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An “Arbitrary Line”

Male Initiation and Colonial Authority

IN THE CHILLY MISTS of Meru in August 1919, tempers flared white-hot. Reverend R. T. Worthington, of the United Methodist mission, had stormed a nearby village flanked by a gang of mission converts. He had come in search of a certain schoolboy who had left his lessons to undergo initiation. The boy’s leave had long ended, and the reverend wanted him back in the classroom. Village elders protested as Worthington broke into the seclusion hut, where the young man lay recuperating from his circumcision, and took him back to the mission. Fuming, the elders assembled before district commissioner A. E. Chamier and informed him that the Meru community would not tolerate Worthington’s incendiary behavior. Worthington had done the unimaginable: remove a still-healing initiate from the moral instruction that took place during seclusion, from the lessons critical to his understanding of his new station in society.¹

Trying to temper the elders’ fury, Commissioner Chamier promised to investigate the matter. Tensions simmered for days. When Chamier finally confronted Worthington, he accused the reverend of “high-handed action.”² Worthington retorted that Meru initiation lasted two months and disrupted mission education. He had merely retrieved a student whose lengthy initiation put eighteen precious months of schooling in jeopardy. Incredulous, Chamier replied that if two months could undermine a year and a half of Western education, it indicated “a certain ineffectiveness about mission training.” For Chamier and the village elders, the reverend had violated Meru custom, interfered with one of the most pivotal moments in a young man’s life, and, worst of all, disregarded elder authority. For Worthington, Meru custom, initiation, and elder power were obstacles hindering his student’s salvation and study.

Young men’s initiation and coming-of-age ignited intense deliberations about the messy, overlapping frontiers of familial, missionary, and colonial authorities. To resolve such arguments like the one in Meru, the British investigated, with the help of African intermediaries like chiefs and interpreters, when men came of age and became independent of their seniors. To discover, define, and demarcate a precise moment when a young man was no longer beholden to his elders—an age when he was free to leave home to work, join a church, or attend a school—became one of the first steps in the formation of the elder state.

In their pursuit of an identifiable moment from which they could extrapolate young male agency, British administrators, missionaries, and ethnographers found male initiation. With its graphic rituals and intense interaction between young and old, male initiation became a focal point in British explorations of African age. They came to view initiation as the pivotal moment in a young African man’s life, the significance of which continued and deepened as he aged. Initiation, which often included genital circumcision, transitioned boys into young men and set them on paths toward adulthood. Initiation also served as a process of concentrated socialization through which older generations imparted the life lessons essential to becoming masculine. Above all, initiation exposed the British to the intense negotiations among generations and the inequalities between young and old. They came to believe that the principal thought on boys’ minds was to become men, while elders sought to control the boys’ youthful energies.

Unlike female initiation and circumcision, which the state and missionaries tried to suppress, the British tampered with male initiation to meet the demands of a settler colony.³ In partnership with chiefs and village elders, the British manipulated initiation to discipline young men and push them into the wage labor market. They modified the frequency of male initiation, lowered the age of circumcision, shortened the length of seclusion, and restricted the activities of warriors. More and more boys, at earlier and earlier ages, became men. In much the same way as during the female circumcision controversies that rocked Central Kenya, colonial officials tried to become practicing elders, making generations of matured, male bodies to strengthen state authority. As for the young men who faced the knife, they forged ahead into an age of altered rituals and uncertain meanings focused squarely on enjoying their youthfulness, achieving masculinity, and dreaming of the joys of elderhood.

PARENTAL PARAMOUNTCY

When Reverend Worthington retrieved his still-healing pupil from seclusion, he reignited a long and storied debate about the relationships between African families, missionaries, and the colonial state, as well as their overlapping claims of over the young. From the very beginning, missionary activity in East Africa tested not only the religious convictions of African communities but also the relationships between young and old. Some of the very first converts to Christianity were the very young who found meaning in the new faith, safety from a father’s abusive hand, or relief from destitution and slavery. In the 1860s, only a few years after establishing a mission in Zanzibar, Roman Catholic missionaries had sixteen children staying with them, some of whom had been enslaved in Nyanza near Lake Victoria and then ransomed out of slavery. The priests viewed themselves as alternative fathers and these former child slaves as the future of missionary work in the region.⁴ By the late nineteenth century, a growing abolitionist impulse and fledgling colonial administration opened more spaces for interaction between the newcomers and young East Africans.⁵ Hundreds of young slaves bound for the Indian Ocean trade found themselves emancipated from their captors by agents of the British Empire. British expeditionary forces freed young captives from caravans crawling coastward while naval patrols boarded slaving vessels at sea. The British then turned many of them over to Christian mission stations like Freretown in Mombasa or the African Asylum near Bombay.⁶

In 1898, famine swept from the shores of the Indian Ocean inland to Lake Victoria. On the coast alone, an estimated forty thousand children perished.⁷ The destitute found refuge at mission stations. Many of the young people who arrived at stations like Freretown represented a different form of bondage than those captured in previous decades. During the famine, desperate parents made heartbreaking decisions to keep their children alive by exchanging them, especially girls, for food and livestock with neighboring families who fared marginally better. These temporary arrangements, known as pawnship, ensured a child’s survival but could also slip into slavery.⁸ A year into the famine, a series of pawnship and kidnapping cases attracted the attention of British authorities. The assistant collector of Rabai, H. B. Johnstone, uncovered what he believed to be a network of child slavery. Kamba traders bought children in German Tanganyika and sold them in exchange for livestock to Duruma families across the border in the British East Africa Protectorate. The Duruma then took these children to the coast and sold them for profit. In this way, traders exchanged young people multiple times as they gradually drove them coastward for sale and shipment.⁹ Whether these children had been pawned by parents or kidnapped by slavers, the British could not tell. For them, pawnship was nothing more than slavery. Concerns about pawnship continued long after the famine. In 1912, and again in 1917, officials issued warnings that Gikuyu children had been seen traveling with non-Gikuyu adults; and if anyone should see this, they must investigate immediately.¹⁰ As the British conflated pawnship and slavery, they forced some parents to circumvent colonial authority and turn to Christian missions for help.

During the famine, Freretown fed and housed as many as one thousand “orphans,” many brought there by parents who could no longer feed them.¹¹ As the missions accepted these young people, they participated in the practice of pawnship with African parents. Caring for freed child slaves, pawns left by their parents, or young converts drawn to a new faith forced missionaries and the colonial state to explore and define the boundaries of authority over African young people. What right did the British have to hand young people over to missions without parental consent? What right did missions have to keep emaciated pawns or emancipated slaves if parents or kin wanted them back? At what point must missionaries and officials consider what young people wanted?

These questions compelled the chief secretary of the protectorate to send out his district commissioners in April 1914 to ascertain when the young became independent of their elders. The chief secretary prefaced his request by writing that he was “strongly of the opinion that native minors of both sexes should remain under the control of their parents during the period of their minority and that they should not be permitted to leave that control without express sanction.”¹² In short, the British colonial state and its African intermediaries should not allow children to leave their families. But if commissioners could determine a definitive moment in which children came of age, then the state might allow them the freedom to leave home and attach themselves to a mission station, join the ranks of the tribal police, or work on a settler’s sisal farm.

