An Uncertain Age. Paul Ocobock
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though sometimes very familiar, ideas. These new actors also sought to control the behavior of young men, to make them hardworking employees, God-fearing parishioners, and law-abiding subjects. Along with African parents and elder kin, they formed an ever-expanding network of competing yet complementary adult authority figures. As freeing as so many young men might have found migrant labor or town life, they found themselves under more adult surveillance than ever before. And the most important and intrusive of all these newcomers was the colonial state.
This is also a book about the British colonial state’s own coming-of-age story—its search for legitimacy and authority. In Kenya, statecraft necessitated posing as an elder—producing what I call the elder state. Early in the colonial encounter, British officials came to view relationships among male generations as a potent source of power. To craft and exert their authority, the British became very willing, very active participants in age-relations. In doing so, the elder state institutionalized age and masculinity as inseparable components of statecraft. Making and unmaking mature men became a means for the British to reconcile the incongruities of nurturing a settler economy while fulfilling the lofty goals of the civilizing mission. For instance, with the help of chiefs and local elders, the British tampered with male initiation practices, pushing boys into premature manhood and the migrant labor market. The elder state wielded male initiation to discipline young delinquents, circumcising prison inmates who exhibited mature, obedient behavior.
Like the relationships between fathers and sons, state making could be a messy affair. Colonial officials’ decisions and actions were nearly always contingent on the demands and desires of Africans, both young and old, and other actors such as missionaries, settlers, Colonial Office officials in London, and international welfare organizations. Entangled with so many eager participants, each with their own perspectives, the elder state became a conduit for the exchange of local African and global Western ideas about age and manhood. Stretched in different directions, the elder state pursued contradictory strategies, ones that changed over time.
As the colonial project matured, so, too, did the role of the elder state. By the 1950s, British authority was at its most uncertain. Challenged by the violence of young men frustrated with their generational station, the elder state constructed a network of institutions to instill a subordinate, subservient masculinity and maturity in captured young rebels. As they prepared to leave an independent Kenya, the British lamented the failure of the elder state, only to see its pieces salvaged by the first generation of Kenyan leaders. The elder state did not merely survive decolonization; postcolonial politicians retooled it for nation building. It ensured that postcolonial politics spun on the axis of age and gender—a gerontocratic form of politics entrenching the power of a single elder generation of male politicians over their young constituents for the next half century.
Exploring the coming-of-age stories of African men and the colonial state offers several contributions to the historiographies of Kenya, Africa, and the British Empire. First, An Uncertain Age positions age at the heart of everyday life in twentieth-century Kenya.6 With a few exceptions, historians have fixed their gaze elsewhere, on other relationships and cleavages like ethnicity, class, and kinship. Unlike ethnicity and kinship, which the British categorized as traditionally African; or class, which they could claim as a modern aftershock of capitalism, age and age-relations were preoccupations shared by both Africans and the British. The colonial encounter involved intense, intimate arguments over age from which Africans and colonial officials crafted powerful practices and institutions that made age a mutually communicable form of authority.
Second, this book joins a growing number of histories of masculinity in Africa. Rallying around Luise White’s call for more nuanced studies of men and masculinities, historians of Africa have begun to break down monolithic male identities like farmer, father, soldier, or student and then examine the rival masculinities with which men wrestled.7 Yet scholars of Kenya have largely ignored White’s challenge. I show that age and gender are inseparable units of historical analysis. To study a young man’s coming-of-age, historians must also examine the different ways he imagined and expressed his masculinity, and then battled one another, elders, and the state over acceptable, respectable expressions of manhood.
Third, the concept of the elder state offers historians a fresh perspective on statecraft in Africa, one that straddles the blurry line between the colonial and the postcolonial periods. Historians have long examined the ways class, race, ethnicity, religion, and education influenced state power. I join a growing number of scholars who argue that both age and gender also produced the state. The elder state reveals that even the youngest imperial subjects, mere boys and girls, could compel the state to consider and control them. As they did, the British found age and masculinity powerful cultural tools with which they communicated their power.
Fourth, this is a book about not just age, but also the making of an age: youth. Since the 1990s, scholars of postcolonial Africa have been fascinated by the creative and destructive power of the young. Whether vanguard or vandals, makers or breakers, the concept of youth has become an influential, very male, actor in Africa’s successes and failures. While several historians have studied the politicization of youths by political parties and Big Men, few have excavated deeper to uncover the cultural, political, and economic processes that begot the so-called youth crises that postcolonial leaders tried to resolve or perpetuate. I trace the emergence of this uncertain age through the twentieth century, exploring how youth arose from the racial and economic inequalities of settler colonialism, the fusion of emergent Western ideas about age with those in East Africa, and the desperate designs of a state struggling for authority.
Finally, the work of historians of Kenya remains ensnared by studies of single ethnic groups and their distinct, disconnected histories. Gikuyu squatters, Gusii litigants, Kalenjin politicians, Kamba soldiers, Maasai moran, or Maragoli widows—this research has produced a history of Kenya as a sum of its ethnic parts, rather than a history of the whole.8 An Uncertain Age pushes scholars to reconsider their ethnicization of Kenya’s past. Kenyans experienced colonial rule not in ethnic isolation but in constant contact with one another. Every young man felt the tremors of colonial power and discussed it with his peers and elders. Age and gender offer historians an opportunity to think about a shared history of Kenya.
The chapters that follow explore the roles age and masculinity played in some of the field’s largest, longest-standing historiographies: migrant labor and town life, crime and punishment, Mau Mau and British counterinsurgency, as well as decolonization and nationalism. Their importance to each of these historiographies is well worth books in their own right. By bringing them together, I hope An Uncertain Age shows historians how mindful African men and the state were of one another’s coming-of-age stories and how this mindfulness influenced so many of the decisions and actions that made up the colonial encounter in Kenya.
ARGUING ABOUT AGE
Prior to colonial rule, age was a powerful force in the lives of Kenyan communities—perhaps more so than ethnicity.9 Early ethnographies do not reveal how far back into the past age-relations and their institutions endured.10 Yet they confirm for historians that on the eve of conquest, how men and women lived their lives, explained their place in society, and sought mobility through it were influenced by their sense of belonging to a given generation and their relationships with their age-mates, juniors, and seniors.11 Age also stratified these communities. Much of the early anthropological and historical literature on age emphasizes the conflict among men over access to wealth.12 In these studies, elder men competed with one another to control the reproductive power of wives and mothers as well as the productive power of young male warriors and clients. To regulate this competition, communities organized themselves by age, ascribing rights and obligations to different age-groups and creating ritual moments when those age-groups formed and gradually moved up into positions of authority. Boys spent their childhoods herding their fathers’ livestock, playing games with age-mates, and learning to navigate the social world around them. Eventually they would be made men, typically through a series of initiation ceremonies. They enjoyed their days honing their warrior skills, raiding neighboring communities’ livestock, dancing, and courting sweethearts. In time, warriors would settle down, marry, start families, and become elders in their own right.
Elder