An Uncertain Age. Paul Ocobock
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Chief among his complaints: the ordinance permitted anyone ten years or older to enter into a labor contract. He argued that allowing children to work resulted in empty schools, villages desperate to find missing children, and estates overrun by underage drunks. Owen appealed to Britons’ own uneasy history with child labor. “Must African children go,” he wrote, “through the same mills of tragic experience, as did many in England?”46 It was, he argued, a moral stain on Britons and their glorious empire.
That summer, two more editorials from Owen appeared in the Manchester Guardian, 109 letters from angry citizens arrived at the Colonial Office, and scores of inquiries were made by agitated ministers of Parliament.47 On the floor of the House of Commons, secretary of state for the colonies Malcolm MacDonald faced a barrage of questions.48 MacDonald promised a full and speedy inquiry—to be handled by officials in Kenya. In the meantime, the Colonial Office remained vague in its response to Owen’s editorials. To deny his claims or point out inaccuracies might lead to further scrutiny. Assistant undersecretary of state for the colonies J. J. Paskin warned that “we are not in a position to deny it without providing him with a handle for widening his agitation to over all the colonies in which there are similar or lower minimum ages.”49 The Colonial Office library had recently discovered that the minimum age in Kenya was the same in Nigeria, Gold Coast, Sierra Leone, and three other territories. The age was even lower in Malaysia and British Guiana. If the press were to find out that this was a systemic problem across the empire, the Colonial Office’s woes would only escalate.
Meanwhile, the governor of Kenya, Robert Brooke-Popham, hastily assembled a committee to allay concerns back in Britain. The committee consisted of only four members, most of whom were retired colonial officials. The chair, E. B. Hosking, had served as Nandi district commissioner and chief native commissioner before retiring in 1938. Joining him were H. R. Montgomery, who had ruled the Coast as provincial commissioner until his retirement in 1936; and S. V. Cooke, the former district commissioner of Lamu, whom Montgomery had forced out years earlier. Both men were of “decided and generally opposite opinions.”50 Once out of the service, Cooke had become a member of the Legislative Council and often spoke out for African rights. Rounding out the group was R. G. M. Calderwood, a Presbyterian missionary for the Church of Scotland Mission.
Committee members fanned out across the colony to visit agricultural estates, goldfields, factories, and other businesses. At each stop, they met with government officials, settlers, and associations representing the major industries. They also met with Archdeacon Owen. And just as he had feared, their final report tried to extinguish the flames that consumed the Colonial Office back at home. In their report, the committee acknowledged that they found African boys common fixtures of working life in the colony but not a trace of girls. They characterized boys’ working conditions as “almost without exception good.”51 They found little wrong with their work on sisal farms or cotton ginneries, though they were alarmed by a number of boys working in mines. Their only criticism came with the work of young men in towns like Nairobi, which they believed led to “consorting with undesirables” and “becoming detribalized nonentities.”52
The committee reaffirmed that wage labor among young Africans was an accepted, unquestionable principle. Without compulsory education, they argued, work had its advantages. No “mill of tragic experience,” as Owen had put it, existed in Kenya. Having defended the practice of encouraging young Africans to work, the committee then tried to silence its critics with a series of proposals to amend the Employment of Servants Ordinance. Their recommendations included raising the minimum age from ten to twelve, restricting the recruitment of young Africans to private recruiters rather than professional agencies, and ending penal sanctions for underage workers.53 Deftly, the committee responded to each of Owen’s main criticisms while still maintaining the necessity of underage labor.
In December, Governor Brooke-Popham announced a new draft amendment to the Employment of Servants Ordinance. The amendment required all young people to obtain an underage version of the despised kipande work pass. Employers also had to keep a register of all underage employees, and the colonial administration could cancel those contracts if inadequate working conditions were discovered.54 Unmoved, Owen viewed the recommendations as a promising yet inadequate start.55 Before he could launch any further critiques, the attention of the British public, the British government, and the colonies shifted dramatically to growing tensions in Europe. All eyes lay on the movement of German troops into Eastern Europe rather than the movement of young men in and out of their reserves. The outbreak of war in Africa and Europe swept the issue of colonial labor practices from the headlines and postponed passage of the amendment. Yet, throughout the 1940s, the Colonial Office continued to fret that someone might discover nothing had been done, and when the war ended, they would be engulfed in yet another scandal.
In Kenya, labor officials spent much of the war thinking about how to issue these new work passes to the young, with farcical results. In November 1939, the government approved a proposal to provide every employee under the age of sixteen a nickel wristband, which would serve as their work pass. According to the registrar of natives, A. E. T. Imbert, a boy interested in finding work would visit his district officer, from whom he would receive a registration certificate and a metal container to store it, free of charge. He would also be given a nickel wrist bracelet stamped with his registration number and the initials JUV. The district officials would fasten the bracelet together on the boy’s wrist with a sheep punch.56
A great deal of effort went into their plan to shackle Kenya’s entire underage workforce. Officials spent time deciding whether the bracelets should be made of nickel, finished brass, or copper. Estimates had been drawn up by companies for the price of the metals and production of the boxes and the bracelets. The labor superintendent had collected one thousand wrist measurements of Luo boys to give the registrar’s office a more precise estimate of just how much metal they would need. But all this hustle and bustle came to a screeching halt in April 1940, when the Crown counsel’s office informed the registrar that the Colonial Office was likely to frown on “the permanent clamping of this kind of bracelet on the wrist of an African juvenile.” Not to mention that the new Employment of Servants Ordinance had called for a “disk” not a “bracelet.”57 Back to the drawing board officials went, busily imagining just what a kipande disk should look like and how might they prevent children from losing them. Should they use string, leather straps, or metal chains to hang the disks around their necks? In less than two years, more than £1,000 was poured into the search for the perfect juvenile kipande. In July 1940, the chief native commissioner abruptly announced that the government’s main priority was registering the young men conscripted into the military, not their younger kin sent by lorry-load to pick tea.58
In London, the Colonial Office waited anxiously for Kenya to amend the EWYPCO and the Employment of Servants Ordinance.59 In September 1942, members of the Colonial Office discussed the reasons why nothing had been done. Henry Moore noted that the colony was suffering from a shortage of metal for the disks and chains to fasten them. Granville Orde-Browne, who had some experience with labor issues in East and Central Africa, argued that in Kenya there was simply not the same objection to the labor of young people as elsewhere in the empire, and, therefore, bringing the law into force lacked any urgency. But in the end, the Colonial Office decided that the approaching coffee harvest could not be disrupted and that any intervention must wait.
Back in Kenya, talk of nickel disks suspended by nickel chains from the necks of young Africans disappeared. Registrar of natives G. Wedderburn had returned from leave in 1942, irked to find waste and wild ideas consuming his department. He outright rejected the need for a separate system for young people when the state could simply use the same procedures for registering adults. In a letter to the chief native commissioner, Wedderburn outlined what the registration of young laborers should look like: Kilonza Nyamai, a boy under the age of sixteen from Kitui, goes to see his district officer accompanied by a parent or guardian. There, he obtains a registration certificate like any other African, bearing his name, tribal particulars, and fingerprints. “He then becomes KTI.1556501 Kilonza Nyamai which number he will retain for life.”60 If a boy like Kilonza had no guardian, then the district official could stand in his kin’s stead. When he turned sixteen,