ethnic groups and their distinct, disconnected histories. Gikuyu squatters, Gusii litigants, Kalenjin politicians, Kamba soldiers, Maasai moran, or Maragoli widows—this research has produced a history of Kenya as a sum of its ethnic parts, rather than a history of the whole.8 An Uncertain Age pushes scholars to reconsider their ethnicization of Kenya’s past. Kenyans experienced colonial rule not in ethnic isolation but in constant contact with one another. Every young man felt the tremors of colonial power and discussed it with his peers and elders. Age and gender offer historians an opportunity to think about a shared history of Kenya.
The chapters that follow explore the roles age and masculinity played in some of the field’s largest, longest-standing historiographies: migrant labor and town life, crime and punishment, Mau Mau and British counterinsurgency, as well as decolonization and nationalism. Their importance to each of these historiographies is well worth books in their own right. By bringing them together, I hope An Uncertain Age shows historians how mindful African men and the state were of one another’s coming-of-age stories and how this mindfulness influenced so many of the decisions and actions that made up the colonial encounter in Kenya.
ARGUING ABOUT AGE
Prior to colonial rule, age was a powerful force in the lives of Kenyan communities—perhaps more so than ethnicity.9 Early ethnographies do not reveal how far back into the past age-relations and their institutions endured.10 Yet they confirm for historians that on the eve of conquest, how men and women lived their lives, explained their place in society, and sought mobility through it were influenced by their sense of belonging to a given generation and their relationships with their age-mates, juniors, and seniors.11 Age also stratified these communities. Much of the early anthropological and historical literature on age emphasizes the conflict among men over access to wealth.12 In these studies, elder men competed with one another to control the reproductive power of wives and mothers as well as the productive power of young male warriors and clients. To regulate this competition, communities organized themselves by age, ascribing rights and obligations to different age-groups and creating ritual moments when those age-groups formed and gradually moved up into positions of authority. Boys spent their childhoods herding their fathers’ livestock, playing games with age-mates, and learning to navigate the social world around them. Eventually they would be made men, typically through a series of initiation ceremonies. They enjoyed their days honing their warrior skills, raiding neighboring communities’ livestock, dancing, and courting sweethearts. In time, warriors would settle down, marry, start families, and become elders in their own right.
Elder men laid claim to this process of making generations as well as norms expected of different ages. They imbued themselves with ritual knowledge, demanded respect from acquiescent juniors, and relished the joys of elderhood. They created an awareness of time, a sense of order, and perceptions of masculinity and maturity within the community.13 Yet the power of elders was never absolute. Male age-relations in East Africa revolved around reciprocal obligations.14 An age, and the rights that came with it, had to be earned. Young men expected fathers to work hard for them, to accumulate the wealth needed for initiation and the bridewealth needed for marriage. Meanwhile, juniors had to prove themselves as well, showing respect for their elders and following the codes of conduct laid out to them during their initiations.
But not everyone agreed on what it meant to be a good father or son. Historians of age, following the lead of gender historians, have begun to challenge the earlier scholarship that proposed a linear process of aging that privileged patriarchs. Seniority was not granted to anyone simply for growing old or playing by the rules.15 Arguing was an essential part of age-relations—part of the pursuit and performance of masculinity and maturity.16 Generations constantly debated one another about their biological, social, and economic positions within the community.17 If a boy showed no signs of maturity, then his father could postpone his initiation. Likewise, if fathers failed to initiate their sons, or if elders clung to the privileges of old age for too long, then younger generations could force the elders to meet their obligations.18 Arguments could be violent and short-lived, but they could also take time and operate within the acceptable, creative moral codes of the day. For instance, at the turn of the twentieth century, as thousands of Gikuyu died of famine and disease, a generation of well-to-do men pooled their resources to push ineffectual elders out of political authority, a ritualized process known as ituĩka, or the “breaking.” As Derek Peterson shows us, this generation retired ruling elders by buying them off with livestock. In doing so, they restored peace, stability, and hope to the Gikuyu community.19
Age-relations as well as their norms and institutions were flexible and creative, designed to weather demographic and climactic changes as well as to exploit new cultural and economic frontiers. Age could shift depending on the ideas and eloquence with which a generation argued, with whom a generation argued, and the wider socioeconomic and political settings in which the argument occurred.20 As a result, as Nicolas Argenti argues, “seniority was not calculated simply on the basis of age but by means of a complex, multilayered assessment” of a range of criteria, including wealth in material goods, kinship, or knowledge.21
Colonialism intensified these arguments. It brought new forms of knowledge and wealth as well as alternative, obstacle-ridden routes along which the young and the old explored their age and masculinity both within and outside household, kinship, and generation. It also introduced new players. Missionaries, employers, and British officials introduced their own ideas about age and claimed the role of adults. Recently, historians have shown how ideas about age were reconfigured as young people inhabited these new spaces and argued with these new actors. Some sons and daughters left home, joined Christian missions, and adhered to the authority of a heavenly father over a corporeal one.22 Their newfound faith and access to Western education set them apart from, and often against, their elders. Others left home in search of work and wages as soldiers, farmers, miners, or artisans. The camaraderie of the barracks, the organization of trade unions, and the struggles of town life all allowed the young to forge relationships outside their age-groups and kin groups.23 They spent their wages on what they wanted, striking out on the path to maturity in their own unique ways—buying flashy clothes to attract sexual partners, attending beer halls and dances, or saving up to get married without their fathers’ consent. Still others sought out social and economic worlds deemed distasteful by their families and colonial states. Boys joined criminal gangs, making up their own age-groups using black marketeering, violence, and street culture to express their manliness.24 Girls joined the criminalized underworld, too, using street hawking and sex work to build successful households and families. They also refused to get married, continued their schooling, and demanded or rejected female circumcision.25
These experiences brought the young not only new sources of wealth and authority but also inevitable conflict with their elders and age-mates.26 As Gary Burgess argues, colonial rule gave the young “analytical distance to question the validity and universality of gerontocratic discourse.”27 As they did, conflict often ensued. In turn-of-the-century Natal, young Zulu men embraced wage labor at a time of crippling war and epidemic disease. In time, as Benedict Carton argues, fathers and families back home became dependent on young men’s wealth. Burdened by demanding fathers and colonial taxation, young men rose up against chiefs and fathers in the 1906 War of the Heads.28 Meredith McKittrick shows how ecological and economic uncertainties in Ovamboland at around the same time also compelled the young to seek “refuge not within the familiar but within the exotic,” in this case Christianity and migrant wage labor.29 Meanwhile, elders fumed over their sons’ and daughters’ cultural delinquency.
Yet many of those children poured their efforts into familial goals in familiar ways. Colonialism did not always trigger irresolvable conflict among seniors and juniors or weaken age-based institutions. Having experienced the “exotic” worlds of migrant wage labor and Christianity, the “new men” of Ovamboland became more independent from their fathers and local kings than in decades past. But they still returned home,