As field reports trickled in, it became clear that no two ethnic communities along the coast were exactly alike or two district commissioners in agreement. The district commissioner of Mombasa did not even bother to ask local intermediaries. Rather, he felt that the Indian Penal Code, from which the protectorate took its laws, sufficiently fixed the end of male childhood at fourteen years of age and the end of female childhood at sixteen. Bending to African custom, he argued, merely weakened the penal code, thereby “rendering inoperative” imperial rule of law.¹³ Other commissioners, eager to dabble in a little ethnographic research, did pose the chief secretary’s question to local elders. The commissioners at Shimoni and Rabai learned that among the Nyika, puberty and marriage determined the transition from childhood to adulthood, and this usually occurred between the ages of fifteen and nineteen. The Rabai commissioner added that coming of age did not depend solely on the age of a boy or a girl, but rather the wealth of his or her family. Well-to-do fathers could marry children off at an early age, usually at fifteen, while poor parents withheld marriage, sometimes until nineteen or older. Colonial taxation, he noted, had forced parents to marry children earlier so that they could use dowry to pay off their taxes. Both commissioners saw a young man’s coming-of-age as highly adaptable to economic conditions. Given this flexibility, they felt that boys should be allowed to leave home at any time, as long as they had parental consent.¹⁴

The commissioner at Malindi offered a much different perspective. He argued that an African child “does not come of age in our sense of the word,” nor was there a precise moment when parents relinquished authority over children. The commissioner at Njale concurred. No young Giriama, he argued, was ever independent of his or her elders. Strict generational control ensured that no child at any age left his or her parents behind without consulting them first. Both men believed that parental consent and unbending generational authority lay at the heart of African social life. If the chief secretary wanted young people to ever be truly free of their elder kin, then the colonial state would have to draw an “arbitrary line.”¹⁵

Despite these differences of opinion, a consensus formed around four significant points. First the commissioners believed that African boys did in fact come of age, though the timing depended on the community’s fortunes and customary practices. They also identified initiation and marriage as the two most pivotal moments in a young man’s life, precise markers differentiating childhood from adulthood. Initiation graduated boys into manhood and an interstitial space before adulthood that introduced a host of new responsibilities. Marriage matriculated them into adulthood as they began their own families. Third, commissioners sanctified parental authority as essential to controlling young men who had left childhood but not yet settled down into adulthood. Finally, they positioned the state as the guarantor of the rights of parents over their children, of the rights of the old over the young.

Once the district commissioners’ reports were in, the final word fell to their superior, provincial commissioner Charles Hobley. Hobley argued that young African men and women might come of age through initiation, but they never really became independent of family life and generational authority. Girls, he argued, merely passed from the control of one male, the father, to another male, the husband. As for boys, marriage provided the pivotal moment of independence; yet, even then, they remained beholden to their fathers and the new families they created. To reject the “definite duties toward his clan and family” because he “wanders off permanently to a Mission or a town” put a young man at risk. “He may become automatically detribalized,” Hobley warned, “and cannot according to native law claim to come back and participate in the division of the family wealth at his father’s death.”¹⁶ To allow a young African man to stray from his age-defined duties so he could join a mission or enter the migrant labor market might, Hobley argued, unravel the entire structure of generational authority and African social life.

For Hobley, the authority of fathers over sons, of parents over children, and of seniors over juniors was an essential component of African and colonial order. The task of his provincial administration was to preserve generational authority. Hobley stressed that as “the question of control of the family is so fundamentally connected with the whole organization of an African tribe, I would strongly urge [. . .] that each case be dealt with [. . .] by the District Officer, the matter being mutually arranged between the guardian and the other party.”¹⁷ District authorities, with their knowledge of local norms, must partner with parents and elders to maintain the harness of generational authority to which the young were yoked. To favor the Indian Penal Code or any other non-African legal structure over the authority of parents and elders, to even imagine a scenario by which young men were free of parental responsibility, risked detribalization. And yet Hobley and some of his commissioners ignored the creativity and contingency in the institutions of age and family life that allowed parents in time of crisis to pawn a starving daughter or send a son to a Christian mission for education.

The district commissioner’s findings and Hobley’s caution were also refracted through their own ideas about age, ones that had undergone very recent renovation back in Britain. Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the British embraced the idea, drawn from biologists and burgeoning fields of social science like child psychology, that a distinct phase of the life course existed between childhood and adulthood, one marked by growing independence. Words such as adolescent, juvenile, and youth became first scientific and then cultural ideas, created so they could be studied, understood, and ultimately controlled. By 1914, a vast literature describing the age between childhood and adulthood had been published, and new legislation to regulate it had been passed in Britain, Europe, and the United States.¹⁸

The young, especially men, were characterized by a near limitless energy as well as an inability to cope with their rapid physiological and psychological development. Yet when all that kinetic, unstable energy was bottled up or misdirected, it led to indiscipline, delinquency, and rebelliousness. This potential for disorder made young men all the more fascinating and frightening to social scientists and reformers, leaving girls well outside their scholarly field of view. When young men succumbed to this baser nature, it was often because they lacked firm familial discipline and had come into contact with destabilizing influences outside the home. This interstitial period between childhood and adulthood quickly became associated with all manner of socioeconomic ills: poverty, urbanization, and criminality, as well as a breakdown of the family, of tradition, and of an idyllic, rural past.¹⁹

Yet this new age could also be “the new ‘raw material’ of the future [and] a potentially awesome power.”²⁰ Channeled and controlled by the state, young men could build nations, expand empires, and reinforce racial and national superiorities. For the British these had been hard-won lessons learned on the battlefield of Southern Africa. Stunned by their near failure in the Second Boer War, the British witnessed the possibilities of imperial collapse and national weakness.²¹ Emerging from the besieged town of Mafeking, the so-called savior of the British effort against the Boers, Robert Baden-Powell, returned home with a solution to British anxieties: the mobilization of the young.²² As Baden-Powell encouraged his readers in Scouting for Boys, “We must all be bricks in the wall of that great edifice—the British Empire—and we must be careful that we do not let our differences of opinion on politics or other questions grow so strong as to divide us. We must still stick shoulder to shoulder as Britons if we want to keep our present position among the nations.”²³ Young men became a means to reinvigorate British masculinity, militarism, imperial purpose, and racial superiority. Years later, during World War I, ideas about age and youth were on the tips of tongues the world over as European nations channeled the energies of young men with deadly design. Tens of thousands of bright, young Britons possessed by romantic, nationalist fervor charged up and out of muddy trenches carved into the cratered fields of France. This no-man’s-land became the crucible by which young Britons could test their manhood.²⁴

In Kenya, colonial officials saw something of what they had lost back home in Britain: the comforts of pastoral hearth and home and the social controls of patriarchs and elder kin. They also worried that they had brought with them those same destabilizing forces that had driven British families to cities, broken them apart, and then released uncontrolled, undisciplined young men and women onto the streets. And so they had to be vigilant and guard against the unraveling of African family life that could in turn weaken indirect rule. They seized on local institutions, like male initiation, which they imagined to have been imbued with unquestioned elder patriarchal power—ignoring, perhaps intentionally, the argument and flexibility embedded in African age-relations. After the 1914 investigation, the elder state still had much to learn. Over the course of colonial rule, the British continued exploring initiation, marriage, and the liminal period in between and then tried wielding the power of generational authority themselves.

