Читать книгу An Uncertain Age - Paul Ocobock - Страница 12

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“I Wanted to Make Something of Myself”

Migration, Wage Labor, and Earning an Age

THERE WAS SIMPLY no precedent for it. In 1917, before the bench of the Mombasa resident magistrate stood ten-year-old houseboy Izaji Mamuji and his employer, Mzee bin Ali. They were at odds over a contract.¹ The case perplexed Chief Justice Robert W. Hamilton and Judge George H. Pickering of the high court. At issue was whether a child had the right to enter into and abide by a contract. Izaji worked as Mzee bin Ali’s houseboy in Mombasa, earning three shillings a month plus clothing and food. No colonial law had been written in regard to whether an African as young as ten had control over his own labor. The 1910 Master and Servants Ordinance, which laid out rules for apprenticeships, offered little assistance. A contract for domestic service was not an apprenticeship. So they turned to English common law. Drawing on a 1911 order-in-council, Hamilton and Pickering ruled that a contract could be upheld if the work benefited the boy. In Izaji’s case, they claimed it did and ruled that his contract should stand. Crown counsel disagreed. Izaji’s contract was void because the boy’s father had the right to disavow the contract. No one should tamper, counsel argued, with the power of a parent over a son’s labor. Izaji Mamuji v. Mzee bin Ali exposed the early elder state’s uncertainty as to where the authority over a young African’s labor lay. Three years before, provincial administrators along the coast had mediated the struggle between parents and missionaries, and now the judiciary grappled with tensions between parents, employers, and sons-turned-employees. Hamilton and Pickering granted a young ten-year-old boy agency over his own labor, while Crown counsel warned of the potentially destabilizing effects of weakened parental authority.

The case of Izaji Mamuji v. Mzee bin Ali lay nestled between the 1927 correspondences of labor inspectors and district officials in Western Kenya.² What was it doing there, a decade out of time and miles out of place? Officials in the western districts had dredged up the case file looking for guidance as to their role in the migration of young men out of the reserves and onto the tea, sisal, and other estates scattered across the colony. A decade might have passed, but provincial administrators and labor officials still fretted over whether boys had a right to their own labor and whether the state and parents had any say in the matter.

Despite its anxieties, the elder state worked tirelessly to push, and sometimes coerce, young African men into the wage labor market. In Western Kenya, between the 1920s and early 1950s, the recruitment of young African men to work on settler estates intensified negotiations among the young, their elders, recruiters, employers, and the state. Recruitment became one of the most common and successful means of drawing young men into the labor market. As recruiters reached into African homesteads, provincial administrators began to fear that putting young men to work far from home might weaken generational authority or awaken international outrage. Provincial administrators and their colleagues in the labor and medical departments tried to exert some control over the rush for African labor in Western Kenya, but more often than not, their actions accelerated the process. Throughout the period, the elder state did just enough to silence criticism from the metropole and muffle the concerns of parents worried about migrant sons. It created labor laws specifically for young people to define who could and could not work based on age, to curtail the abuses of the recruitment system, to inspect workplaces, and to ultimately fine the worst employers. Regardless of these regulatory efforts, the colonial state never seriously questioned young men’s decisions to work. As sons and fathers debated the merits of migrant labor, the British sided decisively with young men entering the colonial economy. As a result, the elder state swung back and forth between regulating the welfare of young laborers while pushing them into the labor market.

Young men were themselves the greatest catalyst for the migration of labor out of Western Kenya and into settler estates, agricultural industries, and towns. Age and gender figured prominently in their decisions to leave home, work for wages, and then spend their hard-earned shillings. They viewed their mobility, financial independence, knowledge, networks, and distance from elder surveillance as new ways to enjoy their youth, rethink manliness, and come of age. Their migration and work instigated intense arguments with their age-mates and elders. Sons viewed their newfound financial independence and distance from family as a chance to express their growing senses of manhood in new ways outside of kinship. This cultural deviance attracted the ire of fathers and elders who nervously contemplated a future in which younger generations had abandoned their villages and forgotten their familial responsibilities. Yet some sons did return home, often with earnings in hand, willing to contribute to the household or rely on fathers to purchase livestock on their behalf. Some boys used their time as migrant laborers to indicate their readiness for initiation and manhood. Migrant labor complicated arguments within households, but it did not always erode the significance of age-relations. Above all, it provided yet another interface for the elder state to enter into and weigh in on debates about age-relations with African communities.

“RAWEST AND MOST IGNORANT OF YOUTHS”

The principal directive of the colonial state in Kenya was to ensure the profitability of the settler economy and produce goods that nourished Britons and their empire. The British were in search of able-bodied men to fill an ever-expanding list of occupations: carpenters and clerks, policemen and postmen, house servants and field hands. To fill these posts, the colonial state levied its authority, often violently, to pull African communities out of subsistence and push them into the wage labor market. At first, most Africans resisted the lure of paltry wages, miserable working conditions, and travel far from home. But gradually, tens of thousands, most of them young men, entered the workforce. After absorbing the infrastructure of the Imperial British East Africa Company in 1895, the British forcefully exercised their authority inland. They did so in part by constructing a railway connecting the main coastal port city of Mombasa to ivory traders near the shores of Lake Victoria.³ To build the rail lines, the British imported thousands of laborers from British India and conscripted many young men from surrounding communities. Scouting ahead of the railway, the British drove columns of young African soldiers and porters on expeditions of conquest. They established forts along the future path of the railway, secured alliances with agreeable local leaders, and subjugated unenthusiastic ones.⁴

