He had failed to consider that initiation changed over time and never embodied a fixed, original form in the first place. What the Routledges observed in 1908 should have differed from what Kenyatta’s age-group experienced in 1913 and what Cagnolo witnessed in the 1930s. Anthropologists were frustrated not just by shifting initiation practices but also by the secrecy with which communities held these rituals and their meanings. In fact, the oaths binding former initiates from sharing details of their time in seclusion still hold to this day.27
Several ethnographers tipped their hats to the flexibility of male initiation and changes already set in motion, sometimes set off by the ethnographers themselves. Even though William and Katherine Routledge conducted one of the earliest studies of Gikuyu social life, the initiation ceremonies they observed were already adaptations to Gikuyu interaction with the Maasai and the coastal slave trade.28 One of the Gikuyu assistants working for the Routledges during their 1908 fieldwork had postponed his initiation to aid in their research. Later, when he informed them that he had to leave their employment to undergo circumcision, they tried to convince him to stay. He flatly refused, telling them that his elders had threatened to prevent his initiation altogether if he postponed it again.29 The Routledges were not alone in relying on uninitiated interlocutors. Around the same time, Alfred C. Hollis learned to speak Nandi from two “small boys” he met in Nairobi—one a Nandi, the other a Kipsigis. They stayed with him until he had learned the language and then returned home.30 Some of Hollis’s very first information about Nandi life and language came from the mouths of mere babes living far from home.
Some of the young men with whom early ethnographers worked had undergone circumcision but not yet completed initiation, and thereby remained but boys in their elders’ eyes. Shortly after World War I, as Gerhard Lindblom made yet another fruitless attempt to witness Kamba circumcision ceremonies (he had been denied repeatedly), he noted that a growing number of Kamba men returned for their second circumcision at very old ages. Although they had been physically circumcised, they had forgone their time in seclusion to work for the government as soldiers and police.31 In the 1930s, John G. Peristiany also relied on a circumcised yet uninitiated Kipsigis interpreter named arap Chuma. In his ethnography, Peristiany recalls that Chuma had gone to Nairobi when he was very young and had been circumcised by a European doctor. When he returned, elders allowed him to marry and settle down, but they never let him forget that he had not been initiated in the proper Kipsigis fashion. “He is constantly made to feel that, unless he is initiated, he will not be considered as really one of them.” During his stay, Peristiany encouraged arap Chuma to complete his initiation.32
In each of these cases, ethnographers had engaged with elders through uninitiated boys or those initiated in an atypical manner. Young men, boys even, had willingly altered their initiation to take advantage of the new possibilities opened up by the colonial encounter. The British “discovered” African coming-of-age just as young men adapted its practice and form to changing colonial circumstances. Moreover, the choices these young intermediaries made in their own transitions to manhood complicated their ability to accurately translate the meanings of African customary practice, especially rituals they themselves had not yet experienced. What chief or village elder would choose to reveal such secrets to an uninitiated boy like the Routledges’ interpreter or a man who had forgone his time in seclusion like arap Chuma? As the Gikuyu proverb goes: “Mûici na kîhîî atigaga kîeha kîarua,” or “He who steals in the company of an uncircumcised boy will live in fear until the boy is circumcised.”33 And if elders chose to share their knowledge through the medium of the uninitiated, an act of adaptation of their own, then the conversations that formed these early ethnographies took place through a generational prism refracting what information elders chose to provide uninitiated translators and what information the boys thought important for European ears. Perhaps the very importance of initiation and age-relations in these early ethnographies was a by-product of exchanges ethnographers had with boys for whom these very issues were the principal thoughts on their minds as well as the minds of elders who found themselves engaged in tense age-infused negotiations with boys elevated far above their station.
These ethnographic missives record a form of historical theater immortalizing performances between African informants and intermediaries as well as European investigators. While they do not offer historians accounts of precolonial forms of initiation or age-relations, they provide an abstraction and a means of identifying how Africans articulated coming-of-age and how agents of colonial rule witnessed it at a particular time. These ethnographies, as well as discussions between colonial officials and African intermediaries, identified several crucial characteristics of coming-of-age that underwent dramatic change during the colonial encounter.
First, male initiation practices marked the physical and psychological transition from childhood to manhood. Before and long after the colonial period, the majority of African communities in Kenya practiced some form of male initiation. These varied in ritual practice, most notably the presence or absence of genital circumcision. Despite ritual diversity, initiation stood as one of the most significant moments in an African man’s life. The Routledges argued that for the Gikuyu, events like marriage and death “hold but a small place . . . compared to that greatest of all ceremonies whereby the boy becomes a man and the girl a woman.”34 Likewise, initiation was a pivotal moment in the lives of young Kamba, Gusii, Kipsigis, Maasai, and Nandi.35 While Luo boys did not traditionally undergo circumcision, they did experience rituals that transitioned them out of childhood.36 Plans to initiate a boy depended on several factors. The well-being of the entire community determined when initiation occurred. Drought, famine, or war could postpone or even accelerate initiation. If conditions permitted, the decision fell to the eagerness of a future initiate and the consent of his father. A boy had to want it, and when ready, he approached his father. Only a father could secure “the satisfaction of all a boy’s longings and ambitions.”37 A father’s consent often depended on his ability to afford the necessary accoutrements of initiation, such as livestock, alcohol, food, and gifts.38 A father’s status also changed once he had initiated his firstborn. He or his age-group as a whole moved upward into a more advanced age with its own new privileges and responsibilities. While a father could postpone his son’s initiation, he could deny neither his son’s nor his own ambitions for too long.
FIGURE 1.1. African child sitting in front of house, n.d. Photo courtesy of the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies Winterton Collection, Northwestern University.
Prior to and in the earlier years of colonial rule, boys’ initiations occurred at some point in their late teens through their mid-twenties. Kamba boys were a notable exception; they experienced circumcision before puberty, around the age of five, but did not complete initiation until much later.39 Preparations took many months. Fathers had to accumulate capital and consult elders. Mothers had to prepare food and alcohol. Boys had to visit relatives to announce initiation, procure the necessary adornments, and perform songs and dances. In the days running up to initiation, Gikuyu and Meru boys worked themselves to the point of exhaustion dancing and singing songs. Wachira Mwaniki, a Gikuyu from Nyeri circumcised in 1936, remembers that the songs emboldened the spirits of the boys who were about to face the knife.40 In Kiambu, David Chege recalls that the words differed two decades later, but the spirit of the songs remained the same: “Let me be allowed to go and get circumcision, I am old enough to face the knife!” “In our family we have never seen anyone shed tears!”41
Before sunrise, Gikuyu and Meru initiates traveled to a nearby stream where they disrobed and stood immersed in chilly waters. After some time, the boys emerged and sat along the bank or in a nearby field where a large crowd had gathered to watch. The boys dug their heels into the cool earth, pushed back against the supportive hands of their sponsors, and fixed their gaze skyward as the circumciser walked, ceremonial knife in hand, down the line, cutting each of them with two swift strokes.42 At the same time of day, but much nearer the shores of Lake
