Interference from missionaries, chiefs, and British officials also inspired generations to work together to preserve ritual life. As Lynn Thomas has shown, when missions, the state, and Christian neighbors tried to block Meru girls’ paths to womanhood, they circumcised one another.31 As the price of bridewealth rose in Western Kenya, Brett Shadle argues, Gusii sons and fathers worked together to control rising bridewealth costs and prevent conflict over delayed marriage.32 Parents across Kenya found merit in their sons’ and daughters’ taking advantage of new possibilities or defending old practices. Wage-earning sons returned home ready to invest in livestock and educated daughters fetched better dowries, each serving their parents’ interests.33 By the late colonial period, mothers and fathers who had been among the first or second generation to join a mission, attend a school, or tend a settler’s herd understood the choices their sons and daughters made.
In An Uncertain Age, I argue that dissent and cooperation do not neatly characterize the strategies and outcomes of Kenyan men’s arguments about age and masculinity. Throughout this book, many boys and young men pointedly interrogated and then flatly rejected the expectations of their elders and peers. There were worlds beyond kinship and generation that they wanted to explore and exploit—and it did not matter what their mothers or fathers might say to stop them. Yet even when they did contemplate the legitimacy of “gerontocratic discourse” by taking unusual or unsavory paths, the destinations young men mapped out in their minds could also be recognizable to those around them. They still wanted to enjoy their youthful years, prove their manly mettle, and earn the right to be initiated or married, as well as feel and be viewed by those around them as mature.
As colonial rule ground on, arguments about age intensified. From the 1930s onward, those once new possibilities through which earlier generations of young men had come of age began to lose their luster. The harder it became to find work, pay for school fees, and save wages, the more distant the prospects for enjoying oneself or settling down. On settler estates, African squatters endured draconian restrictions on the herds they kept and the work hours they logged. The reserves, especially in Central Kenya, simmered with frustration over chiefly misconduct, lack of education and employment, overcrowding, and soil erosion. Town life offered little respite as the costs of living soared while squalor spread.34 For some young men, it was their fathers’ poverty that let them down. They lost confidence in their fathers’ ability to usher them into manhood through initiation, or into adulthood through marriage. For others, a father’s prosperity bitterly reminded them that they had yet to succeed in their own right.
Coming-of-age stalled by the 1950s. Changes that might have once been imperceptible to young men were now painfully clear: many felt trapped in a prolonged age between childhood and adulthood. None of their strategies—going to school, picking tea, or fighting in a world war—provided them material wealth or moral standing. To escape, young men sought out alternative paths. They moved to towns in greater numbers to eke out a living as casual laborers and black marketeers. They joined the militant wings of political associations like the Kenya African Union and the Kikuyu Central Association. They also committed acts of organized violence, like Dini ya Msambwa and Mau Mau, against well-to-do neighbors, chiefs, and the state.35
The Mau Mau war in particular arose out of a crisis of age and masculinity among the Gikuyu. Following Luise White and John Lonsdale, I show that for all its complexities, the organized violence of the early 1950s was young Gikuyu men’s response to a crisis of maturity in the late colonial period.36 They argued with one another and with elders over how to best resolve their ambiguous age. During the war, they used the symbols and vocabulary of initiation, seclusion, warriorhood, and age grading to oath new members, steel fearful comrades, and establish chains of command. As they prepared for battle in the forests of Central Kenya, they reimagined what their masculinity might look like in the future, just as they looked back to history to think about how young warriors should behave. Despite their military defeat and grueling detention, these young men spent the remainder of colonial rule joining the youth wings of political parties and campaigning for their candidates. As young men did in Ghana, Guinea, and Tanzania, Kenyans rallied around age-relations as a way to make claims on the largesse of political elites. They also agitated for often-conservative gendered nationalisms—usually at the expense of young women—to make places for themselves at the table of nation building.37
To scholars of contemporary Africa, this uncertain age with which Mau Mau fighters or political activists struggled or appropriated might seem all too familiar; they would call it youth. A growing number of scholars have argued that youth, typically gendered male, is a liminal period of junior dependence, one marked by “waithood” or “involuntary delay” in becoming an adult.38 Youth is described as a by-product of modernity’s vicious contradictions: expanded access to and expectations of global ideas contrasted starkly by local economic constraints and political repression.39 In their waiting, some youth have become a destructive force of change, finding their masculinity as child soldiers or gangsters.40 Others are a force of creativity and activism, finding ways around state surveillance through social media or empowering one another through fashion and music.41
Much of the literature assumes that youth is the result of “a long historical process, shaped by authoritarian colonialism, postcolonial state failure, and a generally problematic engagement with material modernity.”42 But far too little research has been done to excavate if and how youth emerged over the course of the twentieth century. Deborah Durham offers historians a road map, arguing that studies of youth must go beyond the relationships and negotiations of youth and include the deeper structures that produce these encounters.43 This book does not offer scholars yet another definition of youth. Rather, it looks back on how this prolonged, liminal age came to be in Kenya, and how past practices of age and generational relations became moral representations to hold up against the present and imagine the future.44
MAKING MEN
Manliness mattered as much as age in Kenya. At night, boys listened to the stories of their fathers and grandfathers, learning what it meant to be a man, debating those ideas the next morning out on the grazing fields. A boy, eager for initiation, had to prove to his father that he had the fortitude to face the circumcision knife. A young man practiced his dance moves and refined his oratory skills to catch his peers’ eyes and ears. Age and gender were inseparable to these young men, and historians must treat them as tightly knotted units of historical analysis.45 To study the entwined coming-of-age stories of young men and the state, historians must also consider how growing up and making states were both gendered processes.
Until the 1970s, histories of Africa were histories of men. Afterward, a generation of historians brought the lives of African women to the forefront of the field. Scholars of Kenya are especially lucky to have a remarkable set of studies on the lives of schoolgirls, street hawkers, sex workers, widows, divorcées, wives, and mothers. This early work pushed historians to consider the decisions and actions of women, especially their labor, to be as important as class, race, and ethnicity.46 In the years that followed, focus shifted to the changing practices and meanings of gender and the relationships of power among women and men.47 Histories followed of women navigating the new possibilities of colonialism, like labor outside the household, education, urban migration, Christianity, and colonial courts, to carve out spaces of autonomy for themselves and their families.48
Many of these same studies also reveal that African women struggled under an expanding “patchwork quilt of patriarchies”—fathers and husbands, chiefs, clerics and clergy, employers, and the state.49 Over the course of the twentieth century, these patriarchs leaned on one another to control and marginalize women. They tried to drag women out of the public sphere of politics and streets of commerce and into the private sphere of households ruled by male breadwinners. There they were to labor as dutiful daughters, wives, mothers, and Christians, keeping their husbands and children content and out of trouble.50 Dictating gendered roles to women and then punishing them when they broke gendered rules lay