Rail lines and conquests were costly, and the British sought a way to make the territory profitable. Parts of the colony were incredibly fertile, especially along the Rift Valley. Prior to the turn of the century, communities like the Gikuyu, Kipsigis, and Maasai had used the soil to their advantage. Their herds and farms prospered. They sold their surplus foodstuffs and livestock to traveling Swahili caravans, slave traders, and eventually the colonial state. And as these communities thrived, families expanded out into the frontier, founding new households, farms, and herds.⁵ Rather than rely on the expertise of these local agriculturalists and pastoralists, as they had done in Gold Coast and other colonies, the British transformed Kenya into a settler colony. Beginning in 1902, they encouraged European and white South African émigrés to settle farms and grow cash crops. Colonial surveyors segregated the landscape, carving out the choicest portions for European settlement and then confining African communities to reserves.⁶ Settlers were then offered thousands of acres of the most fertile land near Nairobi stretching north and west into the Rift Valley. Those African families, especially the Maasai, Gikuyu, and later the Kipsigis, who had lived in areas alienated to European farmers were evicted from their homes and moved onto reserves or offered a chance to remain as squatters.

Communities unaffected by settler evictions, especially in Nyanza Province west of the Rift Valley, had little motivation to permanently enter the wage labor market. Their agricultural and pastoral pursuits remained profitable and temporary; seasonal wage labor paid taxes and supplemented incomes. British officials lamented the intransigence of would-be African laborers. In 1907, director of agriculture A. C. MacDonald complained that “the native . . . will only engage himself for a month or at most two. If the work is not to his liking he may take himself off quietly at the end of a week.”⁷ And even if an African laborer fulfilled his contract, he then “returns to the Native Reserve to spend a ten or eleven months holiday and the farmer has to take on a fresh batch of the rawest and most ignorant of youths, when ground has to be cultivated, seeds sown and crops harvested.” These “raw, ignorant youths” proved a hindrance to MacDonald’s ideas of efficient agricultural production. They came untrained, earned just enough to purchase livestock, and returned only when they ran out of money.⁸ In order to make labor more regular and permanent, officials like MacDonald believed the state had to pry open the reserves and draw out African labor with a firmer hand.

Steadily, the number of Africans working away from home grew from 5,000 in 1903 to 120,000 in 1923.⁹ Part of this change reflected several strategies the British employed to draw out labor. First, they relied on the heavy hands of local chiefs, often only recently installed themselves, to compel young men into the labor market. Eager to secure their political positions, African chiefs traveled from village to village rounding up laborers by any means necessary.¹⁰ Under pressure from chiefs, fathers often turned to their children to fulfill compulsory labor demands, which, when discovered by missionaries like Archdeacon Owen, embroiled British authorities in international scandal.¹¹

Second, British officials turned to taxation. The hut tax required married men to pay for the number of homes in their compounds. It targeted the wealth of older men who might send their young male dependents into the labor market and then use their wages to pay the tax. Officials also introduced the poll tax, targeting young, unmarried men over the age of sixteen.¹² Almost immediately, district officials struggled to determine who was sixteen years of age and eligible to pay. They examined would-be laborers for circumcision to determine whether or not they were old enough to work. The same generation of provincial administrators who pressured families to initiate their sons at a much earlier age also used male initiation to determine whether those same young sons should pay the poll tax. By the 1930s, parents and even some chiefs complained that boys faced the knife too early, ended up on the tax register, and then had to work at too tender an age.¹³

A third strategy was the continued eviction of families off their land. Before World War I, European emigrants settled on grazing lands used by the Maasai and farmland tended by Gikuyu. In the interwar years, as land seizures spread west, Kipsigis and Nandi also lost their lands to British war veterans and large agricultural firms. Many African heads of household, especially among the landless, chose to move onto European estates as squatters. Squatters spent part of their days tending a settler’s livestock, cash crops, or household. In exchange for their labor, squatters gained access to plots of land where they grew their own foodstuffs and grazed their own herds. An entire squatter family, including young sons and daughters, balanced work between their household and that of their employers. Before and during the interwar years, squatting was an attractive, profitable arrangement, so much so that poor, landless young men in the reserves sought out work as squatters.¹⁴ With their profits, they expanded herds and even hired laborers to increase production.¹⁵ In the Gikuyu reserves, some of the first to set off for European estates were landless tenants who had worked the farms of their wealthier Gikuyu neighbors. Others saw the estates as a means to escape burdensome taxation, compulsory labor, and tense familial relationships.

