the colonial state had pacified. But by the 1920s, having suffered debilitating cattle epidemics, land alienation to European settlers, and forced relocations, Maasai relations with the British soured. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, burdened by fines for stock theft and pressures of forced labor orders and education, junior moran participated in a series of violent outbursts directed at the colonial state and its intermediaries. Maasai elders, fearful of further uprisings and retaliation by the colonial state, purposefully shortened the period of junior warriorhood following circumcision. They activated the initiation of new age-groups much earlier to force troublesome groups of moran out of junior status and into premature adulthood. By the late 1930s, Maasai boys were not simply circumcised at a younger age but also remained active moran for only a short time. Moreover, warriorhood became a privilege, not a right, dictated by whether young men obeyed and met the expectations of elders and district officials.124
The provincial administration overseeing Samburu areas used similar techniques to rein in the activities of warrior Samburu. Over the course of colonial rule, an “alliance of convenience” developed between elders and administrators.125 From the 1920s onward, district commissioners tried to prevent Samburu moran from cattle raiding and murdering neighboring Turkana warriors by imposing collective fines on livestock and confiscating weapons. In 1936, district commissioner H. B. Sharpe, frustrated by continuing raids, demanded that elders activate the initiation of a new age-group to push the current moran into early maturity. The move also sent a message to the incoming age-group that such could be their fate if they, too, disobeyed the colonial state. Sharpe’s ultimate aim: keep the number of moran low, keep them young, and keep them under constant threat of losing their right to warrior status.
According to Peristiany, colonial officials in the 1920s ended the Kipsigis ceremony by which age-groups transitioned upward because they did not want young men gathering together with weapons. While the ceremony itself was ended, the administration, in conjunction with elders, continued to initiate new age-groups to discipline young warriors. In the late 1920s, “disheartened” Kipsigis elders hastily inaugurated the new Chuma group to pass the disorderly young men of the Maina age-group into premature adulthood.126 Elders halved what would have been a seven-year period of junior warriorship for the Maina. Nandi elders also closed the period of Maina initiation early when junior warriors became a nuisance to the district commissioner.127
Having succeeded in experimenting with the ways boys experienced initiation, district officials and chiefs were caught off guard by unintended consequences. Once boys of tender years faced the knife, they suddenly had access to the rights and obligations of men. Even H. E. Lambert, who had argued for early initiation, warned that circumcising younger initiates might lead to an entire generation of boys claiming the privileges of adult men.128 Early initiation produced initiates sometimes younger than thirteen claiming the right to have sex, drink alcohol, leave home in search of work, and, more terrifying still, expecting the right to marry, accumulate livestock, and own land. The provincial administration had strayed from its supposed conservative principles, reengineering African cultural life to push young men into the labor market and punish their behavior. Elders and the British began to worry that they had accelerated the very socioeconomic uncertainties they were meant to slow down.
CONCLUSION
“The spirit of manhood in the youth,” wrote Jomo Kenyatta in his ethnography of the Gikuyu, “has been almost killed by the imposition of imperialistic rule.”129 The pacification of Kenya, the introduction of Christianity and Western education, and the recruitment of young men into the labor market had transformed how young men spent the liminal period between initiation and marriage—almost, at least. The “spirit of manhood” had not been snuffed out entirely. It simply found expression in different ways. The men who experienced the changes instigated by the elder state defiantly declared that their coming-of-age had been no different than their forefathers’.
When asked how his initiation compared to those who had come before him, Thomas Tamutwa bluntly replied: “It was the same.”130 John Kiptalam Tesot concurred, “The teachings in the menjo remained the same,” despite the period being shortened. “We all traveled the same road,” he said.131 His friend and neighbor Daniel Langat recalled that “life was the same; there were no differences in the way our grandfathers, fathers, and we lived as young men.”132 Looking back to that time, many men argued that in spite of such dramatic changes, the core values of initiation remained unchanged. When pressed further to explain how elders could instill, in such young boys, the knowledge necessary to become men in such short periods of time, many admitted that elders had indeed sacrificed some aspects of initiation. Elders had abandoned certain practices such as traveling to the homesteads of kin to exchange gifts and training for military combat.133
But, as many men acknowledged, just as they gave up some aspects of initiation, they also gained new ones. “It was the same” because they had also found meaning in the new possibilities opened up by the colonial encounter. They “all traveled the same road” because these new possibilities reinforced the lessons of seclusion or allowed them to continue expressing their manly mettle.134 Those men who endured shorter initiation ceremonies to attend school argued that religious and educational instruction augmented the moral lessons of initiation. Anthony King’etich, who attended the Kabianga government school where about 22 percent of his classmates had been medically circumcised, firmly stated that “instructions in schools and churches were in tandem with what the menjo teaches, so what they don’t get in the menjo they get in schools.”135 Schoolboys became warriors of a different class, armed with literacy and vocational skills rather than shields and spears, prepared to do battle in the labor market rather than in livestock raids. Those who faced the knife early and then left home to work for wages discovered the possibility of earning their own currency, paying their own dowry, and starting their own households—with or without the help or consent of fathers. The manipulation of initiation practices by the elder state encouraged young men to reconsider, in very familiar ways, how they earned and expressed age and gender.136
But boys and young men also found this new terrain littered with new obstacles. The colonial encounter had introduced new actors who claimed authority over them. Chiefs, missionaries, schoolteachers, and a host of other government officials joined fathers and elder kin in an effort to control the activities and behavior of young men. In 1927, the acting governor of Kenya, Edward Deuhaur, warned that young schoolboys and migrant laborers “undoubtedly enjoy the immunity given them from tribal restraint, the opportunity afforded them of mixing with their seniors and of seeing something of town life.” Yet he also warned that young Africans found themselves ensnared in a tightly controlled disciplinary regimen: “They are surrounded by sanctions of every description from early youth.”137
These sanctions had been the product of intense arguments begun at the very start of the colonial encounter like those between the Meru elders, Reverend Worthington, Commissioner Chamier, and the schoolboy who chose to sit in seclusion instead of school. In their effort to identify, mediate, and reify the boundaries of parental and colonial authority, the British blended the two together. The elder state, in this instance provincial administrators and chiefs, expanded and legitimized their tenuous authority by accessing the power of age they believed inherent in African communities. Manipulating male initiation became one of the first and most potent ways the elder state exerted itself—all in an effort to direct and discipline the energies of young men. Over time, young men adapted these changes to meet their own goals of proving their masculinity, enjoying their youth, and eventually earning their maturity.
2
“I Wanted to Make Something of Myself”
Migration, Wage Labor, and Earning an Age
THERE WAS SIMPLY no precedent for it. In 1917, before the bench of the
