An Uncertain Age. Paul Ocobock

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      In the late 1940s and 1950s, the elder state’s influence was amplified by this renewed faith in the transformative power of colonial welfare and development. When the elder state came face-to-face with Mau Mau, it seized on the violence to deepen its role in the lives of young men. For officials in the department of community development as well as several provincial administrators, Mau Mau had revealed in the starkest of terms that fathers, elders, and chiefs had failed to exert sufficient control over young men.¹¹² One solution to Mau Mau was for the elder state to boldly step further into Gikuyu age-relations and offer itself up as an alternative elder with a new, more orderly path to manhood. The involvement of the elder state ensured that the detention and rehabilitation of young Gikuyu differed dramatically from the violence of adult detention.¹¹³ In the waning days of empire, the British built a massive network of institutions for young men in the hopes of resolving the issues that had brought Mau Mau to life. And when independence came in 1963, many ancillaries of the elder state believed they had failed. Rather, they had strengthened the institutions of age by making them a source of state power. The elder state elevated arguments that had once occurred in households and among generations to the broader field of politics. And the first generation of African politicians eagerly took up the elder state’s mantle. Political elites like Jomo Kenyatta found the language and relationships of age and the late colonial institutions for young people useful tools to craft a national culture and legitimize their authority.

      SOURCES AND METHODS

      This book draws on a mixed methods approach, blending archival material, life histories, and quantitative analysis. Most of the documentary evidence in this book comes from the Kenya National Archive. In the archive, I cast a wide net, examining files from nearly every corner of the colonial state, from the provincial administration, to the attorney general’s office, to the departments of community development, education, labor, and prisons—among many others. This archival breadth broadens the scope of the book beyond being simply a study of the actions of local African councils and district commissioners or anxieties of municipal authorities and welfare officials. It allows me to explore the many ways a diverse group of young African men encountered an equally diverse group of colonial officials. Juggling archival evidence from these disparate corners of the state shows just how pervasive age and gender were in the cacophonous process of state making in Kenya.

      I also made use of the British National Archives as well as archives at the School of Oriental and African Studies, the Rhodes House Library at Oxford University, and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine—to name just a few. Late in my research, I consulted the newly released Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) files deposited in the British National Archives. While the FCO material promises new revelations on the brutalities of the 1950s, they do not dramatically alter what we already know about the period. The new FCO files tell us far more about the lengths the British went to burn or bury the paper trail—an effort to shape a particular kind of history.¹¹⁴ For this book, the FCO files deepened what I had already found in the Kenya National Archives and from speaking with former detainees. Together, this documentary evidence forms the backbone of the stories that follow.

      Working with documents that detail the interactions between young Africans and colonial officials comes with a particular set of challenges. The ideas and institutions of the elder state were often propaganda pieces, very public performances of British benevolence. Labor inspections of sisal factories, camps for young Mau Mau detainees, or youth clubs for poor, illiterate country boys all tried to temper criticisms by missionaries and social reformers. If the work of the myriad people and institutions that made up the elder state was mere performance, then to tell this story risks perpetuating the very self-serving, face-saving publicity the British hoped to project all those years ago and perpetuate through a tampered archive. Much of my work, then, has been to get backstage, away from the pageantry. And there, the sources reveal much more. I found that the elder state was often at odds with itself, unsure how to best handle young African men. Sometimes, I met true believers: British officials who genuinely took interest in the well-being of young Africans and the civilizing mission.¹¹⁵ Their work, often in collaboration with Africans themselves, resulted in policies and programs generated locally, from within the state, rather than as the result of unwelcome, external pressure. But the best way to tease out such troublesome sources was to corroborate them with the memories of Kenyan men who had encountered the elder state in their youth. Regardless of the propaganda inherent in so much of the elder state’s work, it had real, lasting consequences for the young men it circumcised, caned, incarcerated, educated, or wounded in battle. Listening to their voices, rarely heard during the performance, as well as the murmurs of dissenting officials arguing backstage, allows us to see past the theatricality of the elder state and its archive.

      I conducted eighty interviews, nearly all of them in 2008, with men who came of age during colonial rule. Several Kenyan researchers helped me recruit these men and then facilitated and translated our conversations. John Gitau Kariuki, an experienced researcher who has worked with Robert Blunt and Daniel Branch, among many others, assisted me with my work in Central and Rift Valley Provinces. In Nyanza Province, I worked with the indomitable Henry Kissinger Adera, who had previously worked with Matthew Carotenuto and Derek Peterson. He recruited Luo and Kipsigis participants. Before each interview, we asked all our participants to use the language with which they felt most comfortable, and while most chose to speak in their first language, a few opted to speak Kiswahili or English.

      We began our interviews only after I had completed most of my archival work. I had waited because I wanted to recruit men with firsthand experiences of the issues and institutions I found most compelling in the documentary evidence. Once I realized how important spaces like the Kabete Approved School and the Wamumu Youth Camp had been to British efforts to shape African age and masculinity, I sought out men who had been incarcerated there. When I learned of the colonial state’s preoccupation with the recruitment of young people in and migration out of Western Kenya, I conducted interviews with Luo and Kipsigis men who had left home in search of wages and a little adventure. Waiting in this way afforded me opportunities to speak with men such as Simon Kariuki, Alan Kanyingi, Thomas Tamutwa, and many others who could speak with authority about the thrill of buying clothes with their first paycheck or the agony of being caned by a prison official. In a few instances, I was able to interview men whom I had first encountered in the archival material. Take, for example, Simon Kariuki: I had read of him several times in letters among officials in the department of community development as well as a memoir of a former official, Geoffrey Griffin. Sitting with Simon in his small apartment in the three-story building he owns in Ongata-Rongai, we teased out the tensions between his memories today and colonial records filed away over sixty years earlier. Opportunities such as these revealed to me just how closely life histories and the documentary evidence aligned with one another. When I shared with men what the archive had to say about them, it gave them a chance to challenge and correct their recorded pasts.

      Yet challenges shaped my research as much as these opportunities. The fading memories of the very old limited my work just as the vivid accounts of men like Simon Kariuki enriched it. I struggled to recruit men of advanced age who might tell me something of their lives in the 1920s and 1930s. When I did, I often found them too old or infirm to participate in an interview. First person life histories of men and women who lived through the early years of colonial rule are increasingly closed off to my generation of scholars. Nearly all of my interviews were with men who came of age in the 1940s and 1950s. The stories that follow are those of only a few generations; and within these generations, of a privileged few who thrived and survived. From these life histories alone, I cannot adequately track how ideas and practices surrounding age and masculinity changed over the course of the colonial period. Although I routinely asked the participants to tell me about how their forefathers came of age, I often found them using their fathers’ and grandfathers’ lives as a way of legitimizing their own struggles for manhood and maturity. In the end, I have relied on the archival record to show how different generations of men thought about age and masculinity over the course of the twentieth century.

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