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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