FACING THE KNIFE

Five years had passed since coastal administrators affirmed parental authority, and still Meru district commissioner Chamier had to defend the rights of fathers to initiate their sons from a missionary willfully violating local custom. What bothered Chamier most was not that Worthington had kidnapped a schoolboy from seclusion, but that he had also performed circumcisions at the mission without parental consent. The reverend did not simply remove one student from seclusion; he removed many of his faithful from initiation altogether. Reporting to his superior, provincial commissioner H. R. Tate, Chamier argued that this constituted a serious breach of African cultural life. He conceded that mission-sponsored male circumcision had also taken place in nearby Nyeri and Fort Hall, especially among Gikuyu at Roman Catholic missions. But its wider availability did not change the fact that the missions had converted one of the most climactic moments in an African’s social life to its own purposes. By offering circumcision at his mission, Chamier feared that Worthington detached young people from the collective, generation-forming experience of initiation and robbed them of the customary knowledge they learned in seclusion.

Chamier’s anxieties arose from his belief, which he shared with many other colonial officials at the time, that initiation was one of the most important moments in a young African man’s life. Accounts of initiation among the different ethnic communities of Kenya consumed page after page of early colonial field reports and ethnographies, much of it filtered through the sieve of elder Africans, young often-uninitiated interpreters, and scraps of hearsay meticulously collected by the authors themselves. The theater of initiation—with its elaborate adornments worn, dances and songs performed, genital circumcision endured, and secrets of seclusion withheld—excited the wildest imaginations of colonial newcomers. This ethnographic exploration and interpretation, what Katherine Luongo has called the “anthro-administrative complex,” empowered the British to use initiation, especially genital circumcision, as the not-so “arbitrary line” that marked the water’s edge of parental authority.²⁵

However, colonial investigations like the one conducted in 1914, and dozens of ethnographic studies, did not offer a clear, inert image of African coming-of-age. Rather, they provided officials with a frustratingly blurred snapshot of community practice set in motion by local and global encounters. Consider John Middleton’s frustration as he wrote about Gikuyu social institutions in the early 1950s. Rather than conduct his own research, he tried to synthesize a host of older ethnographies. To his consternation, he found that when considered together, none of the early anthropologists—Routledge, Hobley, Cagnolo, or Kenyatta—presented a consistent, unified narrative of Gikuyu initiation.²⁶ While he rightly attributed the problem to variation in style and region, the ethnographies Middleton used spanned five decades. He had failed to consider that initiation changed over time and never embodied a fixed, original form in the first place. What the Routledges observed in 1908 should have differed from what Kenyatta’s age-group experienced in 1913 and what Cagnolo witnessed in the 1930s. Anthropologists were frustrated not just by shifting initiation practices but also by the secrecy with which communities held these rituals and their meanings. In fact, the oaths binding former initiates from sharing details of their time in seclusion still hold to this day.²⁷

Several ethnographers tipped their hats to the flexibility of male initiation and changes already set in motion, sometimes set off by the ethnographers themselves. Even though William and Katherine Routledge conducted one of the earliest studies of Gikuyu social life, the initiation ceremonies they observed were already adaptations to Gikuyu interaction with the Maasai and the coastal slave trade.²⁸ One of the Gikuyu assistants working for the Routledges during their 1908 fieldwork had postponed his initiation to aid in their research. Later, when he informed them that he had to leave their employment to undergo circumcision, they tried to convince him to stay. He flatly refused, telling them that his elders had threatened to prevent his initiation altogether if he postponed it again.²⁹ The Routledges were not alone in relying on uninitiated interlocutors. Around the same time, Alfred C. Hollis learned to speak Nandi from two “small boys” he met in Nairobi—one a Nandi, the other a Kipsigis. They stayed with him until he had learned the language and then returned home.³⁰ Some of Hollis’s very first information about Nandi life and language came from the mouths of mere babes living far from home.

Some of the young men with whom early ethnographers worked had undergone circumcision but not yet completed initiation, and thereby remained but boys in their elders’ eyes. Shortly after World War I, as Gerhard Lindblom made yet another fruitless attempt to witness Kamba circumcision ceremonies (he had been denied repeatedly), he noted that a growing number of Kamba men returned for their second circumcision at very old ages. Although they had been physically circumcised, they had forgone their time in seclusion to work for the government as soldiers and police.³¹ In the 1930s, John G. Peristiany also relied on a circumcised yet uninitiated Kipsigis interpreter named arap Chuma. In his ethnography, Peristiany recalls that Chuma had gone to Nairobi when he was very young and had been circumcised by a European doctor. When he returned, elders allowed him to marry and settle down, but they never let him forget that he had not been initiated in the proper Kipsigis fashion. “He is constantly made to feel that, unless he is initiated, he will not be considered as really one of them.” During his stay, Peristiany encouraged arap Chuma to complete his initiation.³²

In each of these cases, ethnographers had engaged with elders through uninitiated boys or those initiated in an atypical manner. Young men, boys even, had willingly altered their initiation to take advantage of the new possibilities opened up by the colonial encounter. The British “discovered” African coming-of-age just as young men adapted its practice and form to changing colonial circumstances. Moreover, the choices these young intermediaries made in their own transitions to manhood complicated their ability to accurately translate the meanings of African customary practice, especially rituals they themselves had not yet experienced. What chief or village elder would choose to reveal such secrets to an uninitiated boy like the Routledges’ interpreter or a man who had forgone his time in seclusion like arap Chuma? As the Gikuyu proverb goes: “Mûici na kîhîî atigaga kîeha kîarua,” or “He who steals in the company of an uncircumcised boy will live in fear until the boy is circumcised.”³³ And if elders chose to share their knowledge through the medium of the uninitiated, an act of adaptation of their own, then the conversations that formed these early ethnographies took place through a generational prism refracting what information elders chose to provide uninitiated translators and what information the boys thought important for European ears. Perhaps the very importance of initiation and age-relations in these early ethnographies was a by-product of exchanges ethnographers had with boys for whom these very issues were the principal thoughts on their minds as well as the minds of elders who found themselves engaged in tense age-infused negotiations with boys elevated far above their station.

These ethnographic missives record a form of historical theater immortalizing performances between African informants and intermediaries as well as European investigators. While they do not offer historians accounts of precolonial forms of initiation or age-relations, they provide an abstraction and a means of identifying how Africans articulated coming-of-age and how agents of colonial rule witnessed it at a particular time. These ethnographies, as well as discussions between colonial officials and African intermediaries, identified several crucial characteristics of coming-of-age that underwent dramatic change during the colonial encounter.

First, male initiation practices marked the physical and psychological transition from childhood to manhood. Before and long after the colonial period, the majority of African communities in Kenya practiced some form of male initiation. These varied in ritual practice, most notably the presence or absence of genital circumcision. Despite ritual diversity, initiation stood as one of the most significant moments in an African man’s life. The Routledges argued that for the Gikuyu, events like marriage and death “hold but a small place . . . compared to that greatest of all ceremonies whereby the boy becomes a man and the girl a woman.”³⁴ Likewise, initiation was a pivotal moment in the lives of young Kamba, Gusii, Kipsigis, Maasai, and Nandi.³⁵ While Luo boys did not traditionally undergo circumcision, they did experience rituals that transitioned them out of childhood.³⁶ Plans to initiate a boy depended on several factors. The well-being of the entire community determined when initiation occurred. Drought, famine, or war could postpone or even accelerate initiation. If conditions permitted, the decision fell to the eagerness of a future initiate and the consent of his father. A boy had to want it, and when ready, he approached his father. Only a father could secure “the satisfaction of all a boy’s longings and ambitions.”³⁷ A father’s consent often depended on his ability to afford the necessary accoutrements of initiation, such as livestock, alcohol, food, and gifts.³⁸ A father’s status also changed once he had initiated his firstborn. He or his age-group as a whole moved upward into a more advanced age with its own new privileges and responsibilities. While a father could postpone his son’s initiation, he could deny neither his son’s nor his own ambitions for too long.

