to a Mission or a town” put a young man at risk. “He may become automatically detribalized,” Hobley warned, “and cannot according to native law claim to come back and participate in the division of the family wealth at his father’s death.”16 To allow a young African man to stray from his age-defined duties so he could join a mission or enter the migrant labor market might, Hobley argued, unravel the entire structure of generational authority and African social life.
For Hobley, the authority of fathers over sons, of parents over children, and of seniors over juniors was an essential component of African and colonial order. The task of his provincial administration was to preserve generational authority. Hobley stressed that as “the question of control of the family is so fundamentally connected with the whole organization of an African tribe, I would strongly urge [. . .] that each case be dealt with [. . .] by the District Officer, the matter being mutually arranged between the guardian and the other party.”17 District authorities, with their knowledge of local norms, must partner with parents and elders to maintain the harness of generational authority to which the young were yoked. To favor the Indian Penal Code or any other non-African legal structure over the authority of parents and elders, to even imagine a scenario by which young men were free of parental responsibility, risked detribalization. And yet Hobley and some of his commissioners ignored the creativity and contingency in the institutions of age and family life that allowed parents in time of crisis to pawn a starving daughter or send a son to a Christian mission for education.
The district commissioner’s findings and Hobley’s caution were also refracted through their own ideas about age, ones that had undergone very recent renovation back in Britain. Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the British embraced the idea, drawn from biologists and burgeoning fields of social science like child psychology, that a distinct phase of the life course existed between childhood and adulthood, one marked by growing independence. Words such as adolescent, juvenile, and youth became first scientific and then cultural ideas, created so they could be studied, understood, and ultimately controlled. By 1914, a vast literature describing the age between childhood and adulthood had been published, and new legislation to regulate it had been passed in Britain, Europe, and the United States.18
The young, especially men, were characterized by a near limitless energy as well as an inability to cope with their rapid physiological and psychological development. Yet when all that kinetic, unstable energy was bottled up or misdirected, it led to indiscipline, delinquency, and rebelliousness. This potential for disorder made young men all the more fascinating and frightening to social scientists and reformers, leaving girls well outside their scholarly field of view. When young men succumbed to this baser nature, it was often because they lacked firm familial discipline and had come into contact with destabilizing influences outside the home. This interstitial period between childhood and adulthood quickly became associated with all manner of socioeconomic ills: poverty, urbanization, and criminality, as well as a breakdown of the family, of tradition, and of an idyllic, rural past.19
Yet this new age could also be “the new ‘raw material’ of the future [and] a potentially awesome power.”20 Channeled and controlled by the state, young men could build nations, expand empires, and reinforce racial and national superiorities. For the British these had been hard-won lessons learned on the battlefield of Southern Africa. Stunned by their near failure in the Second Boer War, the British witnessed the possibilities of imperial collapse and national weakness.21 Emerging from the besieged town of Mafeking, the so-called savior of the British effort against the Boers, Robert Baden-Powell, returned home with a solution to British anxieties: the mobilization of the young.22 As Baden-Powell encouraged his readers in Scouting for Boys, “We must all be bricks in the wall of that great edifice—the British Empire—and we must be careful that we do not let our differences of opinion on politics or other questions grow so strong as to divide us. We must still stick shoulder to shoulder as Britons if we want to keep our present position among the nations.”23 Young men became a means to reinvigorate British masculinity, militarism, imperial purpose, and racial superiority. Years later, during World War I, ideas about age and youth were on the tips of tongues the world over as European nations channeled the energies of young men with deadly design. Tens of thousands of bright, young Britons possessed by romantic, nationalist fervor charged up and out of muddy trenches carved into the cratered fields of France. This no-man’s-land became the crucible by which young Britons could test their manhood.24
In Kenya, colonial officials saw something of what they had lost back home in Britain: the comforts of pastoral hearth and home and the social controls of patriarchs and elder kin. They also worried that they had brought with them those same destabilizing forces that had driven British families to cities, broken them apart, and then released uncontrolled, undisciplined young men and women onto the streets. And so they had to be vigilant and guard against the unraveling of African family life that could in turn weaken indirect rule. They seized on local institutions, like male initiation, which they imagined to have been imbued with unquestioned elder patriarchal power—ignoring, perhaps intentionally, the argument and flexibility embedded in African age-relations. After the 1914 investigation, the elder state still had much to learn. Over the course of colonial rule, the British continued exploring initiation, marriage, and the liminal period in between and then tried wielding the power of generational authority themselves.
FACING THE KNIFE
Five years had passed since coastal administrators affirmed parental authority, and still Meru district commissioner Chamier had to defend the rights of fathers to initiate their sons from a missionary willfully violating local custom. What bothered Chamier most was not that Worthington had kidnapped a schoolboy from seclusion, but that he had also performed circumcisions at the mission without parental consent. The reverend did not simply remove one student from seclusion; he removed many of his faithful from initiation altogether. Reporting to his superior, provincial commissioner H. R. Tate, Chamier argued that this constituted a serious breach of African cultural life. He conceded that mission-sponsored male circumcision had also taken place in nearby Nyeri and Fort Hall, especially among Gikuyu at Roman Catholic missions. But its wider availability did not change the fact that the missions had converted one of the most climactic moments in an African’s social life to its own purposes. By offering circumcision at his mission, Chamier feared that Worthington detached young people from the collective, generation-forming experience of initiation and robbed them of the customary knowledge they learned in seclusion.
Chamier’s anxieties arose from his belief, which he shared with many other colonial officials at the time, that initiation was one of the most important moments in a young African man’s life. Accounts of initiation among the different ethnic communities of Kenya consumed page after page of early colonial field reports and ethnographies, much of it filtered through the sieve of elder Africans, young often-uninitiated interpreters, and scraps of hearsay meticulously collected by the authors themselves. The theater of initiation—with its elaborate adornments worn, dances and songs performed, genital circumcision endured, and secrets of seclusion withheld—excited the wildest imaginations of colonial newcomers. This ethnographic exploration and interpretation, what Katherine Luongo has called the “anthro-administrative complex,” empowered the British to use initiation, especially genital circumcision, as the not-so “arbitrary line” that marked the water’s edge of parental authority.25
However, colonial investigations like the one conducted in 1914, and dozens of ethnographic studies, did not offer a clear, inert image of African coming-of-age. Rather, they provided officials with a frustratingly blurred snapshot of community practice set in motion by local and global encounters. Consider John Middleton’s frustration as he wrote about Gikuyu social institutions in the early 1950s. Rather than conduct his own research, he tried to synthesize a host of older ethnographies. To his consternation, he found that when considered together, none of the early anthropologists—Routledge, Hobley, Cagnolo, or Kenyatta—presented a consistent, unified narrative of Gikuyu initiation.26 While he rightly attributed the problem to variation in style
