An Uncertain Age. Paul Ocobock
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standing. To escape, young men sought out alternative paths. They moved to towns in greater numbers to eke out a living as casual laborers and black marketeers. They joined the militant wings of political associations like the Kenya African Union and the Kikuyu Central Association. They also committed acts of organized violence, like Dini ya Msambwa and Mau Mau, against well-to-do neighbors, chiefs, and the state.35
The Mau Mau war in particular arose out of a crisis of age and masculinity among the Gikuyu. Following Luise White and John Lonsdale, I show that for all its complexities, the organized violence of the early 1950s was young Gikuyu men’s response to a crisis of maturity in the late colonial period.36 They argued with one another and with elders over how to best resolve their ambiguous age. During the war, they used the symbols and vocabulary of initiation, seclusion, warriorhood, and age grading to oath new members, steel fearful comrades, and establish chains of command. As they prepared for battle in the forests of Central Kenya, they reimagined what their masculinity might look like in the future, just as they looked back to history to think about how young warriors should behave. Despite their military defeat and grueling detention, these young men spent the remainder of colonial rule joining the youth wings of political parties and campaigning for their candidates. As young men did in Ghana, Guinea, and Tanzania, Kenyans rallied around age-relations as a way to make claims on the largesse of political elites. They also agitated for often-conservative gendered nationalisms—usually at the expense of young women—to make places for themselves at the table of nation building.37
To scholars of contemporary Africa, this uncertain age with which Mau Mau fighters or political activists struggled or appropriated might seem all too familiar; they would call it youth. A growing number of scholars have argued that youth, typically gendered male, is a liminal period of junior dependence, one marked by “waithood” or “involuntary delay” in becoming an adult.38 Youth is described as a by-product of modernity’s vicious contradictions: expanded access to and expectations of global ideas contrasted starkly by local economic constraints and political repression.39 In their waiting, some youth have become a destructive force of change, finding their masculinity as child soldiers or gangsters.40 Others are a force of creativity and activism, finding ways around state surveillance through social media or empowering one another through fashion and music.41
Much of the literature assumes that youth is the result of “a long historical process, shaped by authoritarian colonialism, postcolonial state failure, and a generally problematic engagement with material modernity.”42 But far too little research has been done to excavate if and how youth emerged over the course of the twentieth century. Deborah Durham offers historians a road map, arguing that studies of youth must go beyond the relationships and negotiations of youth and include the deeper structures that produce these encounters.43 This book does not offer scholars yet another definition of youth. Rather, it looks back on how this prolonged, liminal age came to be in Kenya, and how past practices of age and generational relations became moral representations to hold up against the present and imagine the future.44
MAKING MEN
Manliness mattered as much as age in Kenya. At night, boys listened to the stories of their fathers and grandfathers, learning what it meant to be a man, debating those ideas the next morning out on the grazing fields. A boy, eager for initiation, had to prove to his father that he had the fortitude to face the circumcision knife. A young man practiced his dance moves and refined his oratory skills to catch his peers’ eyes and ears. Age and gender were inseparable to these young men, and historians must treat them as tightly knotted units of historical analysis.45 To study the entwined coming-of-age stories of young men and the state, historians must also consider how growing up and making states were both gendered processes.
Until the 1970s, histories of Africa were histories of men. Afterward, a generation of historians brought the lives of African women to the forefront of the field. Scholars of Kenya are especially lucky to have a remarkable set of studies on the lives of schoolgirls, street hawkers, sex workers, widows, divorcées, wives, and mothers. This early work pushed historians to consider the decisions and actions of women, especially their labor, to be as important as class, race, and ethnicity.46 In the years that followed, focus shifted to the changing practices and meanings of gender and the relationships of power among women and men.47 Histories followed of women navigating the new possibilities of colonialism, like labor outside the household, education, urban migration, Christianity, and colonial courts, to carve out spaces of autonomy for themselves and their families.48
Many of these same studies also reveal that African women struggled under an expanding “patchwork quilt of patriarchies”—fathers and husbands, chiefs, clerics and clergy, employers, and the state.49 Over the course of the twentieth century, these patriarchs leaned on one another to control and marginalize women. They tried to drag women out of the public sphere of politics and streets of commerce and into the private sphere of households ruled by male breadwinners. There they were to labor as dutiful daughters, wives, mothers, and Christians, keeping their husbands and children content and out of trouble.50 Dictating gendered roles to women and then punishing them when they broke gendered rules lay at the heart of colonial law and order.
Women were not the only ones who provoked moral panics and stampedes to correct their behavior—so, too, did young men. For a discipline originally built on the study of African men, we still know surprisingly little about how they understood their gender and sexuality, and how those ideas changed over time. In 1990, Luise White encouraged her colleagues to take the study of masculinity more seriously—and several scholars have answered her call.51 Lisa Lindsay and Stephan Miescher define masculinity as “a cluster of norms, values, and behavioral patterns expressing explicitly and implicitly expectations of how men should act and represent themselves to others.”52 Like age, masculinities are relational, and because gender interacts with so many other social structures like race, class, and ethnicity, multiple masculinities can exist within a community.53 Not all masculinities are equal. Masculinities are all pulled, as R. W. Connell argues, into the orbit of a hegemonic masculinity. Dominant as its ideas and practices may be, this hegemonic masculinity wars with rivals through coercion and consensus, destroying some and co-opting others.54 Even men whose masculinities encircle the outermost margins enjoy what Connell calls the “patriarchal dividend,” the privileged position all men share and uphold over women.55 Gender scholars question whether Connell’s hegemonic masculinity existed in colonial Africa. “It is not always obvious,” Lindsay and Miescher write, “which notions of masculinity were dominant, or hegemonic.”56 African men experienced a succession of competing and coexisting masculinities as they crisscrossed the “patchwork of patriarchies” sewn together by fathers, chiefs, missionaries, employers, and colonial officials.57 They also had to adjust to the changing preferences of women and their demands on the kinds of men with whom they wanted to meet, make love, or start families.
For all their work on masculinities, historians of Africa have been less interested in the relationships between local and imperial masculinities than have their colleagues studying other colonial worlds like British India.58 Africanists focus instead on local, African arguments about masculinity and the fractures and continuities those debates produced during colonial rule.59 African masculinities defied definition by the colonizer, shifting rather than breaking under the weight of colonial racism and violence. Young men left home to work for wages or join mission stations; yet, as they did in Ovamboland, they still looked up to their fathers and kin as models of manliness.60 Within young men’s own households, steady paychecks from working on the Nigerian railways or in coal mines allowed them to claim breadwinner status, command the household, and demand family allowances from their employers.61 Even under the surveillance of the state and workplace, South African masculinities were quite literally driven underground, but they still challenged the apartheid regime.62
In similar ways, this book explores the masculinities boys and young men felt, debated, and performed as they grew up in colonial Kenya. I explore the masculine norms boys were expected to adhere to in preparation for initiation as well as those taught to them by elders as they healed