colonial officials tried to become practicing elders, making generations of matured, male bodies to strengthen state authority. As for the young men who faced the knife, they forged ahead into an age of altered rituals and uncertain meanings focused squarely on enjoying their youthfulness, achieving masculinity, and dreaming of the joys of elderhood.
PARENTAL PARAMOUNTCY
When Reverend Worthington retrieved his still-healing pupil from seclusion, he reignited a long and storied debate about the relationships between African families, missionaries, and the colonial state, as well as their overlapping claims of over the young. From the very beginning, missionary activity in East Africa tested not only the religious convictions of African communities but also the relationships between young and old. Some of the very first converts to Christianity were the very young who found meaning in the new faith, safety from a father’s abusive hand, or relief from destitution and slavery. In the 1860s, only a few years after establishing a mission in Zanzibar, Roman Catholic missionaries had sixteen children staying with them, some of whom had been enslaved in Nyanza near Lake Victoria and then ransomed out of slavery. The priests viewed themselves as alternative fathers and these former child slaves as the future of missionary work in the region.4 By the late nineteenth century, a growing abolitionist impulse and fledgling colonial administration opened more spaces for interaction between the newcomers and young East Africans.5 Hundreds of young slaves bound for the Indian Ocean trade found themselves emancipated from their captors by agents of the British Empire. British expeditionary forces freed young captives from caravans crawling coastward while naval patrols boarded slaving vessels at sea. The British then turned many of them over to Christian mission stations like Freretown in Mombasa or the African Asylum near Bombay.6
In 1898, famine swept from the shores of the Indian Ocean inland to Lake Victoria. On the coast alone, an estimated forty thousand children perished.7 The destitute found refuge at mission stations. Many of the young people who arrived at stations like Freretown represented a different form of bondage than those captured in previous decades. During the famine, desperate parents made heartbreaking decisions to keep their children alive by exchanging them, especially girls, for food and livestock with neighboring families who fared marginally better. These temporary arrangements, known as pawnship, ensured a child’s survival but could also slip into slavery.8 A year into the famine, a series of pawnship and kidnapping cases attracted the attention of British authorities. The assistant collector of Rabai, H. B. Johnstone, uncovered what he believed to be a network of child slavery. Kamba traders bought children in German Tanganyika and sold them in exchange for livestock to Duruma families across the border in the British East Africa Protectorate. The Duruma then took these children to the coast and sold them for profit. In this way, traders exchanged young people multiple times as they gradually drove them coastward for sale and shipment.9 Whether these children had been pawned by parents or kidnapped by slavers, the British could not tell. For them, pawnship was nothing more than slavery. Concerns about pawnship continued long after the famine. In 1912, and again in 1917, officials issued warnings that Gikuyu children had been seen traveling with non-Gikuyu adults; and if anyone should see this, they must investigate immediately.10 As the British conflated pawnship and slavery, they forced some parents to circumvent colonial authority and turn to Christian missions for help.
During the famine, Freretown fed and housed as many as one thousand “orphans,” many brought there by parents who could no longer feed them.11 As the missions accepted these young people, they participated in the practice of pawnship with African parents. Caring for freed child slaves, pawns left by their parents, or young converts drawn to a new faith forced missionaries and the colonial state to explore and define the boundaries of authority over African young people. What right did the British have to hand young people over to missions without parental consent? What right did missions have to keep emaciated pawns or emancipated slaves if parents or kin wanted them back? At what point must missionaries and officials consider what young people wanted?
These questions compelled the chief secretary of the protectorate to send out his district commissioners in April 1914 to ascertain when the young became independent of their elders. The chief secretary prefaced his request by writing that he was “strongly of the opinion that native minors of both sexes should remain under the control of their parents during the period of their minority and that they should not be permitted to leave that control without express sanction.”12 In short, the British colonial state and its African intermediaries should not allow children to leave their families. But if commissioners could determine a definitive moment in which children came of age, then the state might allow them the freedom to leave home and attach themselves to a mission station, join the ranks of the tribal police, or work on a settler’s sisal farm.
As field reports trickled in, it became clear that no two ethnic communities along the coast were exactly alike or two district commissioners in agreement. The district commissioner of Mombasa did not even bother to ask local intermediaries. Rather, he felt that the Indian Penal Code, from which the protectorate took its laws, sufficiently fixed the end of male childhood at fourteen years of age and the end of female childhood at sixteen. Bending to African custom, he argued, merely weakened the penal code, thereby “rendering inoperative” imperial rule of law.13 Other commissioners, eager to dabble in a little ethnographic research, did pose the chief secretary’s question to local elders. The commissioners at Shimoni and Rabai learned that among the Nyika, puberty and marriage determined the transition from childhood to adulthood, and this usually occurred between the ages of fifteen and nineteen. The Rabai commissioner added that coming of age did not depend solely on the age of a boy or a girl, but rather the wealth of his or her family. Well-to-do fathers could marry children off at an early age, usually at fifteen, while poor parents withheld marriage, sometimes until nineteen or older. Colonial taxation, he noted, had forced parents to marry children earlier so that they could use dowry to pay off their taxes. Both commissioners saw a young man’s coming-of-age as highly adaptable to economic conditions. Given this flexibility, they felt that boys should be allowed to leave home at any time, as long as they had parental consent.14
The commissioner at Malindi offered a much different perspective. He argued that an African child “does not come of age in our sense of the word,” nor was there a precise moment when parents relinquished authority over children. The commissioner at Njale concurred. No young Giriama, he argued, was ever independent of his or her elders. Strict generational control ensured that no child at any age left his or her parents behind without consulting them first. Both men believed that parental consent and unbending generational authority lay at the heart of African social life. If the chief secretary wanted young people to ever be truly free of their elder kin, then the colonial state would have to draw an “arbitrary line.”15
Despite these differences of opinion, a consensus formed around four significant points. First the commissioners believed that African boys did in fact come of age, though the timing depended on the community’s fortunes and customary practices. They also identified initiation and marriage as the two most pivotal moments in a young man’s life, precise markers differentiating childhood from adulthood. Initiation graduated boys into manhood and an interstitial space before adulthood that introduced a host of new responsibilities. Marriage matriculated them into adulthood as they began their own families. Third, commissioners sanctified parental authority as essential to controlling young men who had left childhood but not yet settled down into adulthood. Finally, they positioned the state as the guarantor of the rights of parents over their children, of the rights of the old over the young.
Once the district commissioners’ reports were in, the final word fell to their superior, provincial commissioner Charles Hobley. Hobley argued that young African men and women might come of age through initiation, but they never really became independent of family life and generational authority. Girls, he argued, merely passed from the control of one male, the father, to another male, the husband. As for boys, marriage provided the pivotal moment of independence; yet, even then, they remained beholden to their fathers and the new families they created. To reject the “definite
