junior warriors, made obsolete by British conquest, into wage laborers. In early 1920s Central Province, district commissioners met with Gikuyu, Meru, and Embu elders to regulate and limit but never outlaw male circumcision. In 1920, only a year after provincial commissioner Tate had consented to missionary meddling in their schoolboys’ initiations, his replacement, D. R. Crampton, ordered district officials to persuade chiefs to shorten male initiation. According to Crampton, this was to be done to steady the flow of Gikuyu labor. “One of the reasons why this change has been advocated is that the present period of convalescence of able-bodied workers, who undergo circumcision, could be done away with and a larger supply of labour be consequently available.”104 The British believed young men spent too much time thinking about and participating in initiation-related events. They wanted a pool of able-bodied laborers with their minds firmly fixed on earning wages.
In Fort Hall and Nyeri, elders agreed on two major changes. They consolidated ceremonies into a single, large celebration for boys living in a location, and they shortened the length by limiting dances and the period spent in seclusion. They rejected requests from the district commissioner to limit initiation to one week, instead agreeing to one or two months. Chiefs sitting on local councils looked favorably on limiting initiation. In 1920, the Fort Hall local council noted that the long length of initiation ceremonies “hang[s] up the output of labor seriously during the three months, and they would get into trouble over it.”105 A few years later, the Kiambu council claimed that “a large number of ceremonies . . . was most unsettling to labour and as things were at present a native so inclined could attend one ceremony after another to the detriment of his work.”106 The year before, Governor Northey had issued his circular on the mobilization of African labor by any means necessary. Neither district commissioners nor chiefs, who were responsible for labor recruitment, wanted their efforts hampered by lengthy initiation festivities.107 When a community spent months preparing for and recuperating from initiation, provincial administrators felt such energies could be put to use in more “productive” ways.
In Rift Valley Province, a similar negotiation began among colonial officials and Kipsigis and Nandi elders. Unlike Gikuyu initiation, Kipsigis and Nandi boys required several years to complete the process. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Kipsigis elders negotiated with provincial administrators to shorten the time young men spent in seclusion. According to Peristiany, the form of initiation he witnessed in the 1930s had already been shortened compared to previous generations.108 Those initiated into the Chuma age-group from the late 1920s to 1947 acknowledged that their stay in the menjo had been shorter than that of previous generations. Thomas Tamutwa noted that his initiation took only six months rather than the two years his father had experienced.109 The change had come from the chiefs and “the elders accepted it, and so did the people.”110
Both government and missions argued that these changes stabilized Kipsigis education and labor. The principal of the government school in Kabianga argued in 1945 that Kipsigis boys who left school for a year of initiation were “retarded on their return, and if leave is refused, their minds are not thereafter concentrated on their school work.” About 22 percent of initiated Kipsigis attending Kabianga School had been “medically circumcised” as opposed to “tribally initiated.”111 Although the rate of school attendance among Kipsigis was much lower than in other communities like the Gikuyu or Luo, these 22 percent attested to the reality that more and more young men experienced a modified initiation. The Kipsigis Sawe age-class initiated during the 1950s experienced the most change to their time in the menjo. Sawe schoolboys underwent initiation during their December recess, which lasted about a month.112 Those who did not attend school experienced a much longer period of initiation. Kimeli Too, John Kiptalam, and their cohort of friends in Kabianga, near Kericho, went to work on the tea estates rather than school. They spent a year in the menjo, compared to the month experienced by boys attending the government school.113 In the same location, young men could experience very different lengths of initiation depending on whether they herded livestock, picked tea leaves, or attended school.
Labor and education were not the only factors pushing Rift Valley communities to shorten their periods of initiation. The heavy presence of Kipsigis and Nandi in the military also raised concerns regarding the length of seclusion. In 1941, the district commissioner of Kapsabet alerted the provincial commissioner that the Nandi Chumo (or Juma) age-group was about to undergo initiation. He warned that uninitiated Nandi serving in the King’s African Rifles would have to be given leave so they could return home for initiation, or they would become “disgruntled.”114 Worse still, they would likely stay home well beyond the two weeks afforded them by the military, thereby interfering with the colony’s preparedness. “Circumcision is the most important event in the life of a Nandi,” he argued, “and it cannot simply be ignored, and is now becoming the principle [sic] thought on their minds to the exclusion of everything else.” The military rejected the commissioner’s proposal for extended leave. Those soldiers who left the service for initiation would either face charges of desertion or forfeit their time in seclusion. Soldiers struggled more than most to balance the cultural demands of household and community life with the rigors of regimented military service.115
Across the colony, the shift to earlier initiations of much younger boys also played a role in maintaining law and order. Ethnographers of the Gikuyu claimed, with near unanimity, that boys had been initiated in the past between the ages of fifteen and eighteen.116 Louis Leakey, one of the most active chroniclers of Gikuyu custom, stressed that elders told him circumcision could not take place before the age of seventeen.117 Over the course of colonial rule, the age of male Gikuyu initiates fell to around thirteen or fifteen, even younger in some cases.118 By the mid-1930s, chiefs in Central Province complained that boys faced the knife far too early.119 Farther west, the age at which Kipsigis boys underwent initiation also fell dramatically. Groups that came of age just after the turn of the century, such as Nyonge, were initiated at twenty to twenty-five years of age.120 But by the time Chumo and Sawe initiates entered the menjo in the 1930s and 1950s, they were only in their mid-teens.121
When British conquest ended the reign of warriors, fathers no longer needed to wait for their sons to physically mature so that they might defend the community or raid for livestock. Colonial rule had enabled willing families to initiate their sons at an earlier age and push them into the labor market so that they might earn enough wages to pay tax, fulfill compulsory labor requirements, and add to the family income. Moreover, the British hoped that young laborers would be more pliable to employer demands. In the 1930s, H. E. Lambert, who would later write on the subject of Gikuyu social institutions, was asked by the chief native commissioner about foreseeable problems with early male circumcision. According to Lambert, late-age initiation had dangerous psychological effects on young men. The results, to Lambert’s thinking, took the “form of mental stultification, sexual aberration [as well as] imbecility and criminality.” The older the initiate, Lambert mused, the more restless and violent he became to gain access to the rights and responsibilities associated with adulthood. Earlier initiations, he argued, might prevent boys from future indiscipline.122
In addition to shifting the timing of initiation and shortening seclusion to encourage young men to labor, colonial officials used initiation to discipline their behavior. Among pastoralist communities like the Kipsigis, Maasai, Nandi, and Samburu, junior and senior warriors had not dissipated as quickly as they had done among the Gikuyu or integrated as easily into the colonial police and military as the Kamba.123 Warrior moran continued to meet, dance, raid for cattle, and occasionally irk district administrators. The rituals of rebellion that made moran manly and worthy of warriorship had become liabilities. Armed with a maturing understanding of the progress by which generations succeeded one another, district officials sought to turn the graduation of age-groups to their advantage. They forcibly and prematurely transitioned young moran out of warriorship and into settled lives as adults, reverse engineering rituals of rebellion into a punitive regime.
From the turn of the century until World War I, moran had worked well with the British.