FIGURE 1.1. African child sitting in front of house, n.d. Photo courtesy of the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies Winterton Collection, Northwestern University.

Prior to and in the earlier years of colonial rule, boys’ initiations occurred at some point in their late teens through their mid-twenties. Kamba boys were a notable exception; they experienced circumcision before puberty, around the age of five, but did not complete initiation until much later.³⁹ Preparations took many months. Fathers had to accumulate capital and consult elders. Mothers had to prepare food and alcohol. Boys had to visit relatives to announce initiation, procure the necessary adornments, and perform songs and dances. In the days running up to initiation, Gikuyu and Meru boys worked themselves to the point of exhaustion dancing and singing songs. Wachira Mwaniki, a Gikuyu from Nyeri circumcised in 1936, remembers that the songs emboldened the spirits of the boys who were about to face the knife.⁴⁰ In Kiambu, David Chege recalls that the words differed two decades later, but the spirit of the songs remained the same: “Let me be allowed to go and get circumcision, I am old enough to face the knife!” “In our family we have never seen anyone shed tears!”⁴¹

Before sunrise, Gikuyu and Meru initiates traveled to a nearby stream where they disrobed and stood immersed in chilly waters. After some time, the boys emerged and sat along the bank or in a nearby field where a large crowd had gathered to watch. The boys dug their heels into the cool earth, pushed back against the supportive hands of their sponsors, and fixed their gaze skyward as the circumciser walked, ceremonial knife in hand, down the line, cutting each of them with two swift strokes.⁴² At the same time of day, but much nearer the shores of Lake Victoria, Gusii boys underwent a remarkably similar ordeal.⁴³ Among pastoralist Kipsigis and Maasai, initiation also included intense ritualized violence, such as passing through gauntlets of stinging nettles and frightening tests of honesty and endurance.⁴⁴ Bravery in the face of searing pain was a common element in genital circumcision. A boy who struggled or cried out endured mockery and humiliation. In these moments, no boy could flinch or cry out in pain. Facing the knife prepared initiates for the courage and discipline expected of them when they became warriors.

The second element emphasized by ethnographers and colonial officials was a period of intense instruction and socialization. Following circumcision, young men entered a period of seclusion, usually in a home built by their sponsors at a fair distance from their villages. These special houses went by a variety of names: the Gikuyu called them githunu or thingira, the Meru called them gichee, the Kamba thomi, and the Nandi and Kipsigis menjo or menjet. Despite their disparate names, their role in initiation was twofold: to protect and to educate the initiates while they healed. During seclusion, new initiates learned the codes of conduct of the community and expectations of becoming warriors, husbands, and eventually fathers and elders. Seclusion ensured that once physically reborn as men, their minds kept pace. Given its importance, male communities shrouded seclusion in secrecy. Before young men emerged from seclusion, their elders bound them to oaths of secrecy. These oaths frustrated ethnographers who knew little about what went on in the menjo, which ultimately pushed them to emphasize the public rituals surrounding genital circumcision over the more private affairs of the seclusion hut.

This was especially the case for Kamba initiates. Several years separated their genital circumcision from their second, great circumcision. Around the age of twelve, though boys from poor families could be twenty or older, initiates left home for the thomi. There they hunted, solved riddles, defended against mock Maasai cattle raids, and confronted their fears.⁴⁵ When the young men returned home from this second circumcision, they had taken yet another step toward adulthood. After facing the knife, young Gikuyu men convalesced for a week or two in the githunu. While they healed, their sponsors, elders, and even older siblings visited to instill in them important lessons.⁴⁶ They informed the boys that they were “not a child any longer, be very brave, and don’t play with uncircumcised boys or girls.”⁴⁷ Moreover, “they have gone to another stage from childhood to adulthood, behave well, respect men and women when you meet them on your way, greet them with respect and move aside to let them pass.”⁴⁸ It reminded them that while they were no longer children, they were still expected to obey their elders.

The seclusion of Kipsigis and Nandi initiates was one of the longest in Kenya. After circumcision, boys stayed in a special hut known as the menjo, constructed far from the community, where they healed.⁴⁹ Here, according to men of the Chuma and Sawe age-groups, the most important aspects of initiation occurred. While recuperating, special elder instructors lived with them, teaching them the laws of the Kipsigis people as well as physical combat. As Anthony King’etich Rotich, a member of the Sawe age-group, recalls, “They were taught everything a Kipsigis needed to know so that he became a man; and when he came out he was now a man, and he was no longer a boy.”⁵⁰ Another Sawe, Jonah Kiprono, concurs: “We learned about war, handling spears, bows, and arrows, and we were also taught about the behavior expected of a man.”⁵¹ This time offered them the opportunity to “forsake childhood traits and behave like an adult.”⁵² Several Kipsigis men carefully distinguished their time in the menjo—and not simply their circumcision—as making them men and preparing them for adulthood.⁵³

Emerging from seclusion, young men entered into new sets of relations with one another as well as with their elders and junior followers.⁵⁴ The crucible of initiation forged a cohesive generation, which shared a special bond governed by strict codes of intragenerational conduct. Gikuyu young men exiting their brief period in seclusion took an age-group name, usually a remarkable, contemporaneous event connecting the group to a moment with historical significance.⁵⁵ When circumcised in 1936, Wachira Mwaniki’s age-set was named cindano (needle) as well as pia (Kenya Bus Service). Pins and needles had just shown up in Nyeri marketplaces, and the Kenya Bus Service had begun operation in Nairobi.⁵⁶ Young men and their age-groups were bound together not only by their initiation and seclusion but also by the historical circumstances in which they came of age and the history they would make together.

Young men left seclusion only to remain in an interstitial period, between childhood and adulthood, of varying lengths of time. Instead of becoming adults, they became warriors of varying degrees of seniority. Gikuyu young men left seclusion to become junior warriors of a mumo, a set of youths. Over the next six or so years, they spent their days dancing, singing, and devoting themselves to military activities.⁵⁷ Their time as warriors became a way to “divert their excess energies and their strength to more profitable channels, such as raiding Maasai stock, and thereby enriching the family.”⁵⁸ Out west, Maasai and Samburu initiates became moran and lived apart from the community in separate compounds known as manyattas, out of which they trained, prepared stock raids, and enjoyed the luxuries bestowed upon them as warriors. Communities who had to defend against Maasai moran raids, such as the Kipsigis and Nandi, prepared their own young warriors fresh out of the menjo for raids and counterraids of their own.⁵⁹

Third, African communities experienced and British officials understood coming-of-age as a series of intense generational relationships. Each step in the journey from initiation to seclusion and on into warriorhood depended on young men’s relations with older generations.⁶⁰ Pastoralist communities such as the Kipsigis, Nandi, Maasai, and Samburu organized generational life around age-groups created at periodic intervals, which formed a progressive, cyclical pattern of advancement. The decision to initiate a new group of boys into junior warriors depended on the willingness of elder men to make way for the new generation. Among the Kipsigis, elders decided to start a new age-group every fifteen years or so, each with its own name.⁶¹ During the next fifteen-year cycle, boys would be initiated into the newest age-group. Eventually, this group would be closed, giving rise to yet another one, pushing all other age-groups upward along an ever-moving axis of age and time.⁶² Consider Thomas Kisigei, a Kipsigis living near Sotik; he claims to have been one of the last initiates into the Chuma age-group. He faced the knife in 1947, during the solar eclipse that passed over southern Kenya.⁶³ At the moment of his initiation, the Chuma group closed its doors to new initiates. As Thomas and his fellow Chuma, who had been initiated years before, entered junior warriorhood, the age-group that had once occupied that position, known as Maina, also moved upward, becoming senior warriors. To make room for the Maina, the group that had once been senior warriors graduated into elderhood.

