and government officials might allow his son to return for initiation, but they were under no such obligation.
Worthington’s siege of a seclusion hut exposed two competing visions of the colonial state. Chamier saw the state as a conservator of the African customs and institutions that buttressed indirect rule. Tate saw the state as a catalyst of the civilizing mission, encouraging Africans to leave the reserve, convert to Christianity, and learn a trade. Each man had served in the Kenyan provincial administration for over a decade and yet found themselves, at least on this issue, in a battle for the soul of the colonial enterprise: Was its task the protection of “native paramountcy” or the moral uplift of its subjects? In some ways, Chamier’s conservatism would claim the 1920s and 1930s. Bruce Berman argues that the interwar provincial administration was a paternalistic, “conservative apparatus of control,” a “guardian bureaucracy” driven to stabilize and control the social and economic forces it had set in motion.87 Two of the most important institutions men like Chamier sought to protect were tribes and chiefs. “Obviously tribes could not be allowed to disintegrate,” as Brett Shadle nicely puts it. “Chiefs without tribes were not chiefs, and with neither chiefs nor tribes Indirect Rule, and colonial rule altogether, would collapse.”88 Nor could customs like initiation be questioned when they were so central to establishing a sense of place and legitimizing authority within a community.
However, missionaries like Worthington and social reformers back in Britain shook provincial administrators like Chamier from their dusty conservatism, forcing them to live up to the lofty goals of the civilizing mission. The battle over female initiation, particularly circumcision, was one of the most spectacular examples of colonial officials and chiefs pushed to tamper with African cultural life in the name of moral uplift. In the 1920s, several religious organizations in Kenya and parliamentarians in London pressured officials to limit and then outright abolish female circumcision.89 In response, the Central Province administration worked with local councils of chiefs to gradually alter female circumcision. Changes were small at first. Officials issued warnings that they would prosecute anyone who forced a girl to undergo circumcision against her will. They also ordered chiefs to reduce the amount of time communities spent initiating their children and lowered the age at which girls underwent initiation.90 Officials feared that girls faced the knife far too late in life, typically after reaching puberty, which encouraged them to have sex before marriage and abort unwanted pregnancies. The provincial administrators hoped that earlier initiations would prevent premarital sex, pregnancies, and abortions, which represented moral decay, looming demographic collapse, and future labor shortages.91
Families resisted these changes. In Kiambu, chiefs complained that when daughters began menstruating before the agreed-upon period of initiation, families clandestinely circumcised the girls themselves.92 The local council backed away from the limitations, permitting female circumcision throughout the year. In Meru, when faced with similar resistance, officials and chiefs aggressively enforced their rulings. When an uninitiated girl was discovered pregnant, police rounded up girls in the area and forcibly circumcised them.93 These campaigns robbed families of the right to initiate girls as they saw fit, and put the district officials in the position of enforcing the very custom they were meant to eradicate.
As the decade wore on, administrators continued to press local councils on female circumcision, families continued to bring girls before the knife as before, and Gikuyu political activists seized on these changes to attack the colonial state and its chiefs. In 1929, the Church of Scotland Mission, the African Inland Mission, the Salvation Army, and other religious organizations called for the end of female circumcision and compelled their congregants to forsake the institution. Most administrators in the districts, who had already done much to alter the practice of female circumcision, were reluctant to push the issue any further. Provincial commissioner E. B. Horne felt the policy toward female circumcision should be one of “masterly inactivity.”94 The ban infuriated the Gikuyu. In droves, congregants abandoned the most outspoken missions and established their own independent churches and schools. They also flocked to the Kikuyu Central Association, whose leadership had successfully turned the ban into a political lightning rod. Talk of a ban was quickly silenced, and the state retreated from many of the alterations it had made to female circumcision. The British had dabbled in welfare and moral uplift and was met with a ferocious response, sowing the seeds of future political discontent.95
All the while, as the most outspoken missionaries sought an end to girls’ circumcisions, they quietly carried them out on boys back at their mission stations. Control over young men’s genitals never aroused the same political furor. Neither the state nor missionaries tried to ban male circumcision, such a thing was simply unimaginable. Susan Pedersen has argued that the British hesitated to ban male circumcision in Kenya because they were unsure how they would then handle the issue of Jews and Muslims living in their colonies.96 But British comfort with male circumcision was not simply an issue of policy—it was a very intimate and personal one. Ronald Hyam has shown that by the end of the nineteenth century, circumcision had become vogue among well-to-do Britons, the very class responsible for running the empire. By the mid-1930s, about two-thirds of upper-middle-class men were circumcised.97 This had not always been the case, though. For centuries, the British and Europeans used circumcision as a marker of paganism, savagery, and sexual deviance in Jews, Muslims, and Africans. Circumcision also played into the horrors Britons endured out on the edge of empire. In 1780, hundreds of British soldiers were taken captive after the state of Mysore soundly defeated the British East India Company. Their Muslim captors forcibly circumcised them, shocking the British public. Removing the captives’ foreskins stripped them of their Christianity and Britishness and became an emblem of national humiliation and emasculation.98 A century later, the British inverted the humiliation of circumcision on the Indian subcontinent into a badge of masculinity and imperial robustness. Medical officials encouraged circumcision among officials in India to promote health and cleanliness as well as to legitimize their manliness and right to rule.99
Officials in Kenya left behind no record of the status of their foreskins, but if Hyam is right, then a few provincial administrators might have been circumcised and more comfortable and sensitive to its cultural significance. Either way, provincial administrators recognized male initiation as an essential part of African masculinity. Dependent on the labor of young men and the power of elders to fuel the colonial economy and maintain law and order, male initiation became an unquestioned necessity.
“THEIR MINDS ARE NOT THEREAFTER CONCENTRATED”
Male initiation became a critical component of colonial authority akin to the reification of customary law, reliance on local chiefs, and enforcement of taxes and compulsory labor. In coalition with local elders, the British sought to exert authority over young men through the process of initiation. The provincial administration adapted male initiation to push newly made young men into the labor market and control their behavior. They manipulated and regulated coming-of-age by changing the timing and length of initiation, seclusion, and warriorship. As was the case among missionaries, the elder state’s work with African initiation practices began in small, unexpected ways. In the early years of the protectorate, medical officers performed a few circumcision procedures strictly out of concern for a male patient’s health.100 In addition, officials at the Kabete Reformatory for young African offenders held “careful discussions” in 1916 about offering circumcision to inmates on a voluntary basis.101 Discontinued, reformatory officials later revived the program in the 1940s when too many inmates escaped for initiation.102 By 1947, announcements were made in Meru and Nyeri informing local leaders that government medical officers would offer circumcision to Gikuyu boys once a week, free of charge.103 Only a small number of young men volunteered for these state-sponsored circumcisions. Beyond occasionally offering an alternative, medicalized form of circumcision, the colonial state had a much broader influence on male initiation.
Across the colony, British administrators entered into delicate negotiations with communities to adjust male coming-of-age to meet the necessities of settler
