An Uncertain Age. Paul Ocobock
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Katherine Luongo has termed the “anthro-administrative complex,” officials and anthropologists, in dialogue with African intermediaries, created a corpus of often functionalist, incomplete knowledge of the ways age and gender guided everyday East African life.81 With this knowledge, the British tried to assert their authority by using and manipulating local practices of age and masculinity—a process that produced what I call the elder state.
The elder state was no “crusher of rocks,” no colossus. But British efforts to harness age became a formidable instrument of statecraft—more than the distant drumbeat of “arterial” power. First, the elder state strung the sinews of the colonial apparatus together, forcing officials with different outlooks on and mandates for rule to argue and work with one another. The elder state emerged from the “constant rows” between the provincial administration, who oversaw day-to-day life in the African reserves; the departments, who managed law and order, economic planning, and welfare projects; as well as the judiciary and treasury, who enforced and funded the entire enterprise.82 In the interwar years, labor officers, who found evidence of child labor on settler estates, argued with district commissioners, who had lowered the age of male initiation, over the appropriate age at which boys could leave home to work. Meanwhile, municipal officials in Nairobi found themselves working with magistrates and the treasury to enforce vagrancy laws and fund repatriation orders for rounded-up street boys.
The elder state manifested itself in nearly every nook and cranny of the regime. Most histories of Kenya focus on a single part, or interaction between only a few parts, of the state. The provincial administration has come under frequent scrutiny because of how closely it worked with African communities. These studies locate the real work of making law and maintaining order in the arguments between local communities, chiefs, and, sometimes, British officials.83 Disputes over land and customary practices like marriage and female circumcision were resolved in local African council meetings attended by chiefs or court battles adjudicated by elders. British officials occasionally arrived on the scene to huddle with chiefs or fume over failed policies. In these histories, if not for their monopoly on violence, the British seem almost incidental to indirect rule.
Second, as the elder state reverberated with tension, the administrative rank and file grew attuned to the voices of those outside the bureaucracy clamoring to be heard. Kenya was a crowded, cacophonous place. As officials moved in and out of colonial society, they encountered all manner of competing ideas about ruling Africa. In conversations with Maasai elders, a district officer might learn the details of how and when they decided to transition a new generation of boys into manhood. Around a settler’s dining room table, they might hear that the nimble fingers of African children were perfect for picking tea. Reading the newspaper, they might read a story about the importance of the Boy Scouts in the training of young British citizens.
Sometimes, these encounters inspired experimentally minded officials to test new technologies of rule, and they were often allowed to do so with a free hand.84 They resourcefully borrowed and experimented with ideas and institutions practiced by the communities they sought to govern, by missionaries working just down the road, by British officials back home, and by other governments around the globe. In the 1930s, the governor sent S. H. La Fontaine, who had served in the provincial administration, to Britain to investigate the methods of juvenile incarceration and reform that could be reproduced in the colony. Twenty years later, to rehabilitate young detainees during the Mau Mau war, community development officers used a blend of Christian baptism, cleansing ceremonies adapted from revivalists, and vocational training provided by former staff of the Church of Scotland Mission at Tumutumu.
More often than not, though, unresponsive officials were compelled to act. When it appeared the state had sacrificed the well-being of Africans to the benefit of settlers, a chorus of criticism pressed the state to respond with denials, committee investigations, reforms, and even development projects.85 Such pressures were especially acute when young Africans were involved. When Archdeacon Owen found children digging roads near Kisumu in the 1920s, he brought his outrage to the British public and to bear on the colonial state.86 And in the 1930s, and again in the 1950s, when Protestant missionaries decided to ban female circumcision and abortion, they pushed district officials and chiefs to support them.87
Third, the elder state was doubly cognizant of age and masculinity—pressured by local arguments with Africans and globally circulating ideas back in Britain. The migration, labor, punishment, illiteracy, and health of young people were controversial in Kenya because they were also so contentious in Britain and much of the Western world. The Colonial Office and British parliamentarians, as well as religious and welfare organizations, were animated by the treatment of Her Majesty’s youngest subjects, just as they were by the treatment of young Britons. How young Africans fared under colonial rule became a barometer for the success or failure of the civilizing mission and the superiority of metropolitan ideas and institutions.
By the end of the nineteenth century, European notions about age had undergone dramatic renovation. Social reformers, social scientists, and government officials began to carve out a new stage of the life cycle between childhood and adulthood, first among the well-to-do and later the working class.88 Those boys and girls newly labeled as “youths” or “adolescents” became more dependent, losing their access to the economic and social worlds outside their households and coming under greater surveillance by parents, educators, and the state.89 Once created, this new age came under close scholarly and political study. It also quickly became a repository for all manner of adult nightmares. Fears emerged that the young, especially boys, left to play in the streets of London, work in satanic mills, or languish in poorhouses suffered from moral and physical degeneration.90 Worse still, the burgeoning field of child psychology promoted ideas that adolescence was a fragile time in the development of the human mind. The young were unstable, irrational, and malleable. When combined with destabilizing influences like town life, poverty, and loose morals, the results for society could be disastrous.91 Governments and charitable institutions urgently defined, legislated, disciplined, and protected the young.92
Yet the same characteristics that made the young so dangerous also gave them great potential—if only their energies could be controlled. In times of intense insecurity, the young could be called upon to defend the nation and empire. Britain’s near defeat in the Boer War inspired Robert Baden-Powell to create the Boy Scouts, which he viewed as a way to harden and discipline the next generation, prevent another catastrophic military campaign, and preserve the empire.93 During World War I, an entire generation of young men flocked to the trenches and their deaths to fulfill a romantic, masculine fervor.94 Over the course of the early twentieth century, states across Europe organized youth movements with militarized, propagandist flare. A creeping conformity replaced the rebellious spirit that had once defined young Europeans. Adults had reimagined them as modern warriors defending the nation and its empire as opposed to rebels erecting mid-nineteenth-century barricades.95 After World War II, the role of the state in the lives of young men and women deepened out of the desire to rejuvenate citizenship and nationhood in the wake of the war’s devastation, the emergence of welfare states, and the threat of nuclear armageddon.96
As elder states developed in Europe, they also formed along the colonial frontier. Metropolitan and colonial governments had worried over the welfare of European children and young people who had been spirited away to or born in settler colonies. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, young English and Portuguese orphans and vagrants were seen as the very foundation of successful empires.97 In turn, colonies became “not only a spleen, to drain the ill humours of the body, but a liver to breed good blood.”98 Colonies cured the nation of its moral decay and created sturdy subjects. By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the well-being and proper socialization of young British immigrants to Australia and South Africa, as well as Northern and Southern Rhodesia, became essential to strengthening the cultural ties that bound the British world system together.99 Yet historians still know far too little about the lives of children and young people in colonized societies and their encounters with the state. In colonial Spanish America, the state defined and legislated childhood and familial relationships; and in doing so, positioned itself as a paternalistic “father king”