were not the only ones who provoked moral panics and stampedes to correct their behavior—so, too, did young men. For a discipline originally built on the study of African men, we still know surprisingly little about how they understood their gender and sexuality, and how those ideas changed over time. In 1990, Luise White encouraged her colleagues to take the study of masculinity more seriously—and several scholars have answered her call.51 Lisa Lindsay and Stephan Miescher define masculinity as “a cluster of norms, values, and behavioral patterns expressing explicitly and implicitly expectations of how men should act and represent themselves to others.”52 Like age, masculinities are relational, and because gender interacts with so many other social structures like race, class, and ethnicity, multiple masculinities can exist within a community.53 Not all masculinities are equal. Masculinities are all pulled, as R. W. Connell argues, into the orbit of a hegemonic masculinity. Dominant as its ideas and practices may be, this hegemonic masculinity wars with rivals through coercion and consensus, destroying some and co-opting others.54 Even men whose masculinities encircle the outermost margins enjoy what Connell calls the “patriarchal dividend,” the privileged position all men share and uphold over women.55 Gender scholars question whether Connell’s hegemonic masculinity existed in colonial Africa. “It is not always obvious,” Lindsay and Miescher write, “which notions of masculinity were dominant, or hegemonic.”56 African men experienced a succession of competing and coexisting masculinities as they crisscrossed the “patchwork of patriarchies” sewn together by fathers, chiefs, missionaries, employers, and colonial officials.57 They also had to adjust to the changing preferences of women and their demands on the kinds of men with whom they wanted to meet, make love, or start families.
For all their work on masculinities, historians of Africa have been less interested in the relationships between local and imperial masculinities than have their colleagues studying other colonial worlds like British India.58 Africanists focus instead on local, African arguments about masculinity and the fractures and continuities those debates produced during colonial rule.59 African masculinities defied definition by the colonizer, shifting rather than breaking under the weight of colonial racism and violence. Young men left home to work for wages or join mission stations; yet, as they did in Ovamboland, they still looked up to their fathers and kin as models of manliness.60 Within young men’s own households, steady paychecks from working on the Nigerian railways or in coal mines allowed them to claim breadwinner status, command the household, and demand family allowances from their employers.61 Even under the surveillance of the state and workplace, South African masculinities were quite literally driven underground, but they still challenged the apartheid regime.62
In similar ways, this book explores the masculinities boys and young men felt, debated, and performed as they grew up in colonial Kenya. I explore the masculine norms boys were expected to adhere to in preparation for initiation as well as those taught to them by elders as they healed in seclusion. As initiation practices changed during colonial rule, I show how young men looked for new ways to prove their manly mettle and how their feelings and expressions of masculinity changed as a result. The travels and travails of migrant wage labor and town life offered young men new spaces, often outside family life, to reconsider the masculinities they observed in their fathers’ households. As they reformulated what it meant to be male, they struggled to convince their elders back home that new styles of clothes and shoes and gang life were acceptable forms of manhood.63 I also show how African men and women mulled over ideas about manhood in constant contact with non-Africans who weighed in, sometimes quite forcefully, with their own expectations and designs.64 If, as Africanist gender scholars claim, colonial Africa was home to a constellation of dominant masculinities, then it is not enough to study African masculinities in relation to one another.65 Relationships between African and colonial or imperial masculinities must matter just as much. Colonial actors might have had only the faintest influence, and their global ideologies might not have seemed so alien to Africans; yet, even in moments of recognition, of soft power, potent masculinities were made. One of the most forceful actors to intervene in African men’s debates about gender was the colonial state.
Gender historians have long paid particular attention to how colonial states influenced gender relations and how gender altered the trajectories of statecraft.66 States are gendered institutions, and the colonial state was a very masculine one. Its sundry bureaucrats, protocols, cultures, and laws were all products of their own competing masculinities that changed over time.67 These masculinities were made up of the prevailing metropolitan norms back home, the racial paternalism of the civilizing mission, and the lessons learned, or not, from colonial subjects. And these came to bear on African communities when they found themselves face-to-face with or working as agents of the state. Emily Osborn’s study of household building in Guinea shows how the French ignored local connections between marriage and political authority and refused to marry Baté women and build households of their own. Instead, they hid their private lives from public view, denying themselves a powerful cultural component of statecraft.68 Unlike their counterparts in Guinea, British officials in Kenya recognized the power of gender, making men and women to make the state.
Despite very rich, very separate scholarships on gender and statecraft, historians of Kenya have only occasionally connected the two. A few studies, most notably Lynn Thomas’s Politics of the Womb, have shown how chiefs and British officials tried to use women’s bodies and African gender ideologies to underwrite their authority.69 In An Uncertain Age, I explore how British officials’ own masculinities and the kinds of masculinity they wanted their young African subjects to inhabit guided their interventions. Moreover, inside government institutions such as approved schools, youth camps, and youth clubs, very intimate conversations took place between the state and young men about acceptable forms of manliness, sexuality, and maturity as well as the outlets through which to express those feelings: sports, hard work, education, and marriage. Colonial rule in Kenya is the story of how the British leveraged the success of their colonial enterprise on their appeal to and control over the masculinities of young Africans.
THE ELDER STATE
Scholars of Africa have long been interested in how colonial regimes exercised their power. Some cast the colonial state as powerful and authoritarian, transforming the everyday lives of traumatized Africans. The state is a crusher of rocks, a bula matari, as Crawford Young argues, relying on violence, private enterprise, and invested African intermediaries to extract raw materials. No less intrusive is Mahmood Mamdani’s “Janus-faced, bifurcated” state, exerting two forms of power: civil laws governing urban citizens and customary laws controlling rural subjects. This decentralized despot locked some Africans away in ethnic reserves, controlled by intermediaries using customary law, and then placed them in tension with Africans living in urban spaces under a different legal logic.70 Others, including Ann Stoler, Frederick Cooper, and Jeffrey Herbst, argue that colonial statecraft was a more contingent process. “More arterial than capillary,” Cooper writes, state power did not circulate evenly to every corner of colonial society, and periodically it required a little defibrillation to keep it going. African communities living closest to the heart of state authority felt the steady, rapid pulse of rule. Further away, its effects could be but a murmur.71 This unevenness opened a range of possibilities for Africans and many others, such as Christian missionaries and European settlers, to affect the nature of colonialism. As a result, the state was “neither monolithic nor omnipotent.” It was tangled up in “competing agendas for using power, competing strategies for maintaining control, and doubts about the legitimacy of the venture”—debates that government officials had not simply with one another but with those over whom they meant to rule.72
In Kenya, the colonial state wrestled with these issues in its own peculiar ways. Kenya was a settler colony teeming with a diverse, vociferous cast of characters who made claims on and against the state. British officials found themselves constantly reacting to the activism of ordinary Africans, chiefs, and educated elites, as well as European settlers, Christian missionaries, international
