An Uncertain Age: The politics of manhood in Kenya by Paul Ocobock (review)

Paul Ocobock's An Uncertain Age provides a much-needed and highly engaging investigation of youth and masculinity in Kenya that gives boys their voices and prioritizes their experiences of colonial rule, and of the Mau Mau rebellion that contested that rule. An Uncertain Age is about both boys' and colonialism's own coming of age in Kenya. It speaks to multiple literatures: histories of masculinities and gender certainly, but also histories of colonial youth and childhood, of statecraft and colonial governmentality, as well as to studies of Mau Mau, decolonization, counter-insurgency and post-conflict rehabilitation. Combining rich and extensive oral histories with archival research from across Kenya, Ocobock's engrossing and compelling monograph is about "boys and young men using the colonial encounter to enjoy their youthfulness, make themselves masculine, and eventually earn a sense of maturity" (3).

Ocobock's book develops the emerging literatures on childhood and empire, but adds an interestingly gendered perspective in its focus on boys.¹ One of Ocobock's key innovations here is the concept of the "elder state," which he uses to highlight the generational tensions and power-relations that underpinned the colonial edifice. Ocobock cogently demonstrates "that even the youