opposite opinions.”50 Once out of the service, Cooke had become a member of the Legislative Council and often spoke out for African rights. Rounding out the group was R. G. M. Calderwood, a Presbyterian missionary for the Church of Scotland Mission.
Committee members fanned out across the colony to visit agricultural estates, goldfields, factories, and other businesses. At each stop, they met with government officials, settlers, and associations representing the major industries. They also met with Archdeacon Owen. And just as he had feared, their final report tried to extinguish the flames that consumed the Colonial Office back at home. In their report, the committee acknowledged that they found African boys common fixtures of working life in the colony but not a trace of girls. They characterized boys’ working conditions as “almost without exception good.”51 They found little wrong with their work on sisal farms or cotton ginneries, though they were alarmed by a number of boys working in mines. Their only criticism came with the work of young men in towns like Nairobi, which they believed led to “consorting with undesirables” and “becoming detribalized nonentities.”52
The committee reaffirmed that wage labor among young Africans was an accepted, unquestionable principle. Without compulsory education, they argued, work had its advantages. No “mill of tragic experience,” as Owen had put it, existed in Kenya. Having defended the practice of encouraging young Africans to work, the committee then tried to silence its critics with a series of proposals to amend the Employment of Servants Ordinance. Their recommendations included raising the minimum age from ten to twelve, restricting the recruitment of young Africans to private recruiters rather than professional agencies, and ending penal sanctions for underage workers.53 Deftly, the committee responded to each of Owen’s main criticisms while still maintaining the necessity of underage labor.
In December, Governor Brooke-Popham announced a new draft amendment to the Employment of Servants Ordinance. The amendment required all young people to obtain an underage version of the despised kipande work pass. Employers also had to keep a register of all underage employees, and the colonial administration could cancel those contracts if inadequate working conditions were discovered.54 Unmoved, Owen viewed the recommendations as a promising yet inadequate start.55 Before he could launch any further critiques, the attention of the British public, the British government, and the colonies shifted dramatically to growing tensions in Europe. All eyes lay on the movement of German troops into Eastern Europe rather than the movement of young men in and out of their reserves. The outbreak of war in Africa and Europe swept the issue of colonial labor practices from the headlines and postponed passage of the amendment. Yet, throughout the 1940s, the Colonial Office continued to fret that someone might discover nothing had been done, and when the war ended, they would be engulfed in yet another scandal.
In Kenya, labor officials spent much of the war thinking about how to issue these new work passes to the young, with farcical results. In November 1939, the government approved a proposal to provide every employee under the age of sixteen a nickel wristband, which would serve as their work pass. According to the registrar of natives, A. E. T. Imbert, a boy interested in finding work would visit his district officer, from whom he would receive a registration certificate and a metal container to store it, free of charge. He would also be given a nickel wrist bracelet stamped with his registration number and the initials JUV. The district officials would fasten the bracelet together on the boy’s wrist with a sheep punch.56
A great deal of effort went into their plan to shackle Kenya’s entire underage workforce. Officials spent time deciding whether the bracelets should be made of nickel, finished brass, or copper. Estimates had been drawn up by companies for the price of the metals and production of the boxes and the bracelets. The labor superintendent had collected one thousand wrist measurements of Luo boys to give the registrar’s office a more precise estimate of just how much metal they would need. But all this hustle and bustle came to a screeching halt in April 1940, when the Crown counsel’s office informed the registrar that the Colonial Office was likely to frown on “the permanent clamping of this kind of bracelet on the wrist of an African juvenile.” Not to mention that the new Employment of Servants Ordinance had called for a “disk” not a “bracelet.”57 Back to the drawing board officials went, busily imagining just what a kipande disk should look like and how might they prevent children from losing them. Should they use string, leather straps, or metal chains to hang the disks around their necks? In less than two years, more than £1,000 was poured into the search for the perfect juvenile kipande. In July 1940, the chief native commissioner abruptly announced that the government’s main priority was registering the young men conscripted into the military, not their younger kin sent by lorry-load to pick tea.58
In London, the Colonial Office waited anxiously for Kenya to amend the EWYPCO and the Employment of Servants Ordinance.59 In September 1942, members of the Colonial Office discussed the reasons why nothing had been done. Henry Moore noted that the colony was suffering from a shortage of metal for the disks and chains to fasten them. Granville Orde-Browne, who had some experience with labor issues in East and Central Africa, argued that in Kenya there was simply not the same objection to the labor of young people as elsewhere in the empire, and, therefore, bringing the law into force lacked any urgency. But in the end, the Colonial Office decided that the approaching coffee harvest could not be disrupted and that any intervention must wait.
Back in Kenya, talk of nickel disks suspended by nickel chains from the necks of young Africans disappeared. Registrar of natives G. Wedderburn had returned from leave in 1942, irked to find waste and wild ideas consuming his department. He outright rejected the need for a separate system for young people when the state could simply use the same procedures for registering adults. In a letter to the chief native commissioner, Wedderburn outlined what the registration of young laborers should look like: Kilonza Nyamai, a boy under the age of sixteen from Kitui, goes to see his district officer accompanied by a parent or guardian. There, he obtains a registration certificate like any other African, bearing his name, tribal particulars, and fingerprints. “He then becomes KTI.1556501 Kilonza Nyamai which number he will retain for life.”60 If a boy like Kilonza had no guardian, then the district official could stand in his kin’s stead. When he turned sixteen, he would return to the same office to exchange his certificate for the adult variety. Wedderburn’s system required no shackles or necklaces, simply the same kipande work pass that so many adults despised and burned in protest.
Without fail, when word broke that the government would begin registering all laborers under the age of sixteen, the Kenya Tea Association vigorously voiced its irritation.61 In January 1943, the association met with the labor department to dissuade it from registering the more than sixty-five hundred laborers under the age of sixteen working on its farms. The association argued that “with a large number of their European staff on Active Service [in the war], and with a shortage of material, [its members] are producing tea in quantities of more than 60% over normal pre-war production figures.”62 If the British wanted to maintain those incredible levels of wartime production, then they would have to abandon any attempt to register their young employees. In short, “the free flow of labor from Kavirondo [Nyanza Province], at present ample for the greatly increased production necessary for the war effort, would be greatly impeded and all but stopped.”63 Tea production in Kericho would grind to a halt as thousands of youngsters trekked back home simply for a slip of paper. Worse still, the association worried that once home, parents and elders would not let the workers return again.
FIGURE 2.3. A labor inspector’s job takes him beyond the city factories and shops to places like this sisal estate with its mill, n.d. Photo courtesy of the National Archives, Kew.
Plans to register laborers under the age of sixteen died in that very meeting. “Change,” the association argued, “is naturally, abhorrent to all of us.” Yet it would have been feasible to provide lorries, fuel, and drivers to transport
