An Uncertain Age. Paul Ocobock
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and educational instruction augmented the moral lessons of initiation. Anthony King’etich, who attended the Kabianga government school where about 22 percent of his classmates had been medically circumcised, firmly stated that “instructions in schools and churches were in tandem with what the menjo teaches, so what they don’t get in the menjo they get in schools.”135 Schoolboys became warriors of a different class, armed with literacy and vocational skills rather than shields and spears, prepared to do battle in the labor market rather than in livestock raids. Those who faced the knife early and then left home to work for wages discovered the possibility of earning their own currency, paying their own dowry, and starting their own households—with or without the help or consent of fathers. The manipulation of initiation practices by the elder state encouraged young men to reconsider, in very familiar ways, how they earned and expressed age and gender.136
But boys and young men also found this new terrain littered with new obstacles. The colonial encounter had introduced new actors who claimed authority over them. Chiefs, missionaries, schoolteachers, and a host of other government officials joined fathers and elder kin in an effort to control the activities and behavior of young men. In 1927, the acting governor of Kenya, Edward Deuhaur, warned that young schoolboys and migrant laborers “undoubtedly enjoy the immunity given them from tribal restraint, the opportunity afforded them of mixing with their seniors and of seeing something of town life.” Yet he also warned that young Africans found themselves ensnared in a tightly controlled disciplinary regimen: “They are surrounded by sanctions of every description from early youth.”137
These sanctions had been the product of intense arguments begun at the very start of the colonial encounter like those between the Meru elders, Reverend Worthington, Commissioner Chamier, and the schoolboy who chose to sit in seclusion instead of school. In their effort to identify, mediate, and reify the boundaries of parental and colonial authority, the British blended the two together. The elder state, in this instance provincial administrators and chiefs, expanded and legitimized their tenuous authority by accessing the power of age they believed inherent in African communities. Manipulating male initiation became one of the first and most potent ways the elder state exerted itself—all in an effort to direct and discipline the energies of young men. Over time, young men adapted these changes to meet their own goals of proving their masculinity, enjoying their youth, and eventually earning their maturity.
2
“I Wanted to Make Something of Myself”
Migration, Wage Labor, and Earning an Age
THERE WAS SIMPLY no precedent for it. In 1917, before the bench of the Mombasa resident magistrate stood ten-year-old houseboy Izaji Mamuji and his employer, Mzee bin Ali. They were at odds over a contract.1 The case perplexed Chief Justice Robert W. Hamilton and Judge George H. Pickering of the high court. At issue was whether a child had the right to enter into and abide by a contract. Izaji worked as Mzee bin Ali’s houseboy in Mombasa, earning three shillings a month plus clothing and food. No colonial law had been written in regard to whether an African as young as ten had control over his own labor. The 1910 Master and Servants Ordinance, which laid out rules for apprenticeships, offered little assistance. A contract for domestic service was not an apprenticeship. So they turned to English common law. Drawing on a 1911 order-in-council, Hamilton and Pickering ruled that a contract could be upheld if the work benefited the boy. In Izaji’s case, they claimed it did and ruled that his contract should stand. Crown counsel disagreed. Izaji’s contract was void because the boy’s father had the right to disavow the contract. No one should tamper, counsel argued, with the power of a parent over a son’s labor. Izaji Mamuji v. Mzee bin Ali exposed the early elder state’s uncertainty as to where the authority over a young African’s labor lay. Three years before, provincial administrators along the coast had mediated the struggle between parents and missionaries, and now the judiciary grappled with tensions between parents, employers, and sons-turned-employees. Hamilton and Pickering granted a young ten-year-old boy agency over his own labor, while Crown counsel warned of the potentially destabilizing effects of weakened parental authority.
The case of Izaji Mamuji v. Mzee bin Ali lay nestled between the 1927 correspondences of labor inspectors and district officials in Western Kenya.2 What was it doing there, a decade out of time and miles out of place? Officials in the western districts had dredged up the case file looking for guidance as to their role in the migration of young men out of the reserves and onto the tea, sisal, and other estates scattered across the colony. A decade might have passed, but provincial administrators and labor officials still fretted over whether boys had a right to their own labor and whether the state and parents had any say in the matter.
Despite its anxieties, the elder state worked tirelessly to push, and sometimes coerce, young African men into the wage labor market. In Western Kenya, between the 1920s and early 1950s, the recruitment of young African men to work on settler estates intensified negotiations among the young, their elders, recruiters, employers, and the state. Recruitment became one of the most common and successful means of drawing young men into the labor market. As recruiters reached into African homesteads, provincial administrators began to fear that putting young men to work far from home might weaken generational authority or awaken international outrage. Provincial administrators and their colleagues in the labor and medical departments tried to exert some control over the rush for African labor in Western Kenya, but more often than not, their actions accelerated the process. Throughout the period, the elder state did just enough to silence criticism from the metropole and muffle the concerns of parents worried about migrant sons. It created labor laws specifically for young people to define who could and could not work based on age, to curtail the abuses of the recruitment system, to inspect workplaces, and to ultimately fine the worst employers. Regardless of these regulatory efforts, the colonial state never seriously questioned young men’s decisions to work. As sons and fathers debated the merits of migrant labor, the British sided decisively with young men entering the colonial economy. As a result, the elder state swung back and forth between regulating the welfare of young laborers while pushing them into the labor market.
Young men were themselves the greatest catalyst for the migration of labor out of Western Kenya and into settler estates, agricultural industries, and towns. Age and gender figured prominently in their decisions to leave home, work for wages, and then spend their hard-earned shillings. They viewed their mobility, financial independence, knowledge, networks, and distance from elder surveillance as new ways to enjoy their youth, rethink manliness, and come of age. Their migration and work instigated intense arguments with their age-mates and elders. Sons viewed their newfound financial independence and distance from family as a chance to express their growing senses of manhood in new ways outside of kinship. This cultural deviance attracted the ire of fathers and elders who nervously contemplated a future in which younger generations had abandoned their villages and forgotten their familial responsibilities. Yet some sons did return home, often with earnings in hand, willing to contribute to the household or rely on fathers to purchase livestock on their behalf. Some boys used their time as migrant laborers to indicate their readiness for initiation and manhood. Migrant labor complicated arguments within households, but it did not always erode the significance of age-relations. Above all, it provided yet another interface for the elder state to enter into and weigh in on debates about age-relations with African communities.
“RAWEST AND MOST IGNORANT OF YOUTHS”
The principal directive of the colonial state in Kenya was to ensure the profitability of the settler economy and produce goods that nourished Britons and their empire. The British were in search of able-bodied men to fill an ever-expanding list of occupations: carpenters and clerks, policemen and postmen, house servants and field hands. To fill these posts, the colonial state levied its authority, often violently, to pull African communities out of subsistence and push them into the wage labor market. At first, most Africans resisted the lure of paltry wages, miserable working conditions, and travel far from home. But gradually, tens of thousands, most of them young men, entered the workforce. After absorbing the infrastructure of the Imperial British East Africa Company in 1895, the British forcefully exercised their authority inland. They did so in part by constructing a railway connecting