An Uncertain Age. Paul Ocobock
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city of Mombasa to ivory traders near the shores of Lake Victoria.3 To build the rail lines, the British imported thousands of laborers from British India and conscripted many young men from surrounding communities. Scouting ahead of the railway, the British drove columns of young African soldiers and porters on expeditions of conquest. They established forts along the future path of the railway, secured alliances with agreeable local leaders, and subjugated unenthusiastic ones.4
Rail lines and conquests were costly, and the British sought a way to make the territory profitable. Parts of the colony were incredibly fertile, especially along the Rift Valley. Prior to the turn of the century, communities like the Gikuyu, Kipsigis, and Maasai had used the soil to their advantage. Their herds and farms prospered. They sold their surplus foodstuffs and livestock to traveling Swahili caravans, slave traders, and eventually the colonial state. And as these communities thrived, families expanded out into the frontier, founding new households, farms, and herds.5 Rather than rely on the expertise of these local agriculturalists and pastoralists, as they had done in Gold Coast and other colonies, the British transformed Kenya into a settler colony. Beginning in 1902, they encouraged European and white South African émigrés to settle farms and grow cash crops. Colonial surveyors segregated the landscape, carving out the choicest portions for European settlement and then confining African communities to reserves.6 Settlers were then offered thousands of acres of the most fertile land near Nairobi stretching north and west into the Rift Valley. Those African families, especially the Maasai, Gikuyu, and later the Kipsigis, who had lived in areas alienated to European farmers were evicted from their homes and moved onto reserves or offered a chance to remain as squatters.
Communities unaffected by settler evictions, especially in Nyanza Province west of the Rift Valley, had little motivation to permanently enter the wage labor market. Their agricultural and pastoral pursuits remained profitable and temporary; seasonal wage labor paid taxes and supplemented incomes. British officials lamented the intransigence of would-be African laborers. In 1907, director of agriculture A. C. MacDonald complained that “the native . . . will only engage himself for a month or at most two. If the work is not to his liking he may take himself off quietly at the end of a week.”7 And even if an African laborer fulfilled his contract, he then “returns to the Native Reserve to spend a ten or eleven months holiday and the farmer has to take on a fresh batch of the rawest and most ignorant of youths, when ground has to be cultivated, seeds sown and crops harvested.” These “raw, ignorant youths” proved a hindrance to MacDonald’s ideas of efficient agricultural production. They came untrained, earned just enough to purchase livestock, and returned only when they ran out of money.8 In order to make labor more regular and permanent, officials like MacDonald believed the state had to pry open the reserves and draw out African labor with a firmer hand.
Steadily, the number of Africans working away from home grew from 5,000 in 1903 to 120,000 in 1923.9 Part of this change reflected several strategies the British employed to draw out labor. First, they relied on the heavy hands of local chiefs, often only recently installed themselves, to compel young men into the labor market. Eager to secure their political positions, African chiefs traveled from village to village rounding up laborers by any means necessary.10 Under pressure from chiefs, fathers often turned to their children to fulfill compulsory labor demands, which, when discovered by missionaries like Archdeacon Owen, embroiled British authorities in international scandal.11
Second, British officials turned to taxation. The hut tax required married men to pay for the number of homes in their compounds. It targeted the wealth of older men who might send their young male dependents into the labor market and then use their wages to pay the tax. Officials also introduced the poll tax, targeting young, unmarried men over the age of sixteen.12 Almost immediately, district officials struggled to determine who was sixteen years of age and eligible to pay. They examined would-be laborers for circumcision to determine whether or not they were old enough to work. The same generation of provincial administrators who pressured families to initiate their sons at a much earlier age also used male initiation to determine whether those same young sons should pay the poll tax. By the 1930s, parents and even some chiefs complained that boys faced the knife too early, ended up on the tax register, and then had to work at too tender an age.13
A third strategy was the continued eviction of families off their land. Before World War I, European emigrants settled on grazing lands used by the Maasai and farmland tended by Gikuyu. In the interwar years, as land seizures spread west, Kipsigis and Nandi also lost their lands to British war veterans and large agricultural firms. Many African heads of household, especially among the landless, chose to move onto European estates as squatters. Squatters spent part of their days tending a settler’s livestock, cash crops, or household. In exchange for their labor, squatters gained access to plots of land where they grew their own foodstuffs and grazed their own herds. An entire squatter family, including young sons and daughters, balanced work between their household and that of their employers. Before and during the interwar years, squatting was an attractive, profitable arrangement, so much so that poor, landless young men in the reserves sought out work as squatters.14 With their profits, they expanded herds and even hired laborers to increase production.15 In the Gikuyu reserves, some of the first to set off for European estates were landless tenants who had worked the farms of their wealthier Gikuyu neighbors. Others saw the estates as a means to escape burdensome taxation, compulsory labor, and tense familial relationships.
While many African families settled into work as squatters, others entered the wage labor market as seasonal migrants.16 After their own crops had been planted and harvested in the reserves, they traveled to settler estates and hired themselves out on temporary contracts. Rather than bring their families with them, these employees left home alone or with a few male kin and worked for a short while. Once their contracts expired, they either signed up for another or returned home. Many estates used a combination of squatter and migrant labor. During the interwar years, a growing number of settlers and large-scale agricultural industries began relying more heavily on migrant contract labor. Settler estates located near African reserves could rely on short-distance commuter labor. European farms in areas without nearby African settlements, especially the sisal industry, required workers brought from farther afield. Moreover, larger British agricultural firms had been attracted to Kenya to produce cash crops like sisal and tea. These firms purchased vast tracts of land, invested heavily to expand production, and intensified demand for larger numbers of African migrant laborers, especially during the harvest season.17
By the 1920s, African curiosity, compulsory labor drives, taxation, evictions, and a growing list of labor laws alone were not enough to meet the demands of large agricultural industries and more sure-footed settlers. In response, a fourth means of drawing young African men into the labor market reached new heights: professional and private recruitment. The networks of recruitment that developed in Central, Rift Valley, and Nyanza Provinces relied on a coalition of interests: the creative strategies of ignominious recruiters and employers as well as the emerging desire of young men to earn a wage. The elder state tried to exercise some control over recruitment and mitigate the scandal that resulted if Britons discovered young Africans were spirited away to work in sisal mills—all the while encouraging the young to leave home and work.
“SCOURING THE DISTRICTS”
Recruitment became one of the most influential techniques to draw out African labor in Kenya. From their earliest years on the coast, the British recruited laborers to work on clove plantations in Mombasa and Zanzibar.18 As the railway wound its way through Central Kenya, and forts and farms bloomed along the route, European and Asian recruiting agencies scoured Kamba and Gikuyu villages for young men. In 1908, the colonial state ordered that recruitment should be left largely to market forces—a combination of settler demand, recruiter persuasion, and African curiosity.19 Wary to be seen compelling Africans to work directly for private enterprise, British officials hoped professional recruiters would fill the void. And they did. From 1913 to 1914, an estimated 74 percent of Africans out working had been recruited.20 By the end of World War I, the vast majority of young men in Machakos, Kitui, and Kiambu had engaged with a labor recruiter.21
Yet the British were wary of throwing open