ten-year-old houseboy Izaji Mamuji and his employer, Mzee bin Ali. They were at odds over a contract.1 The case perplexed Chief Justice Robert W. Hamilton and Judge George H. Pickering of the high court. At issue was whether a child had the right to enter into and abide by a contract. Izaji worked as Mzee bin Ali’s houseboy in Mombasa, earning three shillings a month plus clothing and food. No colonial law had been written in regard to whether an African as young as ten had control over his own labor. The 1910 Master and Servants Ordinance, which laid out rules for apprenticeships, offered little assistance. A contract for domestic service was not an apprenticeship. So they turned to English common law. Drawing on a 1911 order-in-council, Hamilton and Pickering ruled that a contract could be upheld if the work benefited the boy. In Izaji’s case, they claimed it did and ruled that his contract should stand. Crown counsel disagreed. Izaji’s contract was void because the boy’s father had the right to disavow the contract. No one should tamper, counsel argued, with the power of a parent over a son’s labor. Izaji Mamuji v. Mzee bin Ali exposed the early elder state’s uncertainty as to where the authority over a young African’s labor lay. Three years before, provincial administrators along the coast had mediated the struggle between parents and missionaries, and now the judiciary grappled with tensions between parents, employers, and sons-turned-employees. Hamilton and Pickering granted a young ten-year-old boy agency over his own labor, while Crown counsel warned of the potentially destabilizing effects of weakened parental authority.
The case of Izaji Mamuji v. Mzee bin Ali lay nestled between the 1927 correspondences of labor inspectors and district officials in Western Kenya.2 What was it doing there, a decade out of time and miles out of place? Officials in the western districts had dredged up the case file looking for guidance as to their role in the migration of young men out of the reserves and onto the tea, sisal, and other estates scattered across the colony. A decade might have passed, but provincial administrators and labor officials still fretted over whether boys had a right to their own labor and whether the state and parents had any say in the matter.
Despite its anxieties, the elder state worked tirelessly to push, and sometimes coerce, young African men into the wage labor market. In Western Kenya, between the 1920s and early 1950s, the recruitment of young African men to work on settler estates intensified negotiations among the young, their elders, recruiters, employers, and the state. Recruitment became one of the most common and successful means of drawing young men into the labor market. As recruiters reached into African homesteads, provincial administrators began to fear that putting young men to work far from home might weaken generational authority or awaken international outrage. Provincial administrators and their colleagues in the labor and medical departments tried to exert some control over the rush for African labor in Western Kenya, but more often than not, their actions accelerated the process. Throughout the period, the elder state did just enough to silence criticism from the metropole and muffle the concerns of parents worried about migrant sons. It created labor laws specifically for young people to define who could and could not work based on age, to curtail the abuses of the recruitment system, to inspect workplaces, and to ultimately fine the worst employers. Regardless of these regulatory efforts, the colonial state never seriously questioned young men’s decisions to work. As sons and fathers debated the merits of migrant labor, the British sided decisively with young men entering the colonial economy. As a result, the elder state swung back and forth between regulating the welfare of young laborers while pushing them into the labor market.
Young men were themselves the greatest catalyst for the migration of labor out of Western Kenya and into settler estates, agricultural industries, and towns. Age and gender figured prominently in their decisions to leave home, work for wages, and then spend their hard-earned shillings. They viewed their mobility, financial independence, knowledge, networks, and distance from elder surveillance as new ways to enjoy their youth, rethink manliness, and come of age. Their migration and work instigated intense arguments with their age-mates and elders. Sons viewed their newfound financial independence and distance from family as a chance to express their growing senses of manhood in new ways outside of kinship. This cultural deviance attracted the ire of fathers and elders who nervously contemplated a future in which younger generations had abandoned their villages and forgotten their familial responsibilities. Yet some sons did return home, often with earnings in hand, willing to contribute to the household or rely on fathers to purchase livestock on their behalf. Some boys used their time as migrant laborers to indicate their readiness for initiation and manhood. Migrant labor complicated arguments within households, but it did not always erode the significance of age-relations. Above all, it provided yet another interface for the elder state to enter into and weigh in on debates about age-relations with African communities.
“RAWEST AND MOST IGNORANT OF YOUTHS”
The principal directive of the colonial state in Kenya was to ensure the profitability of the settler economy and produce goods that nourished Britons and their empire. The British were in search of able-bodied men to fill an ever-expanding list of occupations: carpenters and clerks, policemen and postmen, house servants and field hands. To fill these posts, the colonial state levied its authority, often violently, to pull African communities out of subsistence and push them into the wage labor market. At first, most Africans resisted the lure of paltry wages, miserable working conditions, and travel far from home. But gradually, tens of thousands, most of them young men, entered the workforce. After absorbing the infrastructure of the Imperial British East Africa Company in 1895, the British forcefully exercised their authority inland. They did so in part by constructing a railway connecting the main coastal port city of Mombasa to ivory traders near the shores of Lake Victoria.3 To build the rail lines, the British imported thousands of laborers from British India and conscripted many young men from surrounding communities. Scouting ahead of the railway, the British drove columns of young African soldiers and porters on expeditions of conquest. They established forts along the future path of the railway, secured alliances with agreeable local leaders, and subjugated unenthusiastic ones.4
Rail lines and conquests were costly, and the British sought a way to make the territory profitable. Parts of the colony were incredibly fertile, especially along the Rift Valley. Prior to the turn of the century, communities like the Gikuyu, Kipsigis, and Maasai had used the soil to their advantage. Their herds and farms prospered. They sold their surplus foodstuffs and livestock to traveling Swahili caravans, slave traders, and eventually the colonial state. And as these communities thrived, families expanded out into the frontier, founding new households, farms, and herds.5 Rather than rely on the expertise of these local agriculturalists and pastoralists, as they had done in Gold Coast and other colonies, the British transformed Kenya into a settler colony. Beginning in 1902, they encouraged European and white South African émigrés to settle farms and grow cash crops. Colonial surveyors segregated the landscape, carving out the choicest portions for European settlement and then confining African communities to reserves.6 Settlers were then offered thousands of acres of the most fertile land near Nairobi stretching north and west into the Rift Valley. Those African families, especially the Maasai, Gikuyu, and later the Kipsigis, who had lived in areas alienated to European farmers were evicted from their homes and moved onto reserves or offered a chance to remain as squatters.
Communities unaffected by settler evictions, especially in Nyanza Province west of the Rift Valley, had little motivation to permanently enter the wage labor market. Their agricultural and pastoral pursuits remained profitable and temporary; seasonal wage labor paid taxes and supplemented incomes. British officials lamented the intransigence of would-be African laborers. In 1907, director of agriculture A. C. MacDonald complained that “the native . . . will only engage himself for a month or at most two. If the work is not to his liking he may take himself off quietly at the end of a week.”7 And even if an African laborer fulfilled his contract, he then “returns to the Native Reserve to spend a ten or eleven months holiday and the farmer has to take on a fresh batch of the rawest and most ignorant of youths, when ground has to be cultivated, seeds sown and crops harvested.” These “raw, ignorant youths” proved a hindrance to MacDonald’s ideas of efficient agricultural production. They came untrained, earned just enough to purchase livestock, and returned only when they ran out of money.8