Creating and closing age-groups required all men to acquiesce to change—but not always willingly. Occasionally uninitiated Kipsigis or junior warriors struggled, sometimes violently, to get the generation above them to relinquish their position. Movement upward through Maasai society was not automatic either. Junior moran had to prove their value to and respect of their elders to progress to positions of senior warriorhood and beyond. This was often accomplished through violent outbursts of indiscipline and direct challenges to the authority of elders. Rebelliousness was an essential component of the Maasai system of age-graduation.⁶⁴ To signal that they, too, had the grit and guts to endure initiation, Gikuyu boys performed endless dances of a distinctly loud and militant manner until parents became so annoyed that they gladly consented to initiation.⁶⁵ However, these “rituals of rebellion” never materialized into full-scale generational revolutions whereby the young permanently overturned elder authority.⁶⁶

Finally, ethnographers and colonial officials fixated on the power elders had over the young and the intense stratification among generations. Elder men and women demanded obedience, service in time of conflict, and legitimacy of their authority. They decided when and how to initiate sons and daughters.⁶⁷ They wielded the ritual violence of the circumcision knife. They conducted the lessons in seclusion. They held the keys to maturity and future elder power. Acquiescence and complicity were as much a part of age-relations as disobedience and rebellion. Kenyatta forcefully argued that among the Gikuyu, the youngest generations were without doubt subservient to elder groups.⁶⁸ For the Maasai of Matapato, Spencer argues that “delay and denial” were “built into the system. It is elders who . . . cultivate the popular awareness of the process of time, and hence the perception of time itself, and of maturity among younger men and women.”⁶⁹ Although young men enjoyed an egalitarian spirit within their age-group, “to acquire a sense of being a Maasai, is to enter into this premise of age inequality from the bottom rung and ultimately to have a role in perpetuating it as one climbs upward.”⁷⁰ Whether Maasai or Gikuyu, young men were “suspended somewhere between boyhood and full adulthood,” and while they enjoyed their youth, they also held on to the promise that one day their elders would help them fulfill their ultimate dream of adulthood.⁷¹

This promise, this elder-sponsored path toward adulthood, was sometimes very explicitly expressed to young men. After a Meru boy’s circumcision, he returned to his father’s homestead. There his father greeted him and announced: “My son, as I have agreed to allow you to be circumcised, I also pledged to get you a wife. My son, I pledged to you a sword, spear, club, and shield for use when going out to fight. My son, I pledged you an ewe and heifer for your in-laws.”⁷² No clearer statement could have been made regarding the stakes of a disciplined, obedient coming-of-age. A Meru father said, in the starkest of terms: “Respect me and obey me, and I will prepare you for manhood.” Gikuyu fathers, John Lonsdale argues, “worked for their sons, earning the next generation’s bridewealth [, and] juniors, children, and clients, were expected to give obedience in return.”⁷³ Mothers worked for their sons, too, as did sisters, whose marriages fetched the dowries that would be reinvested in a brother’s marriage.⁷⁴ In many ways, the entire family labored to ensure that a son matured and started his own family. During colonial rule, and perhaps long before, boys reached manhood and young men reached adulthood through their willingness to accept their families’ efforts, and, if need be, the families exerted a little pressure to help them get there.

As British officials and missionaries came to understand and imagine the cultural significance of circumcision and seclusion as well as the politics of age-relations, they looked for ways to manipulate these forces. Their pursuit to harness the energies of young men and possess the authority of elders had profound implications for the African experience of colonial rule. To alter initiation practices or the time in seclusion; to tip the delicate scales in favor of one generation over another; to subsume the power of generational authority into the state or mission station altered how young men spent their youth, expressed masculinity, and strove for maturity.

DRAWING ARBITRARY LINES

When Reverend Worthington began circumcising young converts in Meru, he participated in a long-standing practice among missionaries in Kenya. Missionaries did not initially advertise themselves as purveyors of an alternative form of initiation, nor did African parents and elders imbue them with any authority on the matter. That did not prevent them from assisting with initiation, even if unintentionally. In 1909, Reverend V. V. Verbi, of the Church Missionary Society station at Wusi, noted, “My medical knowledge had been useful [and] many circumcision cases have been brought to me.”⁷⁵ The reverend became so successful in aiding parents whose sons and daughters suffered infection that local circumcision operators complained to him that he was stealing their profits. Converts also pressured missionaries to permit the practice and persuaded them to carry it out at the stations.⁷⁶ Those who had been orphans, outcasts, or emancipated slaves would have had few alternatives to receive initiation and looked to their new religious community.⁷⁷ Together, missionaries, parents whose children suffered from botched circumcisions, and orphans took the first steps in connecting missions to the powerful cultural work of initiation. In doing so, they introduced new frontiers along which ideas about and relationships of gender and generation could be tested.⁷⁸

Yet some missionaries like Reverend Worthington took this first step further. Worthington saw his role in circumcision as a way to replace the lessons learned in seclusion with those in the classroom. He argued that Meru elders and district commissioner Chamier did “violence to the convictions of those of our number who wish to undergo the ceremony under Christian influences.”⁷⁹ His converts had the right to choose where they became men and women and to whom they turned to circumcise them. If they chose his mission, then Worthington felt no obligation to send them home. He was merely accommodating the desires of his flock, Christianizing African initiation to bring it under his supervision.⁸⁰ This became a common strategy among Catholic and Protestant missionaries. They simply offered to circumcise converts or allowed them to return home for circumcision as long as they did not dance, sing, or enter seclusion. For members of the mission, to forgo the rites accompanying initiation carried a weighty stigma. Many of those “boys who have been circumcised at [the] hospital are hated by their people because they did not go through the old customs.”⁸¹

Worthington positioned schooling as a “vital” and transformative moment in a child’s life, not unlike initiation itself. “It is unjust to extract a child from mission education,” Worthington argued, and “no break in education at such a vital time in the child’s life should occur.” Each in their own way, African initiation and Western religious education socialized the young and transformed boys into masculine, productive members of different sets of communities. However, for missionaries like Worthington, months of dancing, feasting, gift giving, and lessons in customary practice were a diabolical distraction from Bible study, literacy, and vocational training. These activities did not produce the kinds of masculinity or morals he wanted from his schoolboys. In much the same way as Methodist missionaries in South Africa, Worthington saw African initiation and Christian baptism as “both rituals of reproduction” and an “uncompromising choice between the past and the future, benighted damnation and enlightened salvation.”⁸² Eventually, his flock would have to choose. And when schoolboys chose to return home for initiation, they reminded missionaries of the limits of their authority and the need for a firmer hand—or, in Worthington’s case, at the very least, a kidnapping.⁸³

Meru district commissioner Chamier could not have disagreed more. The Meru, he believed, were not hostile to education, but rather merely “bitter” that missionaries and government interfered with custom. In his letter to provincial commissioner Tate, he argued that “if respect for a missionary is only to be obtained by violent interference with tribal customs, the price is in my opinion too high to pay.”⁸⁴ The district commissioner echoed the words Hobley had uttered five years earlier: the colonial state must respect African customs—at least the ones the British recognized—and maintain the authority of parents, elders, and chiefs or pay the ultimate price of detribalization.

