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