An Uncertain Age - Paul Ocobock New African Histories

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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 and economic ills they believed had hampered their work for years.

      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,

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