While many African families settled into work as squatters, others entered the wage labor market as seasonal migrants.¹⁶ After their own crops had been planted and harvested in the reserves, they traveled to settler estates and hired themselves out on temporary contracts. Rather than bring their families with them, these employees left home alone or with a few male kin and worked for a short while. Once their contracts expired, they either signed up for another or returned home. Many estates used a combination of squatter and migrant labor. During the interwar years, a growing number of settlers and large-scale agricultural industries began relying more heavily on migrant contract labor. Settler estates located near African reserves could rely on short-distance commuter labor. European farms in areas without nearby African settlements, especially the sisal industry, required workers brought from farther afield. Moreover, larger British agricultural firms had been attracted to Kenya to produce cash crops like sisal and tea. These firms purchased vast tracts of land, invested heavily to expand production, and intensified demand for larger numbers of African migrant laborers, especially during the harvest season.¹⁷

By the 1920s, African curiosity, compulsory labor drives, taxation, evictions, and a growing list of labor laws alone were not enough to meet the demands of large agricultural industries and more sure-footed settlers. In response, a fourth means of drawing young African men into the labor market reached new heights: professional and private recruitment. The networks of recruitment that developed in Central, Rift Valley, and Nyanza Provinces relied on a coalition of interests: the creative strategies of ignominious recruiters and employers as well as the emerging desire of young men to earn a wage. The elder state tried to exercise some control over recruitment and mitigate the scandal that resulted if Britons discovered young Africans were spirited away to work in sisal mills—all the while encouraging the young to leave home and work.

“SCOURING THE DISTRICTS”

Recruitment became one of the most influential techniques to draw out African labor in Kenya. From their earliest years on the coast, the British recruited laborers to work on clove plantations in Mombasa and Zanzibar.¹⁸ As the railway wound its way through Central Kenya, and forts and farms bloomed along the route, European and Asian recruiting agencies scoured Kamba and Gikuyu villages for young men. In 1908, the colonial state ordered that recruitment should be left largely to market forces—a combination of settler demand, recruiter persuasion, and African curiosity.¹⁹ Wary to be seen compelling Africans to work directly for private enterprise, British officials hoped professional recruiters would fill the void. And they did. From 1913 to 1914, an estimated 74 percent of Africans out working had been recruited.²⁰ By the end of World War I, the vast majority of young men in Machakos, Kitui, and Kiambu had engaged with a labor recruiter.²¹

Yet the British were wary of throwing open the gates of the African reserves to unregulated privateers. The Master and Servants Ordinance created the position of labor agents: individuals or firms appointed to serve as middlemen between recruiters and employers. In theory, labor agencies eased the burdens on provincial administrators by issuing recruiter permits, recording the number of men leaving the districts, and protecting the reserves from being overrun by too many privateers. For their part, district and labor officials tried to systematize recruitment by creating labor camps where recruiters had to bring laborers for inspection before sending them to employers. In reality, labor agencies often participated in recruitment and colonial officials did not cope with the sheer number of recruiters operating in and laborers traveling out of the reserves.

Nowhere were officials more inundated by recruiters and recruits or more aggravated by abusive recruitment practices than in 1920s Western Kenya. As labor demands reached new heights after World War I, all eyes turned toward the reserves of Nyanza and Rift Valley Provinces. By 1923, 75 percent of registered recruiters in the colony operated out of Nyanza Province.²² Around the same time, communities out west had become more receptive to seasonal migrant labor. Although the creation of reserves ended their ability to expand their holdings, less land had been taken from them than from their Maasai and Gikuyu neighbors. Families of Kipsigis, Luo, or Gusii had little reason to leave their reserves to become squatters on European estates. Instead, households sent out their boys and young men to work in the hopes that their income would supplement household wealth and pay taxes. Most young men went out confident they could still rely on one day inheriting their fathers’ farms and herds.

Before World War I, thousands of young recruits passed through the Kisumu labor camp. Linked by rail and road to Mombasa and Nairobi, the camp served as a base of operations for labor agents and recruiters. Young laborers were forwarded from the camp by train or lorry to employers in Kericho, the White Highlands, Nairobi, and as far as the sisal estates near the coast. Between January and March 1914, more than four thousand African men passed through the camp—this during the recruiting off-season when men usually stayed home to harvest their own crops.²³ Africans despised the Kisumu labor camp. The journey was arduous and, for a few, fatal. Many arrived at Kisumu with sleeping sickness, malaria, and other diseases. Fearful that recruiters would load the sick or dying onto cattle cars and send them out east, British officials required that all laborers undergo medical examination. Africans resented the intrusive exams, unexplained vaccinations, and detention in overcrowded conditions. Worse still, if they were declared unfit, they were expected to return home on their own. Of the four thousand men who passed through the camp in the first three months of 1914, medical officers denied work to nearly six hundred.

District and labor officials saw all this as a success. By 1919, the chief native commissioner noted that because of the system, the government registered most labor coming out of the region and outfitted them with work passes. Nyanza recruitment was a vast improvement, he argued, over practices in Coast and Central Provinces. But by the mid-1920s, the strings colonial officials pulled to control Nyanza recruitment frayed. High on their list of complaints: the rising number of underage Africans passing through the Kisumu labor camp. In March 1925, the assistant district commissioner inspected the 10:30 a.m. train out of Kisumu. On board he found “a number of uncontracted totos [children]” being forwarded to employers by the Kavirondo Labour Bureau and John Riddoch, both successful labor agents in Nyanza. At the labor camp he found a further thirty-four boys, all of whom were sent home. In July of that same year, labor inspector P. de V. Allen informed the chief native commissioner of a growing number of Nyanza boys working at railway fuel and ballast camps and on sisal estates in Thika and Fort Hall. Allen worried that they lived in squalor, earned too little to feed themselves, and might drift to towns and slip into criminality. A month later, at a labor camp along the new Thika-Nyeri rail line, the district commissioner of Fort Hall found fifteen Gusii boys, all between the ages of twelve and fifteen, working construction. To his astonishment, all of them carried proper registration and passes.²⁴

