An Uncertain Age. Paul Ocobock
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and community life with the rigors of regimented military service.115
Across the colony, the shift to earlier initiations of much younger boys also played a role in maintaining law and order. Ethnographers of the Gikuyu claimed, with near unanimity, that boys had been initiated in the past between the ages of fifteen and eighteen.116 Louis Leakey, one of the most active chroniclers of Gikuyu custom, stressed that elders told him circumcision could not take place before the age of seventeen.117 Over the course of colonial rule, the age of male Gikuyu initiates fell to around thirteen or fifteen, even younger in some cases.118 By the mid-1930s, chiefs in Central Province complained that boys faced the knife far too early.119 Farther west, the age at which Kipsigis boys underwent initiation also fell dramatically. Groups that came of age just after the turn of the century, such as Nyonge, were initiated at twenty to twenty-five years of age.120 But by the time Chumo and Sawe initiates entered the menjo in the 1930s and 1950s, they were only in their mid-teens.121
When British conquest ended the reign of warriors, fathers no longer needed to wait for their sons to physically mature so that they might defend the community or raid for livestock. Colonial rule had enabled willing families to initiate their sons at an earlier age and push them into the labor market so that they might earn enough wages to pay tax, fulfill compulsory labor requirements, and add to the family income. Moreover, the British hoped that young laborers would be more pliable to employer demands. In the 1930s, H. E. Lambert, who would later write on the subject of Gikuyu social institutions, was asked by the chief native commissioner about foreseeable problems with early male circumcision. According to Lambert, late-age initiation had dangerous psychological effects on young men. The results, to Lambert’s thinking, took the “form of mental stultification, sexual aberration [as well as] imbecility and criminality.” The older the initiate, Lambert mused, the more restless and violent he became to gain access to the rights and responsibilities associated with adulthood. Earlier initiations, he argued, might prevent boys from future indiscipline.122
In addition to shifting the timing of initiation and shortening seclusion to encourage young men to labor, colonial officials used initiation to discipline their behavior. Among pastoralist communities like the Kipsigis, Maasai, Nandi, and Samburu, junior and senior warriors had not dissipated as quickly as they had done among the Gikuyu or integrated as easily into the colonial police and military as the Kamba.123 Warrior moran continued to meet, dance, raid for cattle, and occasionally irk district administrators. The rituals of rebellion that made moran manly and worthy of warriorship had become liabilities. Armed with a maturing understanding of the progress by which generations succeeded one another, district officials sought to turn the graduation of age-groups to their advantage. They forcibly and prematurely transitioned young moran out of warriorship and into settled lives as adults, reverse engineering rituals of rebellion into a punitive regime.
From the turn of the century until World War I, moran had worked well with the British. They grew wealthy in cattle by raiding and skirmishing with neighboring communities the colonial state had pacified. But by the 1920s, having suffered debilitating cattle epidemics, land alienation to European settlers, and forced relocations, Maasai relations with the British soured. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, burdened by fines for stock theft and pressures of forced labor orders and education, junior moran participated in a series of violent outbursts directed at the colonial state and its intermediaries. Maasai elders, fearful of further uprisings and retaliation by the colonial state, purposefully shortened the period of junior warriorhood following circumcision. They activated the initiation of new age-groups much earlier to force troublesome groups of moran out of junior status and into premature adulthood. By the late 1930s, Maasai boys were not simply circumcised at a younger age but also remained active moran for only a short time. Moreover, warriorhood became a privilege, not a right, dictated by whether young men obeyed and met the expectations of elders and district officials.124
The provincial administration overseeing Samburu areas used similar techniques to rein in the activities of warrior Samburu. Over the course of colonial rule, an “alliance of convenience” developed between elders and administrators.125 From the 1920s onward, district commissioners tried to prevent Samburu moran from cattle raiding and murdering neighboring Turkana warriors by imposing collective fines on livestock and confiscating weapons. In 1936, district commissioner H. B. Sharpe, frustrated by continuing raids, demanded that elders activate the initiation of a new age-group to push the current moran into early maturity. The move also sent a message to the incoming age-group that such could be their fate if they, too, disobeyed the colonial state. Sharpe’s ultimate aim: keep the number of moran low, keep them young, and keep them under constant threat of losing their right to warrior status.
According to Peristiany, colonial officials in the 1920s ended the Kipsigis ceremony by which age-groups transitioned upward because they did not want young men gathering together with weapons. While the ceremony itself was ended, the administration, in conjunction with elders, continued to initiate new age-groups to discipline young warriors. In the late 1920s, “disheartened” Kipsigis elders hastily inaugurated the new Chuma group to pass the disorderly young men of the Maina age-group into premature adulthood.126 Elders halved what would have been a seven-year period of junior warriorship for the Maina. Nandi elders also closed the period of Maina initiation early when junior warriors became a nuisance to the district commissioner.127
Having succeeded in experimenting with the ways boys experienced initiation, district officials and chiefs were caught off guard by unintended consequences. Once boys of tender years faced the knife, they suddenly had access to the rights and obligations of men. Even H. E. Lambert, who had argued for early initiation, warned that circumcising younger initiates might lead to an entire generation of boys claiming the privileges of adult men.128 Early initiation produced initiates sometimes younger than thirteen claiming the right to have sex, drink alcohol, leave home in search of work, and, more terrifying still, expecting the right to marry, accumulate livestock, and own land. The provincial administration had strayed from its supposed conservative principles, reengineering African cultural life to push young men into the labor market and punish their behavior. Elders and the British began to worry that they had accelerated the very socioeconomic uncertainties they were meant to slow down.
CONCLUSION
“The spirit of manhood in the youth,” wrote Jomo Kenyatta in his ethnography of the Gikuyu, “has been almost killed by the imposition of imperialistic rule.”129 The pacification of Kenya, the introduction of Christianity and Western education, and the recruitment of young men into the labor market had transformed how young men spent the liminal period between initiation and marriage—almost, at least. The “spirit of manhood” had not been snuffed out entirely. It simply found expression in different ways. The men who experienced the changes instigated by the elder state defiantly declared that their coming-of-age had been no different than their forefathers’.
When asked how his initiation compared to those who had come before him, Thomas Tamutwa bluntly replied: “It was the same.”130 John Kiptalam Tesot concurred, “The teachings in the menjo remained the same,” despite the period being shortened. “We all traveled the same road,” he said.131 His friend and neighbor Daniel Langat recalled that “life was the same; there were no differences in the way our grandfathers, fathers, and we lived as young men.”132 Looking back to that time, many men argued that in spite of such dramatic changes, the core values of initiation remained unchanged. When pressed further to explain how elders could instill, in such young boys, the knowledge necessary to become men in such short periods of time, many admitted that elders had indeed sacrificed some aspects of initiation. Elders had abandoned certain practices such as traveling to the homesteads of kin to exchange gifts and training for military combat.133
But, as many men acknowledged, just as they gave up some aspects of initiation, they also gained new ones. “It was the same” because they had also found meaning in the new possibilities opened up by the colonial encounter. They “all traveled the same road” because these new possibilities reinforced the lessons of seclusion or allowed them to continue expressing their manly mettle.134 Those men who endured shorter initiation ceremonies