An Uncertain Age. Paul Ocobock
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symbolized hard work, discipline, and masculinity. How a young man spent his wages could showcase his growing maturity.77
And as the crucible of work made young men feel more mature, they developed confidence in their skills and an awareness of just how valuable they were to the colonial and household economies. They left employers in search of greener pastures. They moved up into more skilled, more highly paid positions, and a new, younger generation of boys replaced them herding a rancher’s livestock, picking tea leaves, or sweeping sisal factory floors. Thomas Tamutwa recalls that he worked on the tea estates for three years, and in 1946 he left for Molo, where he worked as a herdsboy, which brought the added benefit of having milk at meals. “I felt I was old enough to venture further, so I sought work in Molo for I would drink milk,” and he would earn ten shillings a month, ten times his previous wage.78
For his industriousness, Thomas was rewarded with the greatest of gifts—his initiation into manhood. In 1947, at the age of fifteen, Thomas was initiated into the Chuma age-group, the last group of young boys to do so. He faced the knife far earlier than some of his age-mates. Thomas’s initiation was an acknowledgment by a once-resistant father that wage labor had made his boy a man. Within a generation, age-relations could integrate, though not always smoothly, the new possibilities of colonial rule. Yet some youthful rebellion was required first. If it had ended there, then Thomas might never have faced the circumcision knife at home, left to labor as a wayward, uninitiated boy. But the return of the prodigal son to his father’s homestead showed respect and obedience as well as the value of his labor—traits worthy of manhood.
Kimeli Too, born the same year as Thomas but initiated a year or two later, tells a different story of how he came to leave home. From the very beginning, his decision to work was an easy one, made in concert with his father. Kimeli began working at the Bureti Tea Estate as a farmhand in 1948, shortly after his initiation and seclusion that admitted him into the Sawe age-group. He earned six shillings a month, about average for a man his age in the tea industry at the time. Working for Bureti made practical sense: the estate was a short commute from home, and his father also worked there. Kimeli’s decision was affected by the same choice his father had made years earlier. Kimeli’s father made his livelihood as a migrant wage laborer. He was likely among the first or second generation of Kipsigis to leave home to work on the tea estates. Kimeli recalls that his father lived on the estate for twenty-five years. “He would come home over the weekends for family visit. At times he would make impromptu visits during weekdays and then rush back the following day early in the morning.”79 His father’s decision had paved the way for his son to do the same as an acceptable alternative to tending livestock at home. Kimeli could not say whether his father had struggled with his grandfather over the decision, but it is clear that his father’s choice to earn a wage had made it an acceptable possibility for Kimeli.
Kimeli’s decision to join his father at Bureti Tea also coincided with his initiation. Kimeli decided to work “because I wanted to make something of myself. Just staying idle at home when you are grown up would make you look like a fool.”80 His initiation had transitioned him into a “grownup,” and wage labor became a way to actualize his newfound maturity and masculinity. Unlike Thomas, who saw his labor as the reason to become a man, Kimeli saw it as a fulfillment of his maturity. He then proved it every month when he brought the five shillings he had earned to his father. “I would keep my earnings and bring it to my father. Once the savings were enough, my father would buy cattle.” In the Too family, migrant labor had become the norm rather than a mark of cultural delinquency. Kimeli need not argue with his father over the value of hard work and a wage. And his father believed that Kimeli, recently initiated into manhood, would have the discipline to bring home part of his wages. Kimeli had nothing to prove; his father had nothing to fear. Yet, as a result, Kimeli was initiated a year or more after Thomas Tamutwa. The young man who had followed the rules and obeyed his father faced the knife long after the wayward son. Despite these differences, both Thomas and Kimeli had not strayed too far beyond the behavior their elders expected of them.
Not all young men returned home, however. Some stayed out on the estates, moving from contract to contract. Out on the migrant labor circuit, a young man could lose track of time and ultimately a sense of where he had come from. Among former young Luo migrants, stories abound of boys escaping the estates only to get lost on the way home, eaten by wild animals, or, worse, captured and assimilated by the Kipsigis or Maasai. Those who had to sojourn the farthest to find work carried fear-filled memories that they had traveled so far they might lose their sense of kinship in the process of trying to become mature men. Parents worried too. When a son did return home, the boy was not so subtly warned that if he went out again, he was expected to come back. Thomas remembers that his parents made it clear they expected future installments of capital. “They would ask me for money, but I also felt it was my obligation to provide for them. How could I earn and visit home empty-handed? My father wouldn’t have liked it.”81 And if he happened to squander his wage and return home with nothing, he would be beaten.
Some of the first young men to leave home to attend school, join a Christian mission, work for a wage, or travel to towns tried to alleviate their elders’ concerns. In 1928, the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA), a political organization of young Gikuyu elites like Jomo Kenyatta, began a vernacular journal called Mwigwithania, meaning “one who makes people listen (and agree) together” or “the reconciler.”82 Many of is members, like Kenyatta, had been the culturally dissident youths of their generation. In the journal, KCA members discussed the news, translated biblical passages, and shared Gikuyu proverbs. One of the most common parables shared in Mwigwithania was that of the prodigal son, who left his father, squandered his inheritance, and returned seeking forgiveness.83 Throughout the journal, KCA readers encouraged their young prodigal audience to go home or at least remember their responsibilities to their elders. Yet the Old Testament story is also known as the parable of the two sons. While the younger son enjoyed his youth, the elder son remained at home, obedient and disciplined. And while he had not lost his inheritance, he bristled at the notion that his father had never celebrated his respect for elder authority as he had celebrated his brother’s return. Perhaps Mwigwithania’s authors and readers in fact pitied the thankless life of the herdsboy who stayed home, ever toiling beneath the watchful eye of his family, inexperienced in the youthful adventures beyond the village.
Migrant work was for many a thrilling adventure. Young men did all kinds of work during the colonial period: herding cattle on the Delamere ranch, picking tea leaves for the Brooke Bond Tea Company, sweeping the manufacturing floor at Ziwani Sugar, and digging for gold at Bwemba Gold Mines across the border in Tanganyika. It was typically unskilled work, or at least work for which young men had the requisite skills. A boy’s first job often mirrored the kinds of tasks that he had done for his father or that suited his physical attributes. Young Kipsigis or Nandi boys found work herding livestock and milking dairy cattle because these duties fell within the skill sets they had learned at home. Likewise, European settlers actively recruited them to pick tea and pyrethrum because their height and “nimble fingers” made them efficient harvesters.84
However, employers also de-skilled complicated production processes, just as they had done in Britain, so that younger workers could complete smaller, simpler tasks. Uncoupling skill from labor, employers could hire young people, whom they paid much less than adults, and reduce their production costs.85 The sisal industries, major recruiters in Western Kenya, routinely de-skilled the manufacturing process of sisal fiber so they could hire the young. At Taveta Sisal and Teita Concessions, young laborers harvested sisal leaves on the farm and brought them into the factory. Adults ran the sisal through a decorticator machine to separate the fiber and the flesh, known as tow. The young then transported the fiber outside to dry and swept the machine and floor to pick up any small leftover pieces.86
Many African men look back fondly at the work they did growing up. Those who left home and found work on European estates remember the monotonous grind of getting up each morning, preparing a breakfast of porridge, reporting to work, taking a break for lunch, heading back to work again, and then retiring for dinner—only to do it all over again the next day.87 “At the beginning,” Thomas Tamutwa recalls, “it was hard work, but once you were used