Despite these complaints, it was only when young laborers died, when parents complained, or when girls went out to work that officials scrambled to investigate and promise reforms.²⁵ In 1926, labor officials traveled to Thika to investigate the deaths of eight young employees of British East Africa Fiber and Industrial. They interviewed two twelve-year-old Gusii boys named Mugire Kyamukia and Obuya Nyarang—the only survivors. According to the boys, a fellow Gusii named Petro had recruited them back home. Inspectors knew Petro all too well. He worked for the Kavirondo Labour Bureau in Kisumu. The bureau’s labor agents, Messrs. Yates and Mackey, were notorious in Nyanza for their flagrant disregard of regulations. Mugire and Obuya admitted that they had undergone neither medical inspection nor registration before boarding the train. A month after their arrival, eight of their coworkers fell ill and died. Fortunately, Mugire and Obuya had been taken to the hospital in time. When questioned later, Mackey took responsibility for his recruiter Petro, but argued that once the boys arrived at the sisal estates, whether they lived or died was none of his affair.²⁶

FIGURE 2.1. Extracting sisal fiber, n.d. Photo courtesy of the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies Winterton Collection, Northwestern University.

FIGURE 2.2. Sisal in Kenya. A view of the interior of the Machakos sisal factory showing the brushing, grading, and baling sections, n.d. Photo courtesy of the National Archives, Kew.

The strategies of men like Mackey and Petro revealed to the British, in the starkest of terms, just how little control they had over the flow of labor out of Nyanza. Professional recruiters hired African subcontractors who knew the country, spoke local languages, and understood local custom. Many subcontractors sought out young men, often relatives, from their own villages.²⁷ When these men ran afoul of district authorities, recruiters like Mackey and Yates simply argued that their subcontractors had hired relatives; what transpired had been a voluntary family decision, not recruitment. Recruiters also let their subcontractors take the fall for breaking recruitment rules by paying fines or spending a few days in jail. Recruiters used other tactics to circumvent the authority of district officials. When medical officers rejected a batch of boys, recruiters put them on the train anyway or drove them by foot to different labor camps. In September 1928, officials discovered that recruiters eluded the Kisumu labor camp by taking boys up to North Kavirondo District, where medical officials were less stringent. Recruiters also mixed boys into larger groups with older men, in the hope that government officials might be unwilling to check each and every individual.²⁸

Officials loathed recruiters like Mackey and Yates. The commissioner of South Kavirondo described them as “ex-convicts, defaulting debtors, dipsomaniacs, or men of straw” who should not be allowed to “roam about or to live in the heart of a Native Reserve for the purposes of recruiting.”²⁹ The commissioner in Kisii complained that his town was swarming with recruiters who fought among themselves and created an unseemly spectacle that did not go unnoticed by the African community. Recruiting, he argued, opened the door to a “host of undesirables who will compete with each other for labour and [stop] at nothing to get it.”³⁰ Recruiters revealed European weakness, corrupting the image of respectable authority district officials had worked tirelessly to create.

Yet when the government had the opportunity to stop the recruitment of boys, it did very little. In 1927, the provincial commissioner of Nyanza Province visited a medical officer in Kisumu to observe the procedure for examining would-be laborers. While there, he watched three batches of boys arrive and undergo examination. The recruiters informed the commissioner that two batches would go to coffee estates in Kiambu and Fort Hall, the third to the Donyo Sabuk sisal estate in Thika. After looking over the recruits, the medical officer determined that the average age of one group was about seven. All of them were approved for work and loaded onto a waiting train.³¹ The most powerful colonial official in Western Kenya had just observed the inspection of Africans as young as seven and their transport to work hundreds of miles from home. There was no record of his outrage—only his silence—as the boys boarded the train.

Agents of the colonial 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, was further evidence of the colonial state’s exploitation of young Africans. Chief among his complaints: the ordinance permitted anyone ten years or older to enter into a labor contract. He argued that allowing children to work resulted in empty schools, villages desperate to find missing children, and estates overrun by underage drunks. Owen appealed to Britons’ own uneasy history with child labor. “Must African children go,” he wrote, “through the same mills of tragic experience, as did many in England?”⁴⁶ It was, he argued, a moral stain on Britons and their glorious empire.

That summer, two more editorials from Owen appeared in the Manchester Guardian, 109 letters from angry citizens arrived at the Colonial Office, and scores of inquiries were made by agitated ministers of Parliament.⁴⁷ On the floor of the House of Commons, secretary of state for the colonies Malcolm MacDonald faced a barrage of questions.⁴⁸ MacDonald promised a full and speedy inquiry—to be handled by officials in Kenya. In the meantime, the Colonial Office remained vague in its response to Owen’s editorials. To deny his claims or point out inaccuracies might lead to further scrutiny. Assistant undersecretary of state for the colonies J. J. Paskin warned that “we are not in a position to deny it without providing him with a handle for widening his agitation to over all the colonies in which there are similar or lower minimum ages.”⁴⁹ The Colonial Office library had recently discovered that the minimum age in Kenya was the same in Nigeria, Gold Coast, Sierra Leone, and three other territories. The age was even lower in Malaysia and British Guiana. If the press were to find out that this was a systemic problem across the empire, the Colonial Office’s woes would only escalate.