Chamier was disheartened when provincial commissioner Tate weighed in on Worthington’s activities in Meru. Tate acknowledged the importance of initiation in the transition from childhood to manhood. He had, after all, dabbled in a little ethnographic research of his own a decade earlier as district commissioner in Kiambu. There he spent considerable time investigating the significance of initiation and cataloging a history of Gikuyu age-group names.⁸⁵ However, Tate replied to Chamier that initiation should not jeopardize the far more vital endeavor of teaching a “rising generation [to] master their desires and impulses and to order their lives in a manner not only conducive to their eternal salvation but also more agreeable to civilised standards.”⁸⁶ In Tate’s view, missionaries and colonial officers had partnered in a broader civilizing project, and African parents had to realize that “neither Missionary Societies nor Government will undertake the training of boys and girls unless the latter are to remain under their care in statu pupillai [sic] for the period of completing their education.” Tate’s vision of the colonial encounter and its relationships to male coming-of-age and generational authority marked a dramatic shift in policy outlined by Hobley only five years earlier in 1914. Tate laid out the position of the colonial state and missions vis-à-vis African young men and parents in the starkest of terms. When a father handed his son over to a priest or principal, willingly or unwillingly, he relinquished his authority and, by extension, his right to socialize, initiate, and discipline his son the way he saw fit. Missionaries and government officials might allow his son to return for initiation, but they were under no such obligation.

Worthington’s siege of a seclusion hut exposed two competing visions of the colonial state. Chamier saw the state as a conservator of the African customs and institutions that buttressed indirect rule. Tate saw the state as a catalyst of the civilizing mission, encouraging Africans to leave the reserve, convert to Christianity, and learn a trade. Each man had served in the Kenyan provincial administration for over a decade and yet found themselves, at least on this issue, in a battle for the soul of the colonial enterprise: Was its task the protection of “native paramountcy” or the moral uplift of its subjects? In some ways, Chamier’s conservatism would claim the 1920s and 1930s. Bruce Berman argues that the interwar provincial administration was a paternalistic, “conservative apparatus of control,” a “guardian bureaucracy” driven to stabilize and control the social and economic forces it had set in motion.⁸⁷ Two of the most important institutions men like Chamier sought to protect were tribes and chiefs. “Obviously tribes could not be allowed to disintegrate,” as Brett Shadle nicely puts it. “Chiefs without tribes were not chiefs, and with neither chiefs nor tribes Indirect Rule, and colonial rule altogether, would collapse.”⁸⁸ Nor could customs like initiation be questioned when they were so central to establishing a sense of place and legitimizing authority within a community.

However, missionaries like Worthington and social reformers back in Britain shook provincial administrators like Chamier from their dusty conservatism, forcing them to live up to the lofty goals of the civilizing mission. The battle over female initiation, particularly circumcision, was one of the most spectacular examples of colonial officials and chiefs pushed to tamper with African cultural life in the name of moral uplift. In the 1920s, several religious organizations in Kenya and parliamentarians in London pressured officials to limit and then outright abolish female circumcision.⁸⁹ In response, the Central Province administration worked with local councils of chiefs to gradually alter female circumcision. Changes were small at first. Officials issued warnings that they would prosecute anyone who forced a girl to undergo circumcision against her will. They also ordered chiefs to reduce the amount of time communities spent initiating their children and lowered the age at which girls underwent initiation.⁹⁰ Officials feared that girls faced the knife far too late in life, typically after reaching puberty, which encouraged them to have sex before marriage and abort unwanted pregnancies. The provincial administrators hoped that earlier initiations would prevent premarital sex, pregnancies, and abortions, which represented moral decay, looming demographic collapse, and future labor shortages.⁹¹

Families resisted these changes. In Kiambu, chiefs complained that when daughters began menstruating before the agreed-upon period of initiation, families clandestinely circumcised the girls themselves.⁹² The local council backed away from the limitations, permitting female circumcision throughout the year. In Meru, when faced with similar resistance, officials and chiefs aggressively enforced their rulings. When an uninitiated girl was discovered pregnant, police rounded up girls in the area and forcibly circumcised them.⁹³ These campaigns robbed families of the right to initiate girls as they saw fit, and put the district officials in the position of enforcing the very custom they were meant to eradicate.

As the decade wore on, administrators continued to press local councils on female circumcision, families continued to bring girls before the knife as before, and Gikuyu political activists seized on these changes to attack the colonial state and its chiefs. In 1929, the Church of Scotland Mission, the African Inland Mission, the Salvation Army, and other religious organizations called for the end of female circumcision and compelled their congregants to forsake the institution. Most administrators in the districts, who had already done much to alter the practice of female circumcision, were reluctant to push the issue any further. Provincial commissioner E. B. Horne felt the policy toward female circumcision should be one of “masterly inactivity.”⁹⁴ The ban infuriated the Gikuyu. In droves, congregants abandoned the most outspoken missions and established their own independent churches and schools. They also flocked to the Kikuyu Central Association, whose leadership had successfully turned the ban into a political lightning rod. Talk of a ban was quickly silenced, and the state retreated from many of the alterations it had made to female circumcision. The British had dabbled in welfare and moral uplift and was met with a ferocious response, sowing the seeds of future political discontent.⁹⁵

All the while, as the most outspoken missionaries sought an end to girls’ circumcisions, they quietly carried them out on boys back at their mission stations. Control over young men’s genitals never aroused the same political furor. Neither the state nor missionaries tried to ban male circumcision, such a thing was simply unimaginable. Susan Pedersen has argued that the British hesitated to ban male circumcision in Kenya because they were unsure how they would then handle the issue of Jews and Muslims living in their colonies.⁹⁶ But British comfort with male circumcision was not simply an issue of policy—it was a very intimate and personal one. Ronald Hyam has shown that by the end of the nineteenth century, circumcision had become vogue among well-to-do Britons, the very class responsible for running the empire. By the mid-1930s, about two-thirds of upper-middle-class men were circumcised.⁹⁷ This had not always been the case, though. For centuries, the British and Europeans used circumcision as a marker of paganism, savagery, and sexual deviance in Jews, Muslims, and Africans. Circumcision also played into the horrors Britons endured out on the edge of empire. In 1780, hundreds of British soldiers were taken captive after the state of Mysore soundly defeated the British East India Company. Their Muslim captors forcibly circumcised them, shocking the British public. Removing the captives’ foreskins stripped them of their Christianity and Britishness and became an emblem of national humiliation and emasculation.⁹⁸ A century later, the British inverted the humiliation of circumcision on the Indian subcontinent into a badge of masculinity and imperial robustness. Medical officials encouraged circumcision among officials in India to promote health and cleanliness as well as to legitimize their manliness and right to rule.⁹⁹

Officials in Kenya left behind no record of the status of their foreskins, but if Hyam is right, then a few provincial administrators might have been circumcised and more comfortable and sensitive to its cultural significance. Either way, provincial administrators recognized male initiation as an essential part of African masculinity. Dependent on the labor of young men and the power of elders to fuel the colonial economy and maintain law and order, male initiation became an unquestioned necessity.

