An Uncertain Age. Paul Ocobock
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reserves to unregulated privateers. The Master and Servants Ordinance created the position of labor agents: individuals or firms appointed to serve as middlemen between recruiters and employers. In theory, labor agencies eased the burdens on provincial administrators by issuing recruiter permits, recording the number of men leaving the districts, and protecting the reserves from being overrun by too many privateers. For their part, district and labor officials tried to systematize recruitment by creating labor camps where recruiters had to bring laborers for inspection before sending them to employers. In reality, labor agencies often participated in recruitment and colonial officials did not cope with the sheer number of recruiters operating in and laborers traveling out of the reserves.
Nowhere were officials more inundated by recruiters and recruits or more aggravated by abusive recruitment practices than in 1920s Western Kenya. As labor demands reached new heights after World War I, all eyes turned toward the reserves of Nyanza and Rift Valley Provinces. By 1923, 75 percent of registered recruiters in the colony operated out of Nyanza Province.22 Around the same time, communities out west had become more receptive to seasonal migrant labor. Although the creation of reserves ended their ability to expand their holdings, less land had been taken from them than from their Maasai and Gikuyu neighbors. Families of Kipsigis, Luo, or Gusii had little reason to leave their reserves to become squatters on European estates. Instead, households sent out their boys and young men to work in the hopes that their income would supplement household wealth and pay taxes. Most young men went out confident they could still rely on one day inheriting their fathers’ farms and herds.
Before World War I, thousands of young recruits passed through the Kisumu labor camp. Linked by rail and road to Mombasa and Nairobi, the camp served as a base of operations for labor agents and recruiters. Young laborers were forwarded from the camp by train or lorry to employers in Kericho, the White Highlands, Nairobi, and as far as the sisal estates near the coast. Between January and March 1914, more than four thousand African men passed through the camp—this during the recruiting off-season when men usually stayed home to harvest their own crops.23 Africans despised the Kisumu labor camp. The journey was arduous and, for a few, fatal. Many arrived at Kisumu with sleeping sickness, malaria, and other diseases. Fearful that recruiters would load the sick or dying onto cattle cars and send them out east, British officials required that all laborers undergo medical examination. Africans resented the intrusive exams, unexplained vaccinations, and detention in overcrowded conditions. Worse still, if they were declared unfit, they were expected to return home on their own. Of the four thousand men who passed through the camp in the first three months of 1914, medical officers denied work to nearly six hundred.
District and labor officials saw all this as a success. By 1919, the chief native commissioner noted that because of the system, the government registered most labor coming out of the region and outfitted them with work passes. Nyanza recruitment was a vast improvement, he argued, over practices in Coast and Central Provinces. But by the mid-1920s, the strings colonial officials pulled to control Nyanza recruitment frayed. High on their list of complaints: the rising number of underage Africans passing through the Kisumu labor camp. In March 1925, the assistant district commissioner inspected the 10:30 a.m. train out of Kisumu. On board he found “a number of uncontracted totos [children]” being forwarded to employers by the Kavirondo Labour Bureau and John Riddoch, both successful labor agents in Nyanza. At the labor camp he found a further thirty-four boys, all of whom were sent home. In July of that same year, labor inspector P. de V. Allen informed the chief native commissioner of a growing number of Nyanza boys working at railway fuel and ballast camps and on sisal estates in Thika and Fort Hall. Allen worried that they lived in squalor, earned too little to feed themselves, and might drift to towns and slip into criminality. A month later, at a labor camp along the new Thika-Nyeri rail line, the district commissioner of Fort Hall found fifteen Gusii boys, all between the ages of twelve and fifteen, working construction. To his astonishment, all of them carried proper registration and passes.24
Despite these complaints, it was only when young laborers died, when parents complained, or when girls went out to work that officials scrambled to investigate and promise reforms.25 In 1926, labor officials traveled to Thika to investigate the deaths of eight young employees of British East Africa Fiber and Industrial. They interviewed two twelve-year-old Gusii boys named Mugire Kyamukia and Obuya Nyarang—the only survivors. According to the boys, a fellow Gusii named Petro had recruited them back home. Inspectors knew Petro all too well. He worked for the Kavirondo Labour Bureau in Kisumu. The bureau’s labor agents, Messrs. Yates and Mackey, were notorious in Nyanza for their flagrant disregard of regulations. Mugire and Obuya admitted that they had undergone neither medical inspection nor registration before boarding the train. A month after their arrival, eight of their coworkers fell ill and died. Fortunately, Mugire and Obuya had been taken to the hospital in time. When questioned later, Mackey took responsibility for his recruiter Petro, but argued that once the boys arrived at the sisal estates, whether they lived or died was none of his affair.26
FIGURE 2.1. Extracting sisal fiber, n.d. Photo courtesy of the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies Winterton Collection, Northwestern University.
FIGURE 2.2. Sisal in Kenya. A view of the interior of the Machakos sisal factory showing the brushing, grading, and baling sections, n.d. Photo courtesy of the National Archives, Kew.
The strategies of men like Mackey and Petro revealed to the British, in the starkest of terms, just how little control they had over the flow of labor out of Nyanza. Professional recruiters hired African subcontractors who knew the country, spoke local languages, and understood local custom. Many subcontractors sought out young men, often relatives, from their own villages.27 When these men ran afoul of district authorities, recruiters like Mackey and Yates simply argued that their subcontractors had hired relatives; what transpired had been a voluntary family decision, not recruitment. Recruiters also let their subcontractors take the fall for breaking recruitment rules by paying fines or spending a few days in jail. Recruiters used other tactics to circumvent the authority of district officials. When medical officers rejected a batch of boys, recruiters put them on the train anyway or drove them by foot to different labor camps. In September 1928, officials discovered that recruiters eluded the Kisumu labor camp by taking boys up to North Kavirondo District, where medical officials were less stringent. Recruiters also mixed boys into larger groups with older men, in the hope that government officials might be unwilling to check each and every individual.28
Officials loathed recruiters like Mackey and Yates. The commissioner of South Kavirondo described them as “ex-convicts, defaulting debtors, dipsomaniacs, or men of straw” who should not be allowed to “roam about or to live in the heart of a Native Reserve for the purposes of recruiting.”29 The commissioner in Kisii complained that his town was swarming with recruiters who fought among themselves and created an unseemly spectacle that did not go unnoticed by the African community. Recruiting, he argued, opened the door to a “host of undesirables who will compete with each other for labour and [stop] at nothing to get it.”30 Recruiters revealed European weakness, corrupting the image of respectable authority district officials had worked tirelessly to create.
Yet when the government had the opportunity to stop the recruitment of boys, it did very little. In 1927, the provincial commissioner of Nyanza Province visited a medical officer in Kisumu to observe the procedure for examining would-be laborers. While there, he watched three batches of boys arrive and undergo examination. The recruiters informed the commissioner that two batches would go to coffee estates in Kiambu and Fort Hall, the third to the Donyo Sabuk sisal estate in Thika. After looking over the recruits, the medical officer determined that the average age of one group was about seven. All of them were approved for work and loaded onto a waiting train.31 The most powerful colonial official in Western Kenya had just observed the inspection of Africans as young as seven and their transport to work hundreds of miles from home. There was no record of his outrage—only his silence—as the boys boarded the train.
Agents