Meanwhile, the governor of Kenya, Robert Brooke-Popham, hastily assembled a committee to allay concerns back in Britain. The committee consisted of only four members, most of whom were retired colonial officials. The chair, E. B. Hosking, had served as Nandi district commissioner and chief native commissioner before retiring in 1938. Joining him were H. R. Montgomery, who had ruled the Coast as provincial commissioner until his retirement in 1936; and S. V. Cooke, the former district commissioner of Lamu, whom Montgomery had forced out years earlier. Both men were of “decided and generally opposite opinions.”⁵⁰ Once out of the service, Cooke had become a member of the Legislative Council and often spoke out for African rights. Rounding out the group was R. G. M. Calderwood, a Presbyterian missionary for the Church of Scotland Mission.

Committee members fanned out across the colony to visit agricultural estates, goldfields, factories, and other businesses. At each stop, they met with government officials, settlers, and associations representing the major industries. They also met with Archdeacon Owen. And just as he had feared, their final report tried to extinguish the flames that consumed the Colonial Office back at home. In their report, the committee acknowledged that they found African boys common fixtures of working life in the colony but not a trace of girls. They characterized boys’ working conditions as “almost without exception good.”⁵¹ They found little wrong with their work on sisal farms or cotton ginneries, though they were alarmed by a number of boys working in mines. Their only criticism came with the work of young men in towns like Nairobi, which they believed led to “consorting with undesirables” and “becoming detribalized nonentities.”⁵²

The committee reaffirmed that wage labor among young Africans was an accepted, unquestionable principle. Without compulsory education, they argued, work had its advantages. No “mill of tragic experience,” as Owen had put it, existed in Kenya. Having defended the practice of encouraging young Africans to work, the committee then tried to silence its critics with a series of proposals to amend the Employment of Servants Ordinance. Their recommendations included raising the minimum age from ten to twelve, restricting the recruitment of young Africans to private recruiters rather than professional agencies, and ending penal sanctions for underage workers.⁵³ Deftly, the committee responded to each of Owen’s main criticisms while still maintaining the necessity of underage labor.

In December, Governor Brooke-Popham announced a new draft amendment to the Employment of Servants Ordinance. The amendment required all young people to obtain an underage version of the despised kipande work pass. Employers also had to keep a register of all underage employees, and the colonial administration could cancel those contracts if inadequate working conditions were discovered.⁵⁴ Unmoved, Owen viewed the recommendations as a promising yet inadequate start.⁵⁵ Before he could launch any further critiques, the attention of the British public, the British government, and the colonies shifted dramatically to growing tensions in Europe. All eyes lay on the movement of German troops into Eastern Europe rather than the movement of young men in and out of their reserves. The outbreak of war in Africa and Europe swept the issue of colonial labor practices from the headlines and postponed passage of the amendment. Yet, throughout the 1940s, the Colonial Office continued to fret that someone might discover nothing had been done, and when the war ended, they would be engulfed in yet another scandal.

In Kenya, labor officials spent much of the war thinking about how to issue these new work passes to the young, with farcical results. In November 1939, the government approved a proposal to provide every employee under the age of sixteen a nickel wristband, which would serve as their work pass. According to the registrar of natives, A. E. T. Imbert, a boy interested in finding work would visit his district officer, from whom he would receive a registration certificate and a metal container to store it, free of charge. He would also be given a nickel wrist bracelet stamped with his registration number and the initials JUV. The district officials would fasten the bracelet together on the boy’s wrist with a sheep punch.⁵⁶

A great deal of effort went into their plan to shackle Kenya’s entire underage workforce. Officials spent time deciding whether the bracelets should be made of nickel, finished brass, or copper. Estimates had been drawn up by companies for the price of the metals and production of the boxes and the bracelets. The labor superintendent had collected one thousand wrist measurements of Luo boys to give the registrar’s office a more precise estimate of just how much metal they would need. But all this hustle and bustle came to a screeching halt in April 1940, when the Crown counsel’s office informed the registrar that the Colonial Office was likely to frown on “the permanent clamping of this kind of bracelet on the wrist of an African juvenile.” Not to mention that the new Employment of Servants Ordinance had called for a “disk” not a “bracelet.”⁵⁷ Back to the drawing board officials went, busily imagining just what a kipande disk should look like and how might they prevent children from losing them. Should they use string, leather straps, or metal chains to hang the disks around their necks? In less than two years, more than £1,000 was poured into the search for the perfect juvenile kipande. In July 1940, the chief native commissioner abruptly announced that the government’s main priority was registering the young men conscripted into the military, not their younger kin sent by lorry-load to pick tea.⁵⁸

In London, the Colonial Office waited anxiously for Kenya to amend the EWYPCO and the Employment of Servants Ordinance.⁵⁹ In September 1942, members of the Colonial Office discussed the reasons why nothing had been done. Henry Moore noted that the colony was suffering from a shortage of metal for the disks and chains to fasten them. Granville Orde-Browne, who had some experience with labor issues in East and Central Africa, argued that in Kenya there was simply not the same objection to the labor of young people as elsewhere in the empire, and, therefore, bringing the law into force lacked any urgency. But in the end, the Colonial Office decided that the approaching coffee harvest could not be disrupted and that any intervention must wait.

