similar ordeal.43 Among pastoralist Kipsigis and Maasai, initiation also included intense ritualized violence, such as passing through gauntlets of stinging nettles and frightening tests of honesty and endurance.44 Bravery in the face of searing pain was a common element in genital circumcision. A boy who struggled or cried out endured mockery and humiliation. In these moments, no boy could flinch or cry out in pain. Facing the knife prepared initiates for the courage and discipline expected of them when they became warriors.
The second element emphasized by ethnographers and colonial officials was a period of intense instruction and socialization. Following circumcision, young men entered a period of seclusion, usually in a home built by their sponsors at a fair distance from their villages. These special houses went by a variety of names: the Gikuyu called them githunu or thingira, the Meru called them gichee, the Kamba thomi, and the Nandi and Kipsigis menjo or menjet. Despite their disparate names, their role in initiation was twofold: to protect and to educate the initiates while they healed. During seclusion, new initiates learned the codes of conduct of the community and expectations of becoming warriors, husbands, and eventually fathers and elders. Seclusion ensured that once physically reborn as men, their minds kept pace. Given its importance, male communities shrouded seclusion in secrecy. Before young men emerged from seclusion, their elders bound them to oaths of secrecy. These oaths frustrated ethnographers who knew little about what went on in the menjo, which ultimately pushed them to emphasize the public rituals surrounding genital circumcision over the more private affairs of the seclusion hut.
This was especially the case for Kamba initiates. Several years separated their genital circumcision from their second, great circumcision. Around the age of twelve, though boys from poor families could be twenty or older, initiates left home for the thomi. There they hunted, solved riddles, defended against mock Maasai cattle raids, and confronted their fears.45 When the young men returned home from this second circumcision, they had taken yet another step toward adulthood. After facing the knife, young Gikuyu men convalesced for a week or two in the githunu. While they healed, their sponsors, elders, and even older siblings visited to instill in them important lessons.46 They informed the boys that they were “not a child any longer, be very brave, and don’t play with uncircumcised boys or girls.”47 Moreover, “they have gone to another stage from childhood to adulthood, behave well, respect men and women when you meet them on your way, greet them with respect and move aside to let them pass.”48 It reminded them that while they were no longer children, they were still expected to obey their elders.
The seclusion of Kipsigis and Nandi initiates was one of the longest in Kenya. After circumcision, boys stayed in a special hut known as the menjo, constructed far from the community, where they healed.49 Here, according to men of the Chuma and Sawe age-groups, the most important aspects of initiation occurred. While recuperating, special elder instructors lived with them, teaching them the laws of the Kipsigis people as well as physical combat. As Anthony King’etich Rotich, a member of the Sawe age-group, recalls, “They were taught everything a Kipsigis needed to know so that he became a man; and when he came out he was now a man, and he was no longer a boy.”50 Another Sawe, Jonah Kiprono, concurs: “We learned about war, handling spears, bows, and arrows, and we were also taught about the behavior expected of a man.”51 This time offered them the opportunity to “forsake childhood traits and behave like an adult.”52 Several Kipsigis men carefully distinguished their time in the menjo—and not simply their circumcision—as making them men and preparing them for adulthood.53
Emerging from seclusion, young men entered into new sets of relations with one another as well as with their elders and junior followers.54 The crucible of initiation forged a cohesive generation, which shared a special bond governed by strict codes of intragenerational conduct. Gikuyu young men exiting their brief period in seclusion took an age-group name, usually a remarkable, contemporaneous event connecting the group to a moment with historical significance.55 When circumcised in 1936, Wachira Mwaniki’s age-set was named cindano (needle) as well as pia (Kenya Bus Service). Pins and needles had just shown up in Nyeri marketplaces, and the Kenya Bus Service had begun operation in Nairobi.56 Young men and their age-groups were bound together not only by their initiation and seclusion but also by the historical circumstances in which they came of age and the history they would make together.
Young men left seclusion only to remain in an interstitial period, between childhood and adulthood, of varying lengths of time. Instead of becoming adults, they became warriors of varying degrees of seniority. Gikuyu young men left seclusion to become junior warriors of a mumo, a set of youths. Over the next six or so years, they spent their days dancing, singing, and devoting themselves to military activities.57 Their time as warriors became a way to “divert their excess energies and their strength to more profitable channels, such as raiding Maasai stock, and thereby enriching the family.”58 Out west, Maasai and Samburu initiates became moran and lived apart from the community in separate compounds known as manyattas, out of which they trained, prepared stock raids, and enjoyed the luxuries bestowed upon them as warriors. Communities who had to defend against Maasai moran raids, such as the Kipsigis and Nandi, prepared their own young warriors fresh out of the menjo for raids and counterraids of their own.59
Third, African communities experienced and British officials understood coming-of-age as a series of intense generational relationships. Each step in the journey from initiation to seclusion and on into warriorhood depended on young men’s relations with older generations.60 Pastoralist communities such as the Kipsigis, Nandi, Maasai, and Samburu organized generational life around age-groups created at periodic intervals, which formed a progressive, cyclical pattern of advancement. The decision to initiate a new group of boys into junior warriors depended on the willingness of elder men to make way for the new generation. Among the Kipsigis, elders decided to start a new age-group every fifteen years or so, each with its own name.61 During the next fifteen-year cycle, boys would be initiated into the newest age-group. Eventually, this group would be closed, giving rise to yet another one, pushing all other age-groups upward along an ever-moving axis of age and time.62 Consider Thomas Kisigei, a Kipsigis living near Sotik; he claims to have been one of the last initiates into the Chuma age-group. He faced the knife in 1947, during the solar eclipse that passed over southern Kenya.63 At the moment of his initiation, the Chuma group closed its doors to new initiates. As Thomas and his fellow Chuma, who had been initiated years before, entered junior warriorhood, the age-group that had once occupied that position, known as Maina, also moved upward, becoming senior warriors. To make room for the Maina, the group that had once been senior warriors graduated into elderhood.
Creating and closing age-groups required all men to acquiesce to change—but not always willingly. Occasionally uninitiated Kipsigis or junior warriors struggled, sometimes violently, to get the generation above them to relinquish their position. Movement upward through Maasai society was not automatic either. Junior moran had to prove their value to and respect of their elders to progress to positions of senior warriorhood and beyond. This was often accomplished through violent outbursts of indiscipline and direct challenges to the authority of elders. Rebelliousness was an essential component of the Maasai system of age-graduation.64 To signal that they, too, had the grit and guts to endure initiation, Gikuyu boys performed endless dances of a distinctly loud and militant manner until parents became so annoyed that they gladly consented to initiation.65 However, these “rituals of rebellion” never materialized into full-scale generational revolutions whereby the young permanently overturned elder authority.66
Finally, ethnographers and colonial officials fixated on the power elders had over the young and the intense stratification among generations. Elder men and women demanded obedience, service in time of conflict, and legitimacy of their authority. They decided when and how to initiate sons and daughters.67 They wielded the ritual violence of the circumcision knife. They conducted the lessons in seclusion. They held the keys to maturity and future elder power. Acquiescence and complicity were as much a
