histories in the immediate aftermath of the brutal postelection violence of 2007–2008 that left hundreds dead and hundreds of thousands displaced. The violence cast a long shadow over my conversations. I did not interview anyone who had been displaced by the violence. For some men, speaking about their pasts was a welcome distraction from the crisis. For others, age became a way of contextualizing and making sense of the violence. Numerous interviewees spoke of Kenya’s most pressing problems in terms of generation, not ethnicity. Our discussions ended in refrains about the disrespect generations now had for one another, of rudderless young men run amok, and of corrupt elder politicians desperate to hold on to power.
Perhaps the most difficult challenge I faced was being mindful of the age-relations and generational politics at play during my interviews. I quickly realized that elder men felt deeply uncomfortable speaking with me until they had a better sense of my own maturity. Often after spotting my wedding ring, they nodded approvingly and explained that I could clearly understand such things. Likewise, elder men did not want to discuss the intimate details of their initiations in front of young interpreters. Take for instance a very awkward group interview I conducted in Saunet. I had agreed to work with a young Kipsigis student from the area named Sammie Kiprop Cheruiyot. During our first interview with a local elder and his age-mates, they made it clear that they could not be entirely forthcoming. He was too young, they argued, to learn such things. Sammie was also hesitant to ask his seniors probing, personal questions.
From then on, I recruited and interviewed Kipsigis men with Henry Adera, a Luo who lived nearby in Awendo. Elder Kipsigis men found it much easier to discuss their experiences with two seemingly mature outsiders than with young members of their own community. A few times, Kipsigis men would gently rib Henry that they could share their initiation stories with him because Luos did not circumcise their sons. In my conversations with Gikuyu men in Central Kenya and the Rift Valley, I had the good fortune of being joined by John Gitau Kariuki, whose own maturity facilitated my conversations with elder men. In fact, Gitau eagerly established his own generational bona fides before each interview, a strategy that put elder men at ease with talking about sometimes very difficult, intimate subjects. Such generational tensions underscore the centrality of age in Kenya and the importance of this book. They also give me pause, as they should other researchers, when relying on young, educated men and women to help us conduct research with their elders. Moreover, these still-visible frictions should call on historians to reevaluate and think more critically about earlier ethnographies by anthropologists, who often used underage interpreters to probe elders about things they had no right knowing. It begs the question of whether what we know from these early studies requires a more critical analysis of the age-relations embedded in their results.
The final method I employed in writing this book was analysis of three databases that I compiled using materials from the Kenya and British national archives. The first database consists of 10,410 cases of court-ordered corporal punishment of young men from 1928 to 1955. The second contains 7,423 cases of young offenders from 1938 to 1950 who were punished in a variety of ways, not just by corporal punishment. All these cases had been recorded into annual registers by officials in Nairobi and then sent to the Colonial Office for review. Unfortunately, the registers are incomplete. I could not locate those for the years during World War II, though it is possible that officials in Kenya did not submit them. Although incomplete, the cases provide historians with a great deal of information: among other things, an offender’s age and ethnic background, the crime for which he was charged, and the location of the court where he stood trial, as well as the kind of punishment he received and its severity. I have used this wealth of information to provide rough sketches of those young men the colonial state found most threatening. The data provide historians with as much information about who these young men were as about why the British felt compelled to discipline them.
The third database is made up of 381 case files of inquiries made by the probation service into the lives of young male offenders committed to approved schools between 1947 and 1954. These reports are incredibly rich. I used these investigations by probation officers, who were often Africans, to glimpse the everyday lives and histories of Kenya’s most serious young male offenders. Probation officers interviewed offenders, visited family homesteads, spoke with parents, and debated forms of punishment with one another and magistrates. The details are sometimes extraordinary—parents asking the state to incarcerate sons; offenders describing their first job, favorite subject in school, or life on the streets; and, most intriguing of all, probation officers’ own biases and the characteristics they sought to aid in their decisions of whether boys should be institutionalized by the state. Together, my reading of the documentary evidence, conversations with Kenyan men, and analysis of these three data sets offer a rich, complex, and compelling history of young men’s coming-of-age and their encounter with the state.
CHAPTER OUTLINE
An Uncertain Age begins when a boy’s manhood begins: his initiation. In chapter 1, I explore the ways British provincial administrators and chiefs altered male initiation practices and the effects of these changes on young men’s coming-of-age. During the interwar years, though likely in the years before, district officials and elders lowered the age of initiates, eliminated important ritual practices, and curbed or ended young men’s time as warriors. The elder state became an active participant in the most intimate moments among male generations, trying to push newly made men into the wage labor market and discipline their behavior. The crucible of manhood shifted away from a constellation of ritual practices to circumcision, which became the primary indicator that a boy had become a man. Despite these changes, men defended this diverted path, claiming that it still allowed them to enjoy their youth and strive for manhood.
In chapter 2, I examine the experiences of young men from Western Kenya who left home and traveled the colony working for wages from the 1920s to the early 1950s. Leaving home and earning wages led to tense negotiations among male generations. Sons viewed their newfound financial and spatial independence from kin as a chance to rearticulate age and gender. They enjoyed themselves in new ways, including buying Western clothes, drinking alcohol, and trying out new dance styles. Many fathers and chiefs disapproved of such cultural deviance and tried to prevent them from going back out to work. Other young men returned home with their wages, prepared to contribute to the household. For their part, provincial administrators and labor officers encouraged, and sometimes outright compelled, young men to live and work beyond their fathers’ households. Wary that boys picking tea far from home might weaken elder authority or ignite international outrage, the elder state trod carefully. It drafted child labor laws, carried out workplace inspections, and investigated families’ complaints of runaway sons.
The elder state did not encourage every avenue young men took to earn an age. In chapter 3, I follow the lives of young men living and working on the streets of Nairobi, the capital city of the colony, from the 1920s until the early 1950s. On this urban frontier, young men eked out livings in the legitimate urban workforce, the black market, and the criminal underworld. Street life afforded young men new ways to form masculinities, bonds with age-mates, and relationships with seniors and juniors beyond kinship. The British tried to restrict young men’s urban migration, believing that town life made them undisciplined and uncontrollable. Municipal authorities rounded up the underemployed or homeless, magistrates charged them with vagrancy, and police repatriated them home. Repatriation became the elder state’s first, furtive step to inculcate in young men alternate, colonial models of appropriate mature, masculine behavior.
In chapters 4 and 5, I turn to the elder state’s efforts to define and punish perpetrators of the most serious crimes through corporal punishment and institutionalization. Corporal punishment was a widespread, age-specific practice in the colony. Both African communities and colonial courts relied heavily on physical violence to punish boys. The young