Back in Kenya, talk of nickel disks suspended by nickel chains from the necks of young Africans disappeared. Registrar of natives G. Wedderburn had returned from leave in 1942, irked to find waste and wild ideas consuming his department. He outright rejected the need for a separate system for young people when the state could simply use the same procedures for registering adults. In a letter to the chief native commissioner, Wedderburn outlined what the registration of young laborers should look like: Kilonza Nyamai, a boy under the age of sixteen from Kitui, goes to see his district officer accompanied by a parent or guardian. There, he obtains a registration certificate like any other African, bearing his name, tribal particulars, and fingerprints. “He then becomes KTI.1556501 Kilonza Nyamai which number he will retain for life.”⁶⁰ If a boy like Kilonza had no guardian, then the district official could stand in his kin’s stead. When he turned sixteen, he would return to the same office to exchange his certificate for the adult variety. Wedderburn’s system required no shackles or necklaces, simply the same kipande work pass that so many adults despised and burned in protest.

Without fail, when word broke that the government would begin registering all laborers under the age of sixteen, the Kenya Tea Association vigorously voiced its irritation.⁶¹ In January 1943, the association met with the labor department to dissuade it from registering the more than sixty-five hundred laborers under the age of sixteen working on its farms. The association argued that “with a large number of their European staff on Active Service [in the war], and with a shortage of material, [its members] are producing tea in quantities of more than 60% over normal pre-war production figures.”⁶² If the British wanted to maintain those incredible levels of wartime production, then they would have to abandon any attempt to register their young employees. In short, “the free flow of labor from Kavirondo [Nyanza Province], at present ample for the greatly increased production necessary for the war effort, would be greatly impeded and all but stopped.”⁶³ Tea production in Kericho would grind to a halt as thousands of youngsters trekked back home simply for a slip of paper. Worse still, the association worried that once home, parents and elders would not let the workers return again.

FIGURE 2.3. A labor inspector’s job takes him beyond the city factories and shops to places like this sisal estate with its mill, n.d. Photo courtesy of the National Archives, Kew.

Plans to register laborers under the age of sixteen died in that very meeting. “Change,” the association argued, “is naturally, abhorrent to all of us.” Yet it would have been feasible to provide lorries, fuel, and drivers to transport sixty-five hundred young laborers back home. It had been done the year before, but in the opposite direction. In 1943, over four thousand laborers, mostly under the age of sixteen, had been brought to Kericho to work. But any effort by the colonial state to bring the Employment of Servants Ordinance into effect would “have the most shattering effects on output.”⁶⁴ To justify their decision to abandon any effort to register young laborers during the war, colonial officials took the Kenya Tea Association at its word: that none of its sixty-five hundred workers were under the age of twelve and that it offered adequate provision on its estates in the form of schools, hospitals, sport, housing, and food.⁶⁵

In February, when the Colonial Office prodded the colony yet again, Governor Henry Moore firmly replied that no action would be taken. He had “received long and reasoned protest” from the Kenya Tea Association and the Sotik Settler’s Association, who had expressed sympathy for the new regulations—if only they had lived in “normal times.” To register underage laborers in the midst of the war “would completely disorganise their labour forces and seriously jeopardize their production programme.”⁶⁶ Rather than wait out yet another harvest season, the governor requested that they simply wait out the war. And so thousands of boys continued to pick pyrethrum blossoms, cure coffee beans, and sweep sisal fibers throughout the war, in conditions and for wages that had not changed since the 1920s.

OF GOATSKINS AND SHUKAS

For all the money and manpower exerted to compel the young to leave home and labor, employers ultimately had to wait until young men found something of value in it. Boys and young men did not simply choose to work; they made decisions about the kinds of work they wanted, where they would labor, and how much money made it worth their while. And from the very beginning of colonial rule, some willingly sought out wage labor as an alternative to tending a father’s livestock. By the 1920s, more and more young men were interested in doing so.⁶⁷ The decision to work outside a father’s household was never easy and never made alone. Young men discussed leaving home to work with their age-mates, elder siblings, and parents. Consider the different paths of Thomas Tamutwa and Kimeli Too, both Kipsigis men born twenty miles apart in 1932. They came to wage labor in very different ways and had very different relationships with their fathers.

A son’s decision to labor could ignite intense negotiation in a household. Thomas Tamutwa struggled to get his father to understand why he wanted to leave home. Thomas desperately wanted to go to school.⁶⁸ But his father refused. Who, he asked Thomas, would tend his livestock? As Thomas’s father knew well, the labor of sons and daughters reproduced the wealth of their fathers and enabled them to learn the skills to one day produce their own wealth.⁶⁹ Many African men who grew up during the colonial period described their boyhood, and the boyhood of their forefathers, as enriching social work among age-mates that formed the backbone of their socialization into a set of reciprocal, respectful obligations with their seniors.⁷⁰ Nearly every ethnic community in Kenya, prior to and in the earliest years of colonial rule, put their sons to work looking after livestock. A father might start his son off with a kid goat, and as the boy proved capable, he graduated to larger animals. Each morning at sunrise the boy woke up, threw his goatskin blanket over his shoulders, took porridge, and headed for the grazing fields with his father’s herd. There he met other boys, they mixed the herds, and then spent the day watching the livestock, hunting, playing games, and wrestling. If they were caught ignoring the herd by a passerby, they would be beaten. At sunset, the boys separated the herds and returned home. They took their supper and spent the evening by the fire listening to stories told by their elders and readying themselves to start again the next day.

