the end of the nineteenth century, European notions about age had undergone dramatic renovation. Social reformers, social scientists, and government officials began to carve out a new stage of the life cycle between childhood and adulthood, first among the well-to-do and later the working class.88 Those boys and girls newly labeled as “youths” or “adolescents” became more dependent, losing their access to the economic and social worlds outside their households and coming under greater surveillance by parents, educators, and the state.89 Once created, this new age came under close scholarly and political study. It also quickly became a repository for all manner of adult nightmares. Fears emerged that the young, especially boys, left to play in the streets of London, work in satanic mills, or languish in poorhouses suffered from moral and physical degeneration.90 Worse still, the burgeoning field of child psychology promoted ideas that adolescence was a fragile time in the development of the human mind. The young were unstable, irrational, and malleable. When combined with destabilizing influences like town life, poverty, and loose morals, the results for society could be disastrous.91 Governments and charitable institutions urgently defined, legislated, disciplined, and protected the young.92
Yet the same characteristics that made the young so dangerous also gave them great potential—if only their energies could be controlled. In times of intense insecurity, the young could be called upon to defend the nation and empire. Britain’s near defeat in the Boer War inspired Robert Baden-Powell to create the Boy Scouts, which he viewed as a way to harden and discipline the next generation, prevent another catastrophic military campaign, and preserve the empire.93 During World War I, an entire generation of young men flocked to the trenches and their deaths to fulfill a romantic, masculine fervor.94 Over the course of the early twentieth century, states across Europe organized youth movements with militarized, propagandist flare. A creeping conformity replaced the rebellious spirit that had once defined young Europeans. Adults had reimagined them as modern warriors defending the nation and its empire as opposed to rebels erecting mid-nineteenth-century barricades.95 After World War II, the role of the state in the lives of young men and women deepened out of the desire to rejuvenate citizenship and nationhood in the wake of the war’s devastation, the emergence of welfare states, and the threat of nuclear armageddon.96
As elder states developed in Europe, they also formed along the colonial frontier. Metropolitan and colonial governments had worried over the welfare of European children and young people who had been spirited away to or born in settler colonies. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, young English and Portuguese orphans and vagrants were seen as the very foundation of successful empires.97 In turn, colonies became “not only a spleen, to drain the ill humours of the body, but a liver to breed good blood.”98 Colonies cured the nation of its moral decay and created sturdy subjects. By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the well-being and proper socialization of young British immigrants to Australia and South Africa, as well as Northern and Southern Rhodesia, became essential to strengthening the cultural ties that bound the British world system together.99 Yet historians still know far too little about the lives of children and young people in colonized societies and their encounters with the state. In colonial Spanish America, the state defined and legislated childhood and familial relationships; and in doing so, positioned itself as a paternalistic “father king” to augur its racial domination over non-European subjects.100 Centuries later, the British used prisons and schools in India and Nigeria to experiment with new disciplinary tools that tried to shape Indian and African children into twisted versions of a Western ideal.101 In the mid-twentieth century, the language of development, citizenship, and youth spoken in Europe infused new institutions and new kinds of racialized, social controls in the colonies.102
Last, the elder state in Kenya did not materialize fully formed, but emerged gradually over the course of colonial rule. Early on, from the turn of the century until the late 1940s, the British found that the authority they gained from participating in age-relations was a very messy affair. Ruled by the financial and logistical constraints of empire-on-the-cheap, they had to work with chiefs, elders, and young men to effect change. The elder state became a process of negotiation not just among officials in different posts within the administration but also with the competing, yet not always incompatible, desires and designs of African men.103
At the turn of the century, officials working in the East Africa Protectorate brought with them a “self-confident Victorian mystique of progress.”104 Many of these men were holdovers from the Imperial British East Africa Company, a short-lived, financially disastrous experiment. Adventurers and entrepreneurs fashioned into administrators, they believed that “competitive individualism represented the driving force of progress and the highest stage of social development.” And that spirit led, as Bruce Berman argues, to a period of “intrusive and innovative interventions.”105 These earliest fragments of the elder state began to use age and gender to free young men and women from their familial relationships as well as shield them from abuse. Using the language of racial paternalism, the state fretted over the right of Christian converts to leave home, the safety of kidnapped pawns, and the freedom of girls forced into slavery.106 Officials developed welfare-oriented policies and institutions specifically for young people that aimed to treat them differently than adults. In 1902, young men who loitered about the railway station at Nairobi were arrested and taken to mission stations for education. Five years later, the governor ordered the construction of a reformatory where the protectorate’s worst offenders would receive tough discipline and an education—in much the same way as their counterparts in Britain’s famous Feltham Prison. Throughout the same period, the high court outlined regulations for a less severe form of corporal punishment for young male Africans brought before magistrates.
These “innovative interventions” supposedly ended in the 1920s as a conservative pall settled over the state. A new generation of British officials arrived who valued stability, orderliness, and traditionalism.107 Everywhere they saw the crippling effects of what they called detribalization: unruly young warriors raiding for cattle, young men and women dancing and drinking together, women demanding the right to divorce their abusive husbands, children swarming towns and train stations to pick pockets and pilfer. They sought ways to prevent what they believed to be the breakdown of “traditional” African life. They tried to strengthen the precarious authority of chiefs and establish local tribunals so local elder men could resolve conflicts over land, marriage, and law and order. In spite of this more conservative outlook, the innovative spirit of the early years of colonial rule did not vanish.108 Protestant churches continued to press provincial administrators to outlaw certain cultural practices they deemed barbaric, such as female circumcision and abortion. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s—at the very height of this supposed conservatism—provincial administrators worked with chiefs to speed up the timing and shorten the duration of male initiation to free young men to seek employment. They also circumvented the authority of fathers who resisted sending their sons out to work by facilitating the sons’ efforts to find recruiters. At the same time, prodded by the International Labor Organization and the Colonial Office, technocrats in the departments unveiled new age-specific legislation, including the Juveniles Ordinance and the Employment of Women, Young Persons, and Children Ordinance, to—in theory—protect young people from broken, abusive homes and workplace exploitation.
Concern for the well-being and development of the young—drawn from a sense of paternalism and driven by missionaries, metropolitan officials, and Africans—fueled the elder state’s innovative work throughout the inter-war years. Elsewhere in Africa, significant steps to build state power around age occurred decades later, well after the 1940s, when a developmentalist ethos emerged within the British Empire.109 In Kenya, these efforts began long before; and when officials of the elder state felt the sudden rush of development funds after World War II, they relied on past networks of expertise, practices, and institutions.110 Yet the postwar period did have a dramatic effect on the ambitions of the elder state—it morally and financially invigorated officials.111 In both the departments and the provincial administration, officials busied themselves addressing the social
