An Uncertain Age. Paul Ocobock
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system required no shackles or necklaces, simply the same kipande work pass that so many adults despised and burned in protest.
Without fail, when word broke that the government would begin registering all laborers under the age of sixteen, the Kenya Tea Association vigorously voiced its irritation.61 In January 1943, the association met with the labor department to dissuade it from registering the more than sixty-five hundred laborers under the age of sixteen working on its farms. The association argued that “with a large number of their European staff on Active Service [in the war], and with a shortage of material, [its members] are producing tea in quantities of more than 60% over normal pre-war production figures.”62 If the British wanted to maintain those incredible levels of wartime production, then they would have to abandon any attempt to register their young employees. In short, “the free flow of labor from Kavirondo [Nyanza Province], at present ample for the greatly increased production necessary for the war effort, would be greatly impeded and all but stopped.”63 Tea production in Kericho would grind to a halt as thousands of youngsters trekked back home simply for a slip of paper. Worse still, the association worried that once home, parents and elders would not let the workers return again.
FIGURE 2.3. A labor inspector’s job takes him beyond the city factories and shops to places like this sisal estate with its mill, n.d. Photo courtesy of the National Archives, Kew.
Plans to register laborers under the age of sixteen died in that very meeting. “Change,” the association argued, “is naturally, abhorrent to all of us.” Yet it would have been feasible to provide lorries, fuel, and drivers to transport sixty-five hundred young laborers back home. It had been done the year before, but in the opposite direction. In 1943, over four thousand laborers, mostly under the age of sixteen, had been brought to Kericho to work. But any effort by the colonial state to bring the Employment of Servants Ordinance into effect would “have the most shattering effects on output.”64 To justify their decision to abandon any effort to register young laborers during the war, colonial officials took the Kenya Tea Association at its word: that none of its sixty-five hundred workers were under the age of twelve and that it offered adequate provision on its estates in the form of schools, hospitals, sport, housing, and food.65
In February, when the Colonial Office prodded the colony yet again, Governor Henry Moore firmly replied that no action would be taken. He had “received long and reasoned protest” from the Kenya Tea Association and the Sotik Settler’s Association, who had expressed sympathy for the new regulations—if only they had lived in “normal times.” To register underage laborers in the midst of the war “would completely disorganise their labour forces and seriously jeopardize their production programme.”66 Rather than wait out yet another harvest season, the governor requested that they simply wait out the war. And so thousands of boys continued to pick pyrethrum blossoms, cure coffee beans, and sweep sisal fibers throughout the war, in conditions and for wages that had not changed since the 1920s.
OF GOATSKINS AND SHUKAS
For all the money and manpower exerted to compel the young to leave home and labor, employers ultimately had to wait until young men found something of value in it. Boys and young men did not simply choose to work; they made decisions about the kinds of work they wanted, where they would labor, and how much money made it worth their while. And from the very beginning of colonial rule, some willingly sought out wage labor as an alternative to tending a father’s livestock. By the 1920s, more and more young men were interested in doing so.67 The decision to work outside a father’s household was never easy and never made alone. Young men discussed leaving home to work with their age-mates, elder siblings, and parents. Consider the different paths of Thomas Tamutwa and Kimeli Too, both Kipsigis men born twenty miles apart in 1932. They came to wage labor in very different ways and had very different relationships with their fathers.
A son’s decision to labor could ignite intense negotiation in a household. Thomas Tamutwa struggled to get his father to understand why he wanted to leave home. Thomas desperately wanted to go to school.68 But his father refused. Who, he asked Thomas, would tend his livestock? As Thomas’s father knew well, the labor of sons and daughters reproduced the wealth of their fathers and enabled them to learn the skills to one day produce their own wealth.69 Many African men who grew up during the colonial period described their boyhood, and the boyhood of their forefathers, as enriching social work among age-mates that formed the backbone of their socialization into a set of reciprocal, respectful obligations with their seniors.70 Nearly every ethnic community in Kenya, prior to and in the earliest years of colonial rule, put their sons to work looking after livestock. A father might start his son off with a kid goat, and as the boy proved capable, he graduated to larger animals. Each morning at sunrise the boy woke up, threw his goatskin blanket over his shoulders, took porridge, and headed for the grazing fields with his father’s herd. There he met other boys, they mixed the herds, and then spent the day watching the livestock, hunting, playing games, and wrestling. If they were caught ignoring the herd by a passerby, they would be beaten. At sunset, the boys separated the herds and returned home. They took their supper and spent the evening by the fire listening to stories told by their elders and readying themselves to start again the next day.
Thomas’s father could not understand why his son did not want to enjoy the labors of childhood as he had done. Thomas pressed the issue, sneaking away to join his friends at school. “He would beat me at the mention of a school, asking me who I would leave the goats to, the cattle to. He would flog me whenever I mentioned school.” Thomas’s frustration and fear of his father’s firm hand finally got the better of him. “He beat me until I decided to run away,” he said. Thomas fled to the Kericho tea estates “to escape the constant caning.”71 Working the tea estates during World War II offered Thomas an escape from his father’s violence and obstinacy.
In the struggle between Thomas and his father, the rebellious, uncircumcised son won out. Thomas had access to a network of age-mates who had already made the decision to work, with or without their fathers’ consent. When asked why he ran away to the tea estates rather than the classroom, Thomas replied, “I went to Kericho because that is where everybody went. The whites had employment opportunities at the estates. There are my age-mates who were already there and would brag that Kericho was where the action was. My age-mates would teach me the ways of Kericho whenever they visited home.”72 Thomas’s decision to travel to Kericho in search of a wage embodied what district and labor officials as well as European settlers had hoped would happen. Young employees would go home and recruit their peers. Thomas ultimately made his decision to earn a wage through the intimate, everyday coercions built into childhood relationships and peer pressure, as well as the complicated relationships between fathers and sons.
After working for several months, Thomas returned home wearing a new shuka, a blanket made of red cloth with multicolored patterns worn by the Maasai, and carrying six shillings in savings. His father was overjoyed to see him, and even more impressed by the money the boy handed him. “He loved me a lot for that. Even my mother! I had my shuka on and gave them six shillings.”73 With the money, Thomas’s father bought him a goat and sheep. Many men from Kipsigis and Luo families recall that their fathers bought livestock for them with the savings they brought back—down payments on bridewealth and a household of their own some day.74 Young men found that if they returned home, their wages often fundamentally changed their relationships with their parents.
As parents saw the benefits of a wage-earning son, they eventually came around to the idea of their sons working far from home.75 Before Thomas set out to start another contract, his parents took him aside and asked him “to work and not squander money, but to save and bring more.”76 Well into the 1940s, a father’s household remained for many a primary investment in the future. Many young men also saw their wages as part of a familial responsibility and an investment in their own futures. A father still worked for his son, accumulating wealth in livestock and increasing currency that would one day provide the young man with a wife, land, and a future. Sons also now worked for themselves,