An Uncertain Age - Paul Ocobock New African Histories

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state sometimes actively participated in recruitment. African chiefs often assisted recruiters in their search.32 Raphael Ndai, who grew up in North Kavirondo, recalls that chiefs would call young men to his homestead with promises of sugar and caramel. Once assembled, Raphael and his age-mates were told to line up. The chief inspected them and took the tallest boys aside. During one particular recruitment drive, Raphael’s elder brother was among them. He was taken to Kisumu by foot, vaccinated, loaded onto a train, and sent to the sisal estates.33 Whether chiefs coaxing boys with candy or British officials standing by as medical officers approved boys for work, the elder state found itself implicated in the very recruitment process it claimed to regulate. As detestable as they found recruiters like Yates and his ilk or as dirty as they got their own hands, the British did exercise some measure of authority over recruitment. Labor agents, professional recruiters, and subcontractors still brought most young men to labor camps for inspection, registration, and transport. And British officials still had some power to turn unsuitable workers away, fine recruiters, or revoke contracts.

      By the late 1920s, employers began to bypass the system of professional recruitment. In 1926, John Riddoch warned district officials that employers had begun hiring private recruiters, who answered to no colonial regulation.34 The depression-era economy of the 1930s pushed employers, especially larger tea and sisal firms, to look for cheaper labor and more efficient methods of recruitment. By hiring privateers or turning their own laborers into recruiters, estates looked to extend their influence directly to African communities, sidestepping labor agencies, camps, and inspectors. In 1928, African Highland Produce even hired a former colonial labor inspector, Ernest McInnes, to organize its recruiting system. The Kenya Tea Company, run by Brooke Bond, paid its employees to return home and offered incentives for bringing back relatives.35

      Private recruitment made it easier for many young men to find work. Recruiting offices began to appear in trading centers across Western Kenya. Boys from nearby villages easily walked to these offices and boarded transport directly to tea or sisal estates.36 Lazaro Weke recalls meeting a recruiter in the trading center of Awendo in South Kavirondo District. Rather than walk the hundred miles to the Kisumu labor camp, Lazaro boarded a bus with several other boys, which then traveled from town to town picking up more would-be laborers until it finally reached Kericho. Abiathar Opudo also remembers recruiters driving from village to village, asking children and young men to work.37 The tea estates contracted Asian bus companies to run routes through the western districts. This system of free transportation, paid for by employers, created a two-way connection between the estates and the villages. No longer did boys and young men have to make the arduous trek by foot to major towns like Kisumu only to be stripped, prodded, and vaccinated by medical officers or turned away by district officials. The buses encouraged African employees to go home after their contracts ended and return with young kin in tow.38

      While private recruitment was more expensive for the estates, it stabilized the ebb and flow of labor. When business was good in the late 1920s, private recruiters increased the number of Africans brought to the estates. The tea estates in Kericho boasted that their recruiting infrastructure allowed them to call up ten thousand boys and young men from South Kavirondo District alone.39 During the depression, when demand for labor fell, the estates could limit free transportation, tightening the spigot. Private recruiting also released the estates from government regulation. The provincial commissioner of Nyanza freely admitted that private recruiters “scouring the Districts in search of Labour” required no permit and brought no one in for registration or medical inspection.40

      Private recruiting still relied on coercion and exploitation. Young men who grew up in Western Kenya at the time recall that as they tended their fathers’ livestock, recruiters approached them and promised candy and money.41 Christopher Achar, who lived near the Awendo recruiting office, remembers being told by recruiters, who were always local people, that they were going bird hunting. Boys eagerly and unwittingly boarded buses bound for Kericho, only to end up picking tea rather than hunting birds the same day.42 But not all young men who went out to work were coerced, and for many of those who were, migrant wage labor became a profoundly important part of growing up.

      “CHANGE IS NATURALLY, ABHORRENT TO ALL OF US”

      As young men went out to work in the 1930s and 1940s, British colonial officials, especially those in the provincial administration and labor department, struggled to define the role of the elder state. Beginning in the 1930s, the district and labor officials tried to intervene more frequently in the lives of young wage earners. They crafted laws specifically for young people, defining who could and could not work based on age. They tried to curtail the abuses of the recruitment system. They inspected workplaces and fined employers who allowed the young to work too closely to machines or underground in mines. They returned home thousands of young people when they ended up in town or their parents complained.

      However, forces outside the colony instigated many of the elder state’s efforts, which nearly always coincided with scandalous stories of exploitation in the British media or pressure for the colony to align itself with changing metropolitan and international labor standards. Throughout the 1930s, the Colonial Office, needled by the League of Nations and revelations that Kenya did not meet the empire’s international commitments, forced the colonial state to reexamine its labor policies. But district and labor officials never seriously questioned or prevented young men’s decisions to work. Rather, they did just enough to silence their critics and prevent further scandal. Any blossoming of state labor regulations in the 1930s was short-lived. World War II grabbed the attention of Britain and her empire, and colonial officials in Kenya and employers leveraged the war effort to stifle new regulations.

      The elder state’s first major effort to legislate the labor of young people came in 1933, with the Employment of Women, Young Persons, and Children ordinance (EWYPCO). Long overdue, the ordinance put Kenya in line with conventions that the International Labor Organization had passed thirteen years previously. The ordinance had little impact on the vast majority of young workers; instead, it regulated their work at night, in factories and mines, or aboard ships. Children under the age of twelve could no longer work alongside machinery or in mines. Mines and other industries could hire young people between the ages of twelve and eighteen as long as they kept a register of their names. The ordinance also established fines between £2 and £5 for employers who broke the new rules.43

      The EWYPCO also opened up, ever so slightly, two new means for the colonial state to control the labor of young Africans. First, it pushed the British to define more precisely who was and was not too young to work. By prohibiting children under the age of twelve in industry, the British took a major step in creating an acceptable minimum age for work. Twelve also corresponded with the efforts of provincial administrators to lower the age of male initiation. The ages in the EWYPCO were not simply the application of the International Labor Organization standards but part of a broader endeavor by the colonial state to release children around the age of twelve into the labor market under the cover of colonial law and African custom. Second, the EWYPCO required industries to keep records of their young employees, a requirement they would try to extend to the entire underage labor force by the end of the 1930s. In fact, registering the young became a central feature of the elder state’s efforts. In 1937, the chief native commissioner and the chief registrar of natives wanted young people to carry their own registration certificates, or work passes.44 By forcing young men to obtain their own kipande work passes, officials hoped they might finally find a way to track the number of young people who were out working, prevent the children of tender years from working, and appease parents who did not know or approve of where their sons had gone.

      As these ideas circulated the lower rung of the colonial administration in Kenya, scandal consumed the Colonial Office over Kenya’s continued reliance on the labor of children and young people. The man who struck the match was Archdeacon W. E. Owen of the Church Missionary Society. Owen had long been an outspoken critic of colonial labor practices, especially compulsory labor in Nyanza Province. His letters and newspaper articles routinely exposed the Colonial Office to criticism.45 In May 1938, in the pages of the Manchester Guardian, he condemned the recent passage of the Employment of Servants Ordinance in Kenya. The ordinance, Owen argued,

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