Thomas’s father could not understand why his son did not want to enjoy the labors of childhood as he had done. Thomas pressed the issue, sneaking away to join his friends at school. “He would beat me at the mention of a school, asking me who I would leave the goats to, the cattle to. He would flog me whenever I mentioned school.” Thomas’s frustration and fear of his father’s firm hand finally got the better of him. “He beat me until I decided to run away,” he said. Thomas fled to the Kericho tea estates “to escape the constant caning.”⁷¹ Working the tea estates during World War II offered Thomas an escape from his father’s violence and obstinacy.

In the struggle between Thomas and his father, the rebellious, uncircumcised son won out. Thomas had access to a network of age-mates who had already made the decision to work, with or without their fathers’ consent. When asked why he ran away to the tea estates rather than the classroom, Thomas replied, “I went to Kericho because that is where everybody went. The whites had employment opportunities at the estates. There are my age-mates who were already there and would brag that Kericho was where the action was. My age-mates would teach me the ways of Kericho whenever they visited home.”⁷² Thomas’s decision to travel to Kericho in search of a wage embodied what district and labor officials as well as European settlers had hoped would happen. Young employees would go home and recruit their peers. Thomas ultimately made his decision to earn a wage through the intimate, everyday coercions built into childhood relationships and peer pressure, as well as the complicated relationships between fathers and sons.

After working for several months, Thomas returned home wearing a new shuka, a blanket made of red cloth with multicolored patterns worn by the Maasai, and carrying six shillings in savings. His father was overjoyed to see him, and even more impressed by the money the boy handed him. “He loved me a lot for that. Even my mother! I had my shuka on and gave them six shillings.”⁷³ With the money, Thomas’s father bought him a goat and sheep. Many men from Kipsigis and Luo families recall that their fathers bought livestock for them with the savings they brought back—down payments on bridewealth and a household of their own some day.⁷⁴ Young men found that if they returned home, their wages often fundamentally changed their relationships with their parents.

As parents saw the benefits of a wage-earning son, they eventually came around to the idea of their sons working far from home.⁷⁵ Before Thomas set out to start another contract, his parents took him aside and asked him “to work and not squander money, but to save and bring more.”⁷⁶ Well into the 1940s, a father’s household remained for many a primary investment in the future. Many young men also saw their wages as part of a familial responsibility and an investment in their own futures. A father still worked for his son, accumulating wealth in livestock and increasing currency that would one day provide the young man with a wife, land, and a future. Sons also now worked for themselves, playing a more active role in their own financial destinies. Savings symbolized hard work, discipline, and masculinity. How a young man spent his wages could showcase his growing maturity.⁷⁷

And as the crucible of work made young men feel more mature, they developed confidence in their skills and an awareness of just how valuable they were to the colonial and household economies. They left employers in search of greener pastures. They moved up into more skilled, more highly paid positions, and a new, younger generation of boys replaced them herding a rancher’s livestock, picking tea leaves, or sweeping sisal factory floors. Thomas Tamutwa recalls that he worked on the tea estates for three years, and in 1946 he left for Molo, where he worked as a herdsboy, which brought the added benefit of having milk at meals. “I felt I was old enough to venture further, so I sought work in Molo for I would drink milk,” and he would earn ten shillings a month, ten times his previous wage.⁷⁸

For his industriousness, Thomas was rewarded with the greatest of gifts—his initiation into manhood. In 1947, at the age of fifteen, Thomas was initiated into the Chuma age-group, the last group of young boys to do so. He faced the knife far earlier than some of his age-mates. Thomas’s initiation was an acknowledgment by a once-resistant father that wage labor had made his boy a man. Within a generation, age-relations could integrate, though not always smoothly, the new possibilities of colonial rule. Yet some youthful rebellion was required first. If it had ended there, then Thomas might never have faced the circumcision knife at home, left to labor as a wayward, uninitiated boy. But the return of the prodigal son to his father’s homestead showed respect and obedience as well as the value of his labor—traits worthy of manhood.

Kimeli Too, born the same year as Thomas but initiated a year or two later, tells a different story of how he came to leave home. From the very beginning, his decision to work was an easy one, made in concert with his father. Kimeli began working at the Bureti Tea Estate as a farmhand in 1948, shortly after his initiation and seclusion that admitted him into the Sawe age-group. He earned six shillings a month, about average for a man his age in the tea industry at the time. Working for Bureti made practical sense: the estate was a short commute from home, and his father also worked there. Kimeli’s decision was affected by the same choice his father had made years earlier. Kimeli’s father made his livelihood as a migrant wage laborer. He was likely among the first or second generation of Kipsigis to leave home to work on the tea estates. Kimeli recalls that his father lived on the estate for twenty-five years. “He would come home over the weekends for family visit. At times he would make impromptu visits during weekdays and then rush back the following day early in the morning.”⁷⁹ His father’s decision had paved the way for his son to do the same as an acceptable alternative to tending livestock at home. Kimeli could not say whether his father had struggled with his grandfather over the decision, but it is clear that his father’s choice to earn a wage had made it an acceptable possibility for Kimeli.

