corporal punishment, whether meted out by parents or colonial officials, as part of a broader effort by adults to discipline their immaturity. Magistrates also institutionalized the most serious young offenders in approved schools. I trace the methods staff used to transform hardened house burglars and recidivist vagrants into obedient subjects. They drew on the latest techniques developed in Britain and the United States, such as vocational training and rigorous work-time discipline, as well as the very local practices of male circumcision and age grading. Young men rejected and reappropriated these efforts as they went about their own journeys toward adulthood behind bars. Some parents even negotiated for and demanded from colonial officials the incarceration of their delinquent sons.
By the 1940s, inadequate education, chronic underemployment, and debilitating poverty pushed men’s plans for marriage and adulthood further into the horizon. In their frustration and confusion, they turned to violent protest. In chapters 6 and 7, I narrow the focus of the book for a moment to examine the Mau Mau war and the brutal British counterinsurgency of the 1950s. Mau Mau was one of many violent uprisings led by young men during the colonial period, yet it offers historians a useful case for how men argued over age and competing masculinities. The war became a new means for young Gikuyu to express their masculinity, lay claim to maturity, and capture the mobility that had eluded them. Their efforts ran aground against the violent, surging tide of the British counterinsurgency. A handful of influential British officials—in concert with conservative loyalists as well as Christian elite Gikuyu—identified Mau Mau as a conflict about age-relations. Together they framed Mau Mau as a form of juvenile delinquency and the failure of elders and the state to adequately discipline them. Their solution to Mau Mau led to a dramatic expansion of the elder state, in which the British sought to wield generational authority more forcefully, quite literally certifying young men’s maturity in return for their acquiescence.
This work began at the Wamumu Youth Camp, built by the department of community development in 1955 to “rehabilitate” nearly two thousand Mau Mau detainees under the age of eighteen. In chapter 7, we visit Wamumu, where camp staff tried to unmake the masculinity of former Mau Mau insurgents, infantilizing them as undisciplined boys. Then, using circumcision rites, education, sports, propaganda, and job placement, they reimagined them as mature, disciplined subjects. Wamumu became a state-sponsored rite of passage aimed at defeating Mau Mau and entrenching the state’s authority through age and gender. But the elder state did not stop at Wamumu. In the late 1950s, officials believed they faced a colony-wide “youth crisis.” The issues that had driven the Mau Mau generation to war remained unresolved: underemployment, lack of education, poverty, political disenfranchisement, and racial inequality. Officials feared that they faced a new, rising young generation of frustrated insurgents. And so the elder state tried to piece together a youth service, massive in scope and size compared to those found in other colonies. The Wamumu program was distributed throughout Kenya in approved schools for young offenders and in hundreds of newly built youth clubs serving tens of thousands of poor young men and women in the countryside.
As the sun set on the British Empire, officials lamented the failure of this new network of institutions they had built for the young. Yet the elder state found new life in the postcolony, and age became a powerful tool of the state in newly independent Kenya. In chapter 8, I show how young men demanded action from Jomo Kenyatta and other politicians whom they had carried to power. In response, Jomo Kenyatta, the first president of Kenya, created the National Youth Service and preserved late colonial programs and rhetoric. Through the elder state, Kenyatta and the first generation of Kenyan leaders recast themselves as political elders tasked with leading a young nation of young citizens. In fact, they brought the elder state to fruition, institutionalizing maturity and masculinity as essential tools of statecraft. Young men became instruments of the elder state to build a fledgling nation and perpetuate a single generation’s grip on power—one that would last nearly as long as colonial rule.
1
An “Arbitrary Line”
Male Initiation and Colonial Authority
IN THE CHILLY MISTS of Meru in August 1919, tempers flared white-hot. Reverend R. T. Worthington, of the United Methodist mission, had stormed a nearby village flanked by a gang of mission converts. He had come in search of a certain schoolboy who had left his lessons to undergo initiation. The boy’s leave had long ended, and the reverend wanted him back in the classroom. Village elders protested as Worthington broke into the seclusion hut, where the young man lay recuperating from his circumcision, and took him back to the mission. Fuming, the elders assembled before district commissioner A. E. Chamier and informed him that the Meru community would not tolerate Worthington’s incendiary behavior. Worthington had done the unimaginable: remove a still-healing initiate from the moral instruction that took place during seclusion, from the lessons critical to his understanding of his new station in society.1
Trying to temper the elders’ fury, Commissioner Chamier promised to investigate the matter. Tensions simmered for days. When Chamier finally confronted Worthington, he accused the reverend of “high-handed action.”2 Worthington retorted that Meru initiation lasted two months and disrupted mission education. He had merely retrieved a student whose lengthy initiation put eighteen precious months of schooling in jeopardy. Incredulous, Chamier replied that if two months could undermine a year and a half of Western education, it indicated “a certain ineffectiveness about mission training.” For Chamier and the village elders, the reverend had violated Meru custom, interfered with one of the most pivotal moments in a young man’s life, and, worst of all, disregarded elder authority. For Worthington, Meru custom, initiation, and elder power were obstacles hindering his student’s salvation and study.
Young men’s initiation and coming-of-age ignited intense deliberations about the messy, overlapping frontiers of familial, missionary, and colonial authorities. To resolve such arguments like the one in Meru, the British investigated, with the help of African intermediaries like chiefs and interpreters, when men came of age and became independent of their seniors. To discover, define, and demarcate a precise moment when a young man was no longer beholden to his elders—an age when he was free to leave home to work, join a church, or attend a school—became one of the first steps in the formation of the elder state.
In their pursuit of an identifiable moment from which they could extrapolate young male agency, British administrators, missionaries, and ethnographers found male initiation. With its graphic rituals and intense interaction between young and old, male initiation became a focal point in British explorations of African age. They came to view initiation as the pivotal moment in a young African man’s life, the significance of which continued and deepened as he aged. Initiation, which often included genital circumcision, transitioned boys into young men and set them on paths toward adulthood. Initiation also served as a process of concentrated socialization through which older generations imparted the life lessons essential to becoming masculine. Above all, initiation exposed the British to the intense negotiations among generations and the inequalities between young and old. They came to believe that the principal thought on boys’ minds was to become men, while elders sought to control the boys’ youthful energies.
Unlike female initiation and circumcision, which the state and missionaries tried to suppress, the British tampered with male initiation to meet the demands of a settler colony.3 In partnership with chiefs and village elders, the British manipulated initiation to discipline young men and push them into the wage labor market. They modified the frequency of male initiation, lowered the age of circumcision, shortened the length of seclusion, and restricted the activities of warriors. More and more boys, at earlier and earlier ages, became men. In much the same way as during the female circumcision
