and counterraids of their own.59
Third, African communities experienced and British officials understood coming-of-age as a series of intense generational relationships. Each step in the journey from initiation to seclusion and on into warriorhood depended on young men’s relations with older generations.60 Pastoralist communities such as the Kipsigis, Nandi, Maasai, and Samburu organized generational life around age-groups created at periodic intervals, which formed a progressive, cyclical pattern of advancement. The decision to initiate a new group of boys into junior warriors depended on the willingness of elder men to make way for the new generation. Among the Kipsigis, elders decided to start a new age-group every fifteen years or so, each with its own name.61 During the next fifteen-year cycle, boys would be initiated into the newest age-group. Eventually, this group would be closed, giving rise to yet another one, pushing all other age-groups upward along an ever-moving axis of age and time.62 Consider Thomas Kisigei, a Kipsigis living near Sotik; he claims to have been one of the last initiates into the Chuma age-group. He faced the knife in 1947, during the solar eclipse that passed over southern Kenya.63 At the moment of his initiation, the Chuma group closed its doors to new initiates. As Thomas and his fellow Chuma, who had been initiated years before, entered junior warriorhood, the age-group that had once occupied that position, known as Maina, also moved upward, becoming senior warriors. To make room for the Maina, the group that had once been senior warriors graduated into elderhood.
Creating and closing age-groups required all men to acquiesce to change—but not always willingly. Occasionally uninitiated Kipsigis or junior warriors struggled, sometimes violently, to get the generation above them to relinquish their position. Movement upward through Maasai society was not automatic either. Junior moran had to prove their value to and respect of their elders to progress to positions of senior warriorhood and beyond. This was often accomplished through violent outbursts of indiscipline and direct challenges to the authority of elders. Rebelliousness was an essential component of the Maasai system of age-graduation.64 To signal that they, too, had the grit and guts to endure initiation, Gikuyu boys performed endless dances of a distinctly loud and militant manner until parents became so annoyed that they gladly consented to initiation.65 However, these “rituals of rebellion” never materialized into full-scale generational revolutions whereby the young permanently overturned elder authority.66
Finally, ethnographers and colonial officials fixated on the power elders had over the young and the intense stratification among generations. Elder men and women demanded obedience, service in time of conflict, and legitimacy of their authority. They decided when and how to initiate sons and daughters.67 They wielded the ritual violence of the circumcision knife. They conducted the lessons in seclusion. They held the keys to maturity and future elder power. Acquiescence and complicity were as much a part of age-relations as disobedience and rebellion. Kenyatta forcefully argued that among the Gikuyu, the youngest generations were without doubt subservient to elder groups.68 For the Maasai of Matapato, Spencer argues that “delay and denial” were “built into the system. It is elders who . . . cultivate the popular awareness of the process of time, and hence the perception of time itself, and of maturity among younger men and women.”69 Although young men enjoyed an egalitarian spirit within their age-group, “to acquire a sense of being a Maasai, is to enter into this premise of age inequality from the bottom rung and ultimately to have a role in perpetuating it as one climbs upward.”70 Whether Maasai or Gikuyu, young men were “suspended somewhere between boyhood and full adulthood,” and while they enjoyed their youth, they also held on to the promise that one day their elders would help them fulfill their ultimate dream of adulthood.71
This promise, this elder-sponsored path toward adulthood, was sometimes very explicitly expressed to young men. After a Meru boy’s circumcision, he returned to his father’s homestead. There his father greeted him and announced: “My son, as I have agreed to allow you to be circumcised, I also pledged to get you a wife. My son, I pledged to you a sword, spear, club, and shield for use when going out to fight. My son, I pledged you an ewe and heifer for your in-laws.”72 No clearer statement could have been made regarding the stakes of a disciplined, obedient coming-of-age. A Meru father said, in the starkest of terms: “Respect me and obey me, and I will prepare you for manhood.” Gikuyu fathers, John Lonsdale argues, “worked for their sons, earning the next generation’s bridewealth [, and] juniors, children, and clients, were expected to give obedience in return.”73 Mothers worked for their sons, too, as did sisters, whose marriages fetched the dowries that would be reinvested in a brother’s marriage.74 In many ways, the entire family labored to ensure that a son matured and started his own family. During colonial rule, and perhaps long before, boys reached manhood and young men reached adulthood through their willingness to accept their families’ efforts, and, if need be, the families exerted a little pressure to help them get there.
As British officials and missionaries came to understand and imagine the cultural significance of circumcision and seclusion as well as the politics of age-relations, they looked for ways to manipulate these forces. Their pursuit to harness the energies of young men and possess the authority of elders had profound implications for the African experience of colonial rule. To alter initiation practices or the time in seclusion; to tip the delicate scales in favor of one generation over another; to subsume the power of generational authority into the state or mission station altered how young men spent their youth, expressed masculinity, and strove for maturity.
DRAWING ARBITRARY LINES
When Reverend Worthington began circumcising young converts in Meru, he participated in a long-standing practice among missionaries in Kenya. Missionaries did not initially advertise themselves as purveyors of an alternative form of initiation, nor did African parents and elders imbue them with any authority on the matter. That did not prevent them from assisting with initiation, even if unintentionally. In 1909, Reverend V. V. Verbi, of the Church Missionary Society station at Wusi, noted, “My medical knowledge had been useful [and] many circumcision cases have been brought to me.”75 The reverend became so successful in aiding parents whose sons and daughters suffered infection that local circumcision operators complained to him that he was stealing their profits. Converts also pressured missionaries to permit the practice and persuaded them to carry it out at the stations.76 Those who had been orphans, outcasts, or emancipated slaves would have had few alternatives to receive initiation and looked to their new religious community.77 Together, missionaries, parents whose children suffered from botched circumcisions, and orphans took the first steps in connecting missions to the powerful cultural work of initiation. In doing so, they introduced new frontiers along which ideas about and relationships of gender and generation could be tested.78
Yet some missionaries like Reverend Worthington took this first step further. Worthington saw his role in circumcision as a way to replace the lessons learned in seclusion with those in the classroom. He argued that Meru elders and district commissioner Chamier did “violence to the convictions of those of our number who wish to undergo the ceremony under Christian influences.”79 His converts had the right to choose where they became men and women and to whom they turned to circumcise them. If they chose his mission, then Worthington felt no obligation to send them home. He was merely accommodating the desires of his flock, Christianizing African initiation to bring it under his supervision.80 This became a common strategy among Catholic and Protestant missionaries. They simply offered to circumcise converts or allowed them to return home for circumcision as long as they did not dance, sing, or enter seclusion. For members of the mission,