youngest generations were without doubt subservient to elder groups.68 For the Maasai of Matapato, Spencer argues that “delay and denial” were “built into the system. It is elders who . . . cultivate the popular awareness of the process of time, and hence the perception of time itself, and of maturity among younger men and women.”69 Although young men enjoyed an egalitarian spirit within their age-group, “to acquire a sense of being a Maasai, is to enter into this premise of age inequality from the bottom rung and ultimately to have a role in perpetuating it as one climbs upward.”70 Whether Maasai or Gikuyu, young men were “suspended somewhere between boyhood and full adulthood,” and while they enjoyed their youth, they also held on to the promise that one day their elders would help them fulfill their ultimate dream of adulthood.71
This promise, this elder-sponsored path toward adulthood, was sometimes very explicitly expressed to young men. After a Meru boy’s circumcision, he returned to his father’s homestead. There his father greeted him and announced: “My son, as I have agreed to allow you to be circumcised, I also pledged to get you a wife. My son, I pledged to you a sword, spear, club, and shield for use when going out to fight. My son, I pledged you an ewe and heifer for your in-laws.”72 No clearer statement could have been made regarding the stakes of a disciplined, obedient coming-of-age. A Meru father said, in the starkest of terms: “Respect me and obey me, and I will prepare you for manhood.” Gikuyu fathers, John Lonsdale argues, “worked for their sons, earning the next generation’s bridewealth [, and] juniors, children, and clients, were expected to give obedience in return.”73 Mothers worked for their sons, too, as did sisters, whose marriages fetched the dowries that would be reinvested in a brother’s marriage.74 In many ways, the entire family labored to ensure that a son matured and started his own family. During colonial rule, and perhaps long before, boys reached manhood and young men reached adulthood through their willingness to accept their families’ efforts, and, if need be, the families exerted a little pressure to help them get there.
As British officials and missionaries came to understand and imagine the cultural significance of circumcision and seclusion as well as the politics of age-relations, they looked for ways to manipulate these forces. Their pursuit to harness the energies of young men and possess the authority of elders had profound implications for the African experience of colonial rule. To alter initiation practices or the time in seclusion; to tip the delicate scales in favor of one generation over another; to subsume the power of generational authority into the state or mission station altered how young men spent their youth, expressed masculinity, and strove for maturity.
DRAWING ARBITRARY LINES
When Reverend Worthington began circumcising young converts in Meru, he participated in a long-standing practice among missionaries in Kenya. Missionaries did not initially advertise themselves as purveyors of an alternative form of initiation, nor did African parents and elders imbue them with any authority on the matter. That did not prevent them from assisting with initiation, even if unintentionally. In 1909, Reverend V. V. Verbi, of the Church Missionary Society station at Wusi, noted, “My medical knowledge had been useful [and] many circumcision cases have been brought to me.”75 The reverend became so successful in aiding parents whose sons and daughters suffered infection that local circumcision operators complained to him that he was stealing their profits. Converts also pressured missionaries to permit the practice and persuaded them to carry it out at the stations.76 Those who had been orphans, outcasts, or emancipated slaves would have had few alternatives to receive initiation and looked to their new religious community.77 Together, missionaries, parents whose children suffered from botched circumcisions, and orphans took the first steps in connecting missions to the powerful cultural work of initiation. In doing so, they introduced new frontiers along which ideas about and relationships of gender and generation could be tested.78
Yet some missionaries like Reverend Worthington took this first step further. Worthington saw his role in circumcision as a way to replace the lessons learned in seclusion with those in the classroom. He argued that Meru elders and district commissioner Chamier did “violence to the convictions of those of our number who wish to undergo the ceremony under Christian influences.”79 His converts had the right to choose where they became men and women and to whom they turned to circumcise them. If they chose his mission, then Worthington felt no obligation to send them home. He was merely accommodating the desires of his flock, Christianizing African initiation to bring it under his supervision.80 This became a common strategy among Catholic and Protestant missionaries. They simply offered to circumcise converts or allowed them to return home for circumcision as long as they did not dance, sing, or enter seclusion. For members of the mission, to forgo the rites accompanying initiation carried a weighty stigma. Many of those “boys who have been circumcised at [the] hospital are hated by their people because they did not go through the old customs.”81
Worthington positioned schooling as a “vital” and transformative moment in a child’s life, not unlike initiation itself. “It is unjust to extract a child from mission education,” Worthington argued, and “no break in education at such a vital time in the child’s life should occur.” Each in their own way, African initiation and Western religious education socialized the young and transformed boys into masculine, productive members of different sets of communities. However, for missionaries like Worthington, months of dancing, feasting, gift giving, and lessons in customary practice were a diabolical distraction from Bible study, literacy, and vocational training. These activities did not produce the kinds of masculinity or morals he wanted from his schoolboys. In much the same way as Methodist missionaries in South Africa, Worthington saw African initiation and Christian baptism as “both rituals of reproduction” and an “uncompromising choice between the past and the future, benighted damnation and enlightened salvation.”82 Eventually, his flock would have to choose. And when schoolboys chose to return home for initiation, they reminded missionaries of the limits of their authority and the need for a firmer hand—or, in Worthington’s case, at the very least, a kidnapping.83
Meru district commissioner Chamier could not have disagreed more. The Meru, he believed, were not hostile to education, but rather merely “bitter” that missionaries and government interfered with custom. In his letter to provincial commissioner Tate, he argued that “if respect for a missionary is only to be obtained by violent interference with tribal customs, the price is in my opinion too high to pay.”84 The district commissioner echoed the words Hobley had uttered five years earlier: the colonial state must respect African customs—at least the ones the British recognized—and maintain the authority of parents, elders, and chiefs or pay the ultimate price of detribalization.
Chamier was disheartened when provincial commissioner Tate weighed in on Worthington’s activities in Meru. Tate acknowledged the importance of initiation in the transition from childhood to manhood. He had, after all, dabbled in a little ethnographic research of his own a decade earlier as district commissioner in Kiambu. There he spent considerable time investigating the significance of initiation and cataloging a history of Gikuyu age-group names.85 However, Tate replied to Chamier that initiation should not jeopardize the far more vital endeavor of teaching a “rising generation [to] master their desires and impulses and to order their lives in a manner not only conducive to their eternal salvation but also more agreeable to civilised standards.”86 In Tate’s view, missionaries and colonial officers had partnered in a broader civilizing project, and African parents had to realize that “neither Missionary Societies nor Government will undertake the training of boys and girls unless the latter are to remain under their care in statu pupillai [sic] for the period of completing their education.” Tate’s vision of the colonial encounter and its relationships to male coming-of-age and generational authority marked a dramatic shift in policy outlined by Hobley only five years earlier in 1914. Tate laid out the position of the colonial state and missions vis-à-vis African young men and parents in the starkest of terms. When a father handed his son over to a priest or principal, willingly or unwillingly, he relinquished his authority and, by extension, his right to socialize, initiate,
