at the National History Center in Washington, DC. That summer was truly inspiring. I learned an incredible amount from my fellow “seminarians,” as well as Dane Kennedy, Philippa Levine, Jason Parker, and Marilyn Young.
There are a few people, though, whose friendship and influence on my work require a little more than passing notice. Jim Brennan, Matt Carotenuto, John Lonsdale, Kate Luongo, Julie MacArthur, Sloan Mahone, George-Paul Meiu, Kenda Mutongi, Tim Parsons, China Scherz, and Luise White have all shared drinks and ideas with me. Without the help of Sara Bellows-Blakely, chapter 5 of this book would not exist. I spent a few wonderful years living in Chicago, writing up the dissertation and getting to know Emily Lynn Osborn. Emily became a fast friend, tireless advocate, and coconspirator. She has read this manuscript more than most and kept me on the straight-and-narrow tenure track. Special thanks go to Brett Shadle and Meredith McKittrick, who read a very juvenile draft of this book and offered me constructive feedback. But this book has matured fastest under the scrutiny of the editors, dare I say the elders, at Ohio University Press. Gill Berchowitz, Jean Allman, Allen Isaacman, and Derek Peterson have patiently pushed me further than anyone, and I am immensely grateful. And to all the wonderful people I have worked with at Ohio University Press—Omar Aziz, Nancy Basmajian, Beth Pratt, Samara Rafert, Charles Sutherland, Sally Welch, Heather Roberts Stanfiel, and especially Deborah Wiseman—my thanks for making this book a reality.
But none of these folks had to put up with me like my wife, Abi. She endured the long absences for research, writing mood swings, and endless drafts handed to her to edit, as well as the anxieties of the job market, teaching, and finishing a first book. My work would not be what it is without her constant critique. I owe no greater debt than to Abi, who has graced my life and my work with her brilliance, good humor, and love.
I would like to dedicate this book, written by a young man about young men, to five generations of women who have had an immeasurable influence on me. This book is for my grandmothers, Jean and Florence; my mothers, Patricia and Vanessa; my wife, Abi; my sister, Cara; and my daughter, Ruby.
Kenya. Courtesy of Mat Sisk, Center for Digital Scholarship, Hesburgh Library, University of Notre Dame.
Introduction
ALONG THE COAST OF the British East Africa Protectorate, district commissioners left their posts in the heat and humidity of April 1914 to meet with local elders on an urgent matter.1 Their task: to investigate when, or if ever, African boys and girls came of age. Their reason: to determine whether Christian missions had the right to keep underage Africans in their custody without parental consent. The issue had vexed British officials since the waning years of the nineteenth century. Christian missions had opened new, alternative spaces for the young. At first, a few sons and daughters converted, attended services, received an education, and worked on mission farms. Others arrived as recently freed slaves, picked up and dropped off by the British abolitionist impulse. And still others came out of desperation, made destitute by disease, drought, and famine. When parents demanded that their sons and daughters be returned home, difficult questions arose over the tangled authorities of families, missionaries, and the colonial state.
As the long rainy season began, district commissioners and African elders exchanged information about being young and growing old. They then submitted their reports to provincial commissioner Charles Hobley. Some commissioners argued that young East Africans were never free from the power of the old. To carve out a moment of independence, the colonial state would have to draw an arbitrary, entirely novel line, one with untold repercussions. Others claimed that for boys, parental control ceased when fathers helped them marry and settle down. Girls merely passed from the control of fathers to the control of husbands. A few officials felt no need to ask their African intermediaries at all. Imperial laws like the Indian Penal Code already established an age at which nonwhites became adults: fourteen for boys and sixteen for girls. The British need only exert their rule of law.2 After reading these reports, provincial commissioner Hobley concluded that “no hard and fast ruling should be made.”3 The administration must leverage its influence carefully. Hobley warned his commissioners against disrupting elder, male authority. They must uphold the power of fathers whenever demarcating the boundaries between obedient childhood and independent adulthood. And they must be ever mindful of the encroaching influences of missionaries and one another into the realm of elders.
The inquiry failed to unknot the issue of African coming-of-age. While the British determined that boys, unlike their sisters, eventually experienced some degree of independence, they remained unsure of how much. They knew that age was a powerful part of the everyday lives of East Africans, and they presumed patriarchs had strict authority over juniors. Yet the stability of age-relations and the influence of elders seemed worryingly tenuous. For the remainder of colonial rule, and long after, the state in Kenya exerted considerable energy to understand, and then access, the power it believed inherent in age-relations.
A century later, struggles over age and state authority continue in Kenya. In the first few months of 2008, waves of postelection violence rocked the country, leaving thousands dead and an estimated six hundred thousand internally displaced. The horror called to mind similar episodes in 1992 and 1997. Even after rival presidential candidates Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga shook hands over a power-sharing agreement beside a smiling Kofi Annan, unrest continued in the countryside. Smoldering evidence lay everywhere of the violence perpetrated by young men and orchestrated by political elites. Senior politicians activated age-relations and the lexicon of age to instigate ethnic conflict.
In the wake of this bloodshed, I conducted much of the research for this book. In nearly all of my more than eighty interviews with Gikuyu, Kipsigis, and Luo men, talk turned to politics and postelection mayhem: an interviewee pointing out the ashy remains of kiosks and schools near his home in Saunet, another giving refuge to a displaced family in Gilgil, and still another comforting his son, who had suffered a stroke after being beaten in Bondo. These discussions gave the men I met an opportunity to vent frustrations and share anxieties. They also made connections across time. Memories of coming of age in colonial Kenya became a way for these men to talk about how generations behave today. These senior men lamented the disrespect the young showed for them but admitted their failure to dictate respectable norms. It had never been so, they claimed, in the “good old days.”
After these interviews, I returned to the archive, and through the British colonial record I inhabited those “good old days”: letters from fathers to district commissioners worrying about runaway sons, and warnings from chiefs about young people drinking, dancing, and singing lewd songs. The “good old” colonial days seemed a lot like the present. Decades separate the stories drawn from the archive and men’s memories, yet age remains a prism through which Kenyans look to the not-so-distant colonial past to pass judgment on the present and fret about the future.
An Uncertain Age tells many coming-of-age stories of men who grew up in Kenya from the beginning of British colonial rule in the 1890s until the end of Jomo Kenyatta’s presidency in the late 1970s. This is a book about boys and young men using the colonial encounter to enjoy their youthfulness, make themselves masculine, and eventually earn a sense of maturity. Age and gender drove their pursuit of new possibilities in areas such as migrant wage labor, town life, crime, anticolonial violence, and nation building. They relished being young and used these new paths to reimagine and assert their age and masculinity with one another and other generations.
Colonialism could also unmake men. British conquest had relied on the violence of British troops, the East African Rifles, and local auxiliaries like the Maasai, who saw profit in the livestock confiscated from fallen neighbors.4 Young men who joined the conquest as soldiers or porters imagined their work as part of their coming-of-age.5
