An Uncertain Age. Paul Ocobock
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who have been circumcised at [the] hospital are hated by their people because they did not go through the old customs.”81
Worthington positioned schooling as a “vital” and transformative moment in a child’s life, not unlike initiation itself. “It is unjust to extract a child from mission education,” Worthington argued, and “no break in education at such a vital time in the child’s life should occur.” Each in their own way, African initiation and Western religious education socialized the young and transformed boys into masculine, productive members of different sets of communities. However, for missionaries like Worthington, months of dancing, feasting, gift giving, and lessons in customary practice were a diabolical distraction from Bible study, literacy, and vocational training. These activities did not produce the kinds of masculinity or morals he wanted from his schoolboys. In much the same way as Methodist missionaries in South Africa, Worthington saw African initiation and Christian baptism as “both rituals of reproduction” and an “uncompromising choice between the past and the future, benighted damnation and enlightened salvation.”82 Eventually, his flock would have to choose. And when schoolboys chose to return home for initiation, they reminded missionaries of the limits of their authority and the need for a firmer hand—or, in Worthington’s case, at the very least, a kidnapping.83
Meru district commissioner Chamier could not have disagreed more. The Meru, he believed, were not hostile to education, but rather merely “bitter” that missionaries and government interfered with custom. In his letter to provincial commissioner Tate, he argued that “if respect for a missionary is only to be obtained by violent interference with tribal customs, the price is in my opinion too high to pay.”84 The district commissioner echoed the words Hobley had uttered five years earlier: the colonial state must respect African customs—at least the ones the British recognized—and maintain the authority of parents, elders, and chiefs or pay the ultimate price of detribalization.
Chamier was disheartened when provincial commissioner Tate weighed in on Worthington’s activities in Meru. Tate acknowledged the importance of initiation in the transition from childhood to manhood. He had, after all, dabbled in a little ethnographic research of his own a decade earlier as district commissioner in Kiambu. There he spent considerable time investigating the significance of initiation and cataloging a history of Gikuyu age-group names.85 However, Tate replied to Chamier that initiation should not jeopardize the far more vital endeavor of teaching a “rising generation [to] master their desires and impulses and to order their lives in a manner not only conducive to their eternal salvation but also more agreeable to civilised standards.”86 In Tate’s view, missionaries and colonial officers had partnered in a broader civilizing project, and African parents had to realize that “neither Missionary Societies nor Government will undertake the training of boys and girls unless the latter are to remain under their care in statu pupillai [sic] for the period of completing their education.” Tate’s vision of the colonial encounter and its relationships to male coming-of-age and generational authority marked a dramatic shift in policy outlined by Hobley only five years earlier in 1914. Tate laid out the position of the colonial state and missions vis-à-vis African young men and parents in the starkest of terms. When a father handed his son over to a priest or principal, willingly or unwillingly, he relinquished his authority and, by extension, his right to socialize, initiate, and discipline his son the way he saw fit. Missionaries and government officials might allow his son to return for initiation, but they were under no such obligation.
Worthington’s siege of a seclusion hut exposed two competing visions of the colonial state. Chamier saw the state as a conservator of the African customs and institutions that buttressed indirect rule. Tate saw the state as a catalyst of the civilizing mission, encouraging Africans to leave the reserve, convert to Christianity, and learn a trade. Each man had served in the Kenyan provincial administration for over a decade and yet found themselves, at least on this issue, in a battle for the soul of the colonial enterprise: Was its task the protection of “native paramountcy” or the moral uplift of its subjects? In some ways, Chamier’s conservatism would claim the 1920s and 1930s. Bruce Berman argues that the interwar provincial administration was a paternalistic, “conservative apparatus of control,” a “guardian bureaucracy” driven to stabilize and control the social and economic forces it had set in motion.87 Two of the most important institutions men like Chamier sought to protect were tribes and chiefs. “Obviously tribes could not be allowed to disintegrate,” as Brett Shadle nicely puts it. “Chiefs without tribes were not chiefs, and with neither chiefs nor tribes Indirect Rule, and colonial rule altogether, would collapse.”88 Nor could customs like initiation be questioned when they were so central to establishing a sense of place and legitimizing authority within a community.
However, missionaries like Worthington and social reformers back in Britain shook provincial administrators like Chamier from their dusty conservatism, forcing them to live up to the lofty goals of the civilizing mission. The battle over female initiation, particularly circumcision, was one of the most spectacular examples of colonial officials and chiefs pushed to tamper with African cultural life in the name of moral uplift. In the 1920s, several religious organizations in Kenya and parliamentarians in London pressured officials to limit and then outright abolish female circumcision.89 In response, the Central Province administration worked with local councils of chiefs to gradually alter female circumcision. Changes were small at first. Officials issued warnings that they would prosecute anyone who forced a girl to undergo circumcision against her will. They also ordered chiefs to reduce the amount of time communities spent initiating their children and lowered the age at which girls underwent initiation.90 Officials feared that girls faced the knife far too late in life, typically after reaching puberty, which encouraged them to have sex before marriage and abort unwanted pregnancies. The provincial administrators hoped that earlier initiations would prevent premarital sex, pregnancies, and abortions, which represented moral decay, looming demographic collapse, and future labor shortages.91
Families resisted these changes. In Kiambu, chiefs complained that when daughters began menstruating before the agreed-upon period of initiation, families clandestinely circumcised the girls themselves.92 The local council backed away from the limitations, permitting female circumcision throughout the year. In Meru, when faced with similar resistance, officials and chiefs aggressively enforced their rulings. When an uninitiated girl was discovered pregnant, police rounded up girls in the area and forcibly circumcised them.93 These campaigns robbed families of the right to initiate girls as they saw fit, and put the district officials in the position of enforcing the very custom they were meant to eradicate.
As the decade wore on, administrators continued to press local councils on female circumcision, families continued to bring girls before the knife as before, and Gikuyu political activists seized on these changes to attack the colonial state and its chiefs. In 1929, the Church of Scotland Mission, the African Inland Mission, the Salvation Army, and other religious organizations called for the end of female circumcision and compelled their congregants to forsake the institution. Most administrators in the districts, who had already done much to alter the practice of female circumcision, were reluctant to push the issue any further. Provincial commissioner E. B. Horne felt the policy toward female circumcision should be one of “masterly inactivity.”94 The ban infuriated the Gikuyu. In droves, congregants abandoned the most outspoken missions and established their own independent churches and schools. They also flocked to the Kikuyu Central Association, whose leadership had successfully turned the ban into a political lightning rod. Talk of a ban was quickly silenced, and the state retreated from many of the alterations it had made to female circumcision. The British had dabbled in welfare and moral uplift and was met with a ferocious response, sowing the seeds of future political discontent.95
All the while, as the most outspoken missionaries sought an end to girls’ circumcisions, they quietly carried them out on boys back at their mission stations. Control over young men’s genitals never aroused the same political furor. Neither the state nor missionaries tried to ban male circumcision, such a thing was simply unimaginable. Susan Pedersen has argued that the British hesitated to ban male circumcision in Kenya because they were unsure how they would then handle the issue of Jews and Muslims living in their colonies.96