“THEIR MINDS ARE NOT THEREAFTER CONCENTRATED”

Male initiation became a critical component of colonial authority akin to the reification of customary law, reliance on local chiefs, and enforcement of taxes and compulsory labor. In coalition with local elders, the British sought to exert authority over young men through the process of initiation. The provincial administration adapted male initiation to push newly made young men into the labor market and control their behavior. They manipulated and regulated coming-of-age by changing the timing and length of initiation, seclusion, and warriorship. As was the case among missionaries, the elder state’s work with African initiation practices began in small, unexpected ways. In the early years of the protectorate, medical officers performed a few circumcision procedures strictly out of concern for a male patient’s health.¹⁰⁰ In addition, officials at the Kabete Reformatory for young African offenders held “careful discussions” in 1916 about offering circumcision to inmates on a voluntary basis.¹⁰¹ Discontinued, reformatory officials later revived the program in the 1940s when too many inmates escaped for initiation.¹⁰² By 1947, announcements were made in Meru and Nyeri informing local leaders that government medical officers would offer circumcision to Gikuyu boys once a week, free of charge.¹⁰³ Only a small number of young men volunteered for these state-sponsored circumcisions. Beyond occasionally offering an alternative, medicalized form of circumcision, the colonial state had a much broader influence on male initiation.

Across the colony, British administrators entered into delicate negotiations with communities to adjust male coming-of-age to meet the necessities of settler colonialism. Their first order of business was to refashion junior warriors, made obsolete by British conquest, into wage laborers. In early 1920s Central Province, district commissioners met with Gikuyu, Meru, and Embu elders to regulate and limit but never outlaw male circumcision. In 1920, only a year after provincial commissioner Tate had consented to missionary meddling in their schoolboys’ initiations, his replacement, D. R. Crampton, ordered district officials to persuade chiefs to shorten male initiation. According to Crampton, this was to be done to steady the flow of Gikuyu labor. “One of the reasons why this change has been advocated is that the present period of convalescence of able-bodied workers, who undergo circumcision, could be done away with and a larger supply of labour be consequently available.”¹⁰⁴ The British believed young men spent too much time thinking about and participating in initiation-related events. They wanted a pool of able-bodied laborers with their minds firmly fixed on earning wages.

In Fort Hall and Nyeri, elders agreed on two major changes. They consolidated ceremonies into a single, large celebration for boys living in a location, and they shortened the length by limiting dances and the period spent in seclusion. They rejected requests from the district commissioner to limit initiation to one week, instead agreeing to one or two months. Chiefs sitting on local councils looked favorably on limiting initiation. In 1920, the Fort Hall local council noted that the long length of initiation ceremonies “hang[s] up the output of labor seriously during the three months, and they would get into trouble over it.”¹⁰⁵ A few years later, the Kiambu council claimed that “a large number of ceremonies . . . was most unsettling to labour and as things were at present a native so inclined could attend one ceremony after another to the detriment of his work.”¹⁰⁶ The year before, Governor Northey had issued his circular on the mobilization of African labor by any means necessary. Neither district commissioners nor chiefs, who were responsible for labor recruitment, wanted their efforts hampered by lengthy initiation festivities.¹⁰⁷ When a community spent months preparing for and recuperating from initiation, provincial administrators felt such energies could be put to use in more “productive” ways.

In Rift Valley Province, a similar negotiation began among colonial officials and Kipsigis and Nandi elders. Unlike Gikuyu initiation, Kipsigis and Nandi boys required several years to complete the process. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Kipsigis elders negotiated with provincial administrators to shorten the time young men spent in seclusion. According to Peristiany, the form of initiation he witnessed in the 1930s had already been shortened compared to previous generations.¹⁰⁸ Those initiated into the Chuma age-group from the late 1920s to 1947 acknowledged that their stay in the menjo had been shorter than that of previous generations. Thomas Tamutwa noted that his initiation took only six months rather than the two years his father had experienced.¹⁰⁹ The change had come from the chiefs and “the elders accepted it, and so did the people.”¹¹⁰

Both government and missions argued that these changes stabilized Kipsigis education and labor. The principal of the government school in Kabianga argued in 1945 that Kipsigis boys who left school for a year of initiation were “retarded on their return, and if leave is refused, their minds are not thereafter concentrated on their school work.” About 22 percent of initiated Kipsigis attending Kabianga School had been “medically circumcised” as opposed to “tribally initiated.”¹¹¹ Although the rate of school attendance among Kipsigis was much lower than in other communities like the Gikuyu or Luo, these 22 percent attested to the reality that more and more young men experienced a modified initiation. The Kipsigis Sawe age-class initiated during the 1950s experienced the most change to their time in the menjo. Sawe schoolboys underwent initiation during their December recess, which lasted about a month.¹¹² Those who did not attend school experienced a much longer period of initiation. Kimeli Too, John Kiptalam, and their cohort of friends in Kabianga, near Kericho, went to work on the tea estates rather than school. They spent a year in the menjo, compared to the month experienced by boys attending the government school.¹¹³ In the same location, young men could experience very different lengths of initiation depending on whether they herded livestock, picked tea leaves, or attended school.

Labor and education were not the only factors pushing Rift Valley communities to shorten their periods of initiation. The heavy presence of Kipsigis and Nandi in the military also raised concerns regarding the length of seclusion. In 1941, the district commissioner of Kapsabet alerted the provincial commissioner that the Nandi Chumo (or Juma) age-group was about to undergo initiation. He warned that uninitiated Nandi serving in the King’s African Rifles would have to be given leave so they could return home for initiation, or they would become “disgruntled.”¹¹⁴ Worse still, they would likely stay home well beyond the two weeks afforded them by the military, thereby interfering with the colony’s preparedness. “Circumcision is the most important event in the life of a Nandi,” he argued, “and it cannot simply be ignored, and is now becoming the principle [sic] thought on their minds to the exclusion of everything else.” The military rejected the commissioner’s proposal for extended leave. Those soldiers who left the service for initiation would either face charges of desertion or forfeit their time in seclusion. Soldiers struggled more than most to balance the cultural demands of household and community life with the rigors of regimented military service.¹¹⁵

Across the colony, the shift to earlier initiations of much younger boys also played a role in maintaining law and order. Ethnographers of the Gikuyu claimed, with near unanimity, that boys had been initiated in the past between the ages of fifteen and eighteen.¹¹⁶ Louis Leakey, one of the most active chroniclers of Gikuyu custom, stressed that elders told him circumcision could not take place before the age of seventeen.¹¹⁷ Over the course of colonial rule, the age of male Gikuyu initiates fell to around thirteen or fifteen, even younger in some cases.¹¹⁸ By the mid-1930s, chiefs in Central Province complained that boys faced the knife far too early.¹¹⁹ Farther west, the age at which Kipsigis boys underwent initiation also fell dramatically. Groups that came of age just after the turn of the century, such as Nyonge, were initiated at twenty to twenty-five years of age.¹²⁰ But by the time Chumo and Sawe initiates entered the menjo in the 1930s and 1950s, they were only in their mid-teens.¹²¹

When British conquest ended the reign of warriors, fathers no longer needed to wait for their sons to physically mature so that they might defend the community or raid for livestock. Colonial rule had enabled willing families to initiate their sons at an earlier age and push them into the labor market so that they might earn enough wages to pay tax, fulfill compulsory labor requirements, and add to the family income. Moreover, the British hoped that young laborers would be more pliable to employer demands. In the 1930s, H. E. Lambert, who would later write on the subject of Gikuyu social institutions, was asked by the chief native commissioner about foreseeable problems with early male circumcision. According to Lambert, late-age initiation had dangerous psychological effects on young men. The results, to Lambert’s thinking, took the “form of mental stultification, sexual aberration [as well as] imbecility and criminality.” The older the initiate, Lambert mused, the more restless and violent he became to gain access to the rights and responsibilities associated with adulthood. Earlier initiations, he argued, might prevent boys from future indiscipline.¹²²

In addition to shifting the timing of initiation and shortening seclusion to encourage young men to labor, colonial officials used initiation to discipline their behavior. Among pastoralist communities like the Kipsigis, Maasai, Nandi, and Samburu, junior and senior warriors had not dissipated as quickly as they had done among the Gikuyu or integrated as easily into the colonial police and military as the Kamba.¹²³ Warrior moran continued to meet, dance, raid for cattle, and occasionally irk district administrators. The rituals of rebellion that made moran manly and worthy of warriorship had become liabilities. Armed with a maturing understanding of the progress by which generations succeeded one another, district officials sought to turn the graduation of age-groups to their advantage. They forcibly and prematurely transitioned young moran out of warriorship and into settled lives as adults, reverse engineering rituals of rebellion into a punitive regime.

