superiors in London. Each of these voices spoke of competing, contradictory visions of what life in a settler colony should be like. Under such intense scrutiny both within and outside the colony, the state internalized these contradictions. As Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale argue, to ensure the financial viability of the colony, the state nurtured the economic fortunes of settler families it had encouraged to emigrate. The state alienated vast tracks of the choicest land from African communities like the Maasai, Kipsigis, and Gikuyu, and then coerced them to leave their homes and work for wages. British officials also had to keep the promise, or at least the pretense, of the civilizing mission. Ever fearful of being seen as an accessory to settler exploitation and virulent racism, the state also adopted “the role of evenhanded arbiter, of defender of the weaker, African, interest.”73 With one hand, the state tried to extract African labor, violently if need be. With the other, it sought to shield them from the destabilizing effects of capitalism and Western culture.
For Berman and Lonsdale, considering the welfare of Africans merely made tolerable the dirty work of building an apparatus to coerce them out to work. Cooper has pointed out that their analysis of statecraft in Kenya focused more on securing “profits and peace” than “on the cultural work that colonial states do.”74 Since first conceptualizing colonial rule as a state of struggle, historians of Kenya and elsewhere in Africa have turned to locating the much deeper cultural work that went on to cope with the state’s contending logics. One of the places historians looked for the state’s cultural work was within the African institutions on which the British leaned most heavily to strengthen their authority. The British relied on the practice of indirect rule. Their men on the spot, known in Kenya as the provincial administration, worked with a cadre of chiefs and elders to collect taxes, enforce laws, discipline unruly behavior, and arbitrate local disputes. If African communities had no preexisting tradition of chieftaincy, as was the case in Kenya, then British officials appointed men they felt up to the task.75 These intermediaries offered the British a way to overcome their financial limitations and exert influence beyond the barrel of a gun.76 Together, provincial administrators and their African intermediaries created and oversaw local courts, and codified customary laws, such as marriage or land tenure rights, as well as hardened ethnic affiliations. These kinds of cultural work, Lynn Thomas argues, offered the colonial state ways to resolve the tensions between the crude necessities of coercive exploitation and ideological commitments to the civilizing mission.77
Rather than instruments of colonial domination, these flexible African institutions became sites of intense argument.78 Africans often reappropriated them in ways the British had not intended. Chiefs used newly created courts to reimagine marriage rights and household relationships, yet women and young men used them to challenge the authority of their husbands or elders, respectively.79 Ethnic affiliations solidified after the state carved out African reserves to establish racial boundaries and demarcate chiefly jurisdiction. Yet Africans trying to inspire political unity and agitation hardened ethnicity to challenge state authority.80
Age and gender also served the colonial state well. Almost immediately, the British set out to learn as much about African social and political life as possible. Through what Katherine Luongo has termed the “anthro-administrative complex,” officials and anthropologists, in dialogue with African intermediaries, created a corpus of often functionalist, incomplete knowledge of the ways age and gender guided everyday East African life.81 With this knowledge, the British tried to assert their authority by using and manipulating local practices of age and masculinity—a process that produced what I call the elder state.
The elder state was no “crusher of rocks,” no colossus. But British efforts to harness age became a formidable instrument of statecraft—more than the distant drumbeat of “arterial” power. First, the elder state strung the sinews of the colonial apparatus together, forcing officials with different outlooks on and mandates for rule to argue and work with one another. The elder state emerged from the “constant rows” between the provincial administration, who oversaw day-to-day life in the African reserves; the departments, who managed law and order, economic planning, and welfare projects; as well as the judiciary and treasury, who enforced and funded the entire enterprise.82 In the interwar years, labor officers, who found evidence of child labor on settler estates, argued with district commissioners, who had lowered the age of male initiation, over the appropriate age at which boys could leave home to work. Meanwhile, municipal officials in Nairobi found themselves working with magistrates and the treasury to enforce vagrancy laws and fund repatriation orders for rounded-up street boys.
The elder state manifested itself in nearly every nook and cranny of the regime. Most histories of Kenya focus on a single part, or interaction between only a few parts, of the state. The provincial administration has come under frequent scrutiny because of how closely it worked with African communities. These studies locate the real work of making law and maintaining order in the arguments between local communities, chiefs, and, sometimes, British officials.83 Disputes over land and customary practices like marriage and female circumcision were resolved in local African council meetings attended by chiefs or court battles adjudicated by elders. British officials occasionally arrived on the scene to huddle with chiefs or fume over failed policies. In these histories, if not for their monopoly on violence, the British seem almost incidental to indirect rule.
Second, as the elder state reverberated with tension, the administrative rank and file grew attuned to the voices of those outside the bureaucracy clamoring to be heard. Kenya was a crowded, cacophonous place. As officials moved in and out of colonial society, they encountered all manner of competing ideas about ruling Africa. In conversations with Maasai elders, a district officer might learn the details of how and when they decided to transition a new generation of boys into manhood. Around a settler’s dining room table, they might hear that the nimble fingers of African children were perfect for picking tea. Reading the newspaper, they might read a story about the importance of the Boy Scouts in the training of young British citizens.
Sometimes, these encounters inspired experimentally minded officials to test new technologies of rule, and they were often allowed to do so with a free hand.84 They resourcefully borrowed and experimented with ideas and institutions practiced by the communities they sought to govern, by missionaries working just down the road, by British officials back home, and by other governments around the globe. In the 1930s, the governor sent S. H. La Fontaine, who had served in the provincial administration, to Britain to investigate the methods of juvenile incarceration and reform that could be reproduced in the colony. Twenty years later, to rehabilitate young detainees during the Mau Mau war, community development officers used a blend of Christian baptism, cleansing ceremonies adapted from revivalists, and vocational training provided by former staff of the Church of Scotland Mission at Tumutumu.
More often than not, though, unresponsive officials were compelled to act. When it appeared the state had sacrificed the well-being of Africans to the benefit of settlers, a chorus of criticism pressed the state to respond with denials, committee investigations, reforms, and even development projects.85 Such pressures were especially acute when young Africans were involved. When Archdeacon Owen found children digging roads near Kisumu in the 1920s, he brought his outrage to the British public and to bear on the colonial state.86 And in the 1930s, and again in the 1950s, when Protestant missionaries decided to ban female circumcision and abortion, they pushed district officials and chiefs to support them.87
Third, the elder state was doubly cognizant of age and masculinity—pressured by local arguments with Africans and globally circulating ideas back in Britain. The migration, labor, punishment, illiteracy, and health of young people were controversial in Kenya because they were also so contentious in Britain and much of the Western world. The Colonial Office and British parliamentarians, as well as religious and welfare organizations, were animated by the treatment of Her Majesty’s youngest subjects, just as they were by the treatment of young Britons. How young Africans fared under colonial rule became a barometer for the success or failure of the civilizing mission and the superiority of metropolitan ideas and