Kimeli’s decision to join his father at Bureti Tea also coincided with his initiation. Kimeli decided to work “because I wanted to make something of myself. Just staying idle at home when you are grown up would make you look like a fool.”⁸⁰ His initiation had transitioned him into a “grownup,” and wage labor became a way to actualize his newfound maturity and masculinity. Unlike Thomas, who saw his labor as the reason to become a man, Kimeli saw it as a fulfillment of his maturity. He then proved it every month when he brought the five shillings he had earned to his father. “I would keep my earnings and bring it to my father. Once the savings were enough, my father would buy cattle.” In the Too family, migrant labor had become the norm rather than a mark of cultural delinquency. Kimeli need not argue with his father over the value of hard work and a wage. And his father believed that Kimeli, recently initiated into manhood, would have the discipline to bring home part of his wages. Kimeli had nothing to prove; his father had nothing to fear. Yet, as a result, Kimeli was initiated a year or more after Thomas Tamutwa. The young man who had followed the rules and obeyed his father faced the knife long after the wayward son. Despite these differences, both Thomas and Kimeli had not strayed too far beyond the behavior their elders expected of them.

Not all young men returned home, however. Some stayed out on the estates, moving from contract to contract. Out on the migrant labor circuit, a young man could lose track of time and ultimately a sense of where he had come from. Among former young Luo migrants, stories abound of boys escaping the estates only to get lost on the way home, eaten by wild animals, or, worse, captured and assimilated by the Kipsigis or Maasai. Those who had to sojourn the farthest to find work carried fear-filled memories that they had traveled so far they might lose their sense of kinship in the process of trying to become mature men. Parents worried too. When a son did return home, the boy was not so subtly warned that if he went out again, he was expected to come back. Thomas remembers that his parents made it clear they expected future installments of capital. “They would ask me for money, but I also felt it was my obligation to provide for them. How could I earn and visit home empty-handed? My father wouldn’t have liked it.”⁸¹ And if he happened to squander his wage and return home with nothing, he would be beaten.

Some of the first young men to leave home to attend school, join a Christian mission, work for a wage, or travel to towns tried to alleviate their elders’ concerns. In 1928, the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA), a political organization of young Gikuyu elites like Jomo Kenyatta, began a vernacular journal called Mwigwithania, meaning “one who makes people listen (and agree) together” or “the reconciler.”⁸² Many of is members, like Kenyatta, had been the culturally dissident youths of their generation. In the journal, KCA members discussed the news, translated biblical passages, and shared Gikuyu proverbs. One of the most common parables shared in Mwigwithania was that of the prodigal son, who left his father, squandered his inheritance, and returned seeking forgiveness.⁸³ Throughout the journal, KCA readers encouraged their young prodigal audience to go home or at least remember their responsibilities to their elders. Yet the Old Testament story is also known as the parable of the two sons. While the younger son enjoyed his youth, the elder son remained at home, obedient and disciplined. And while he had not lost his inheritance, he bristled at the notion that his father had never celebrated his respect for elder authority as he had celebrated his brother’s return. Perhaps Mwigwithania’s authors and readers in fact pitied the thankless life of the herdsboy who stayed home, ever toiling beneath the watchful eye of his family, inexperienced in the youthful adventures beyond the village.

Migrant work was for many a thrilling adventure. Young men did all kinds of work during the colonial period: herding cattle on the Delamere ranch, picking tea leaves for the Brooke Bond Tea Company, sweeping the manufacturing floor at Ziwani Sugar, and digging for gold at Bwemba Gold Mines across the border in Tanganyika. It was typically unskilled work, or at least work for which young men had the requisite skills. A boy’s first job often mirrored the kinds of tasks that he had done for his father or that suited his physical attributes. Young Kipsigis or Nandi boys found work herding livestock and milking dairy cattle because these duties fell within the skill sets they had learned at home. Likewise, European settlers actively recruited them to pick tea and pyrethrum because their height and “nimble fingers” made them efficient harvesters.⁸⁴

However, employers also de-skilled complicated production processes, just as they had done in Britain, so that younger workers could complete smaller, simpler tasks. Uncoupling skill from labor, employers could hire young people, whom they paid much less than adults, and reduce their production costs.⁸⁵ The sisal industries, major recruiters in Western Kenya, routinely de-skilled the manufacturing process of sisal fiber so they could hire the young. At Taveta Sisal and Teita Concessions, young laborers harvested sisal leaves on the farm and brought them into the factory. Adults ran the sisal through a decorticator machine to separate the fiber and the flesh, known as tow. The young then transported the fiber outside to dry and swept the machine and floor to pick up any small leftover pieces.⁸⁶

Many African men look back fondly at the work they did growing up. Those who left home and found work on European estates remember the monotonous grind of getting up each morning, preparing a breakfast of porridge, reporting to work, taking a break for lunch, heading back to work again, and then retiring for dinner—only to do it all over again the next day.⁸⁷ “At the beginning,” Thomas Tamutwa recalls, “it was hard work, but once you were used to it, it was quite easy.”⁸⁸ Once they disciplined their minds and bodies to the pace, it became easier to focus on other things like their social lives. In the evenings tea pickers would play games with one another or tell stories around the fire. Herdsboys stepped away from grazing cattle to fit in a little high-jumping and wrestling.⁸⁹ Migrant labor became as much a social affair as it had been back home, as well as an important part in forming relationships among age-mates and reimagining masculinity.