From the turn of the century until World War I, moran had worked well with the British. They grew wealthy in cattle by raiding and skirmishing with neighboring communities the colonial state had pacified. But by the 1920s, having suffered debilitating cattle epidemics, land alienation to European settlers, and forced relocations, Maasai relations with the British soured. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, burdened by fines for stock theft and pressures of forced labor orders and education, junior moran participated in a series of violent outbursts directed at the colonial state and its intermediaries. Maasai elders, fearful of further uprisings and retaliation by the colonial state, purposefully shortened the period of junior warriorhood following circumcision. They activated the initiation of new age-groups much earlier to force troublesome groups of moran out of junior status and into premature adulthood. By the late 1930s, Maasai boys were not simply circumcised at a younger age but also remained active moran for only a short time. Moreover, warriorhood became a privilege, not a right, dictated by whether young men obeyed and met the expectations of elders and district officials.¹²⁴

The provincial administration overseeing Samburu areas used similar techniques to rein in the activities of warrior Samburu. Over the course of colonial rule, an “alliance of convenience” developed between elders and administrators.¹²⁵ From the 1920s onward, district commissioners tried to prevent Samburu moran from cattle raiding and murdering neighboring Turkana warriors by imposing collective fines on livestock and confiscating weapons. In 1936, district commissioner H. B. Sharpe, frustrated by continuing raids, demanded that elders activate the initiation of a new age-group to push the current moran into early maturity. The move also sent a message to the incoming age-group that such could be their fate if they, too, disobeyed the colonial state. Sharpe’s ultimate aim: keep the number of moran low, keep them young, and keep them under constant threat of losing their right to warrior status.

According to Peristiany, colonial officials in the 1920s ended the Kipsigis ceremony by which age-groups transitioned upward because they did not want young men gathering together with weapons. While the ceremony itself was ended, the administration, in conjunction with elders, continued to initiate new age-groups to discipline young warriors. In the late 1920s, “disheartened” Kipsigis elders hastily inaugurated the new Chuma group to pass the disorderly young men of the Maina age-group into premature adulthood.¹²⁶ Elders halved what would have been a seven-year period of junior warriorship for the Maina. Nandi elders also closed the period of Maina initiation early when junior warriors became a nuisance to the district commissioner.¹²⁷

Having succeeded in experimenting with the ways boys experienced initiation, district officials and chiefs were caught off guard by unintended consequences. Once boys of tender years faced the knife, they suddenly had access to the rights and obligations of men. Even H. E. Lambert, who had argued for early initiation, warned that circumcising younger initiates might lead to an entire generation of boys claiming the privileges of adult men.¹²⁸ Early initiation produced initiates sometimes younger than thirteen claiming the right to have sex, drink alcohol, leave home in search of work, and, more terrifying still, expecting the right to marry, accumulate livestock, and own land. The provincial administration had strayed from its supposed conservative principles, reengineering African cultural life to push young men into the labor market and punish their behavior. Elders and the British began to worry that they had accelerated the very socioeconomic uncertainties they were meant to slow down.

CONCLUSION

“The spirit of manhood in the youth,” wrote Jomo Kenyatta in his ethnography of the Gikuyu, “has been almost killed by the imposition of imperialistic rule.”¹²⁹ The pacification of Kenya, the introduction of Christianity and Western education, and the recruitment of young men into the labor market had transformed how young men spent the liminal period between initiation and marriage—almost, at least. The “spirit of manhood” had not been snuffed out entirely. It simply found expression in different ways. The men who experienced the changes instigated by the elder state defiantly declared that their coming-of-age had been no different than their forefathers’.

When asked how his initiation compared to those who had come before him, Thomas Tamutwa bluntly replied: “It was the same.”¹³⁰ John Kiptalam Tesot concurred, “The teachings in the menjo remained the same,” despite the period being shortened. “We all traveled the same road,” he said.¹³¹ His friend and neighbor Daniel Langat recalled that “life was the same; there were no differences in the way our grandfathers, fathers, and we lived as young men.”¹³² Looking back to that time, many men argued that in spite of such dramatic changes, the core values of initiation remained unchanged. When pressed further to explain how elders could instill, in such young boys, the knowledge necessary to become men in such short periods of time, many admitted that elders had indeed sacrificed some aspects of initiation. Elders had abandoned certain practices such as traveling to the homesteads of kin to exchange gifts and training for military combat.¹³³

But, as many men acknowledged, just as they gave up some aspects of initiation, they also gained new ones. “It was the same” because they had also found meaning in the new possibilities opened up by the colonial encounter. They “all traveled the same road” because these new possibilities reinforced the lessons of seclusion or allowed them to continue expressing their manly mettle.¹³⁴ Those men who endured shorter initiation ceremonies to attend school argued that religious and educational instruction augmented the moral lessons of initiation. Anthony King’etich, who attended the Kabianga government school where about 22 percent of his classmates had been medically circumcised, firmly stated that “instructions in schools and churches were in tandem with what the menjo teaches, so what they don’t get in the menjo they get in schools.”¹³⁵ Schoolboys became warriors of a different class, armed with literacy and vocational skills rather than shields and spears, prepared to do battle in the labor market rather than in livestock raids. Those who faced the knife early and then left home to work for wages discovered the possibility of earning their own currency, paying their own dowry, and starting their own households—with or without the help or consent of fathers. The manipulation of initiation practices by the elder state encouraged young men to reconsider, in very familiar ways, how they earned and expressed age and gender.¹³⁶

But boys and young men also found this new terrain littered with new obstacles. The colonial encounter had introduced new actors who claimed authority over them. Chiefs, missionaries, schoolteachers, and a host of other government officials joined fathers and elder kin in an effort to control the activities and behavior of young men. In 1927, the acting governor of Kenya, Edward Deuhaur, warned that young schoolboys and migrant laborers “undoubtedly enjoy the immunity given them from tribal restraint, the opportunity afforded them of mixing with their seniors and of seeing something of town life.” Yet he also warned that young Africans found themselves ensnared in a tightly controlled disciplinary regimen: “They are surrounded by sanctions of every description from early youth.”¹³⁷

These sanctions had been the product of intense arguments begun at the very start of the colonial encounter like those between the Meru elders, Reverend Worthington, Commissioner Chamier, and the schoolboy who chose to sit in seclusion instead of school. In their effort to identify, mediate, and reify the boundaries of parental and colonial authority, the British blended the two together. The elder state, in this instance provincial administrators and chiefs, expanded and legitimized their tenuous authority by accessing the power of age they believed inherent in African communities. Manipulating male initiation became one of the first and most potent ways the elder state exerted itself—all in an effort to direct and discipline the energies of young men. Over time, young men adapted these changes to meet their own goals of proving their masculinity, enjoying their youth, and eventually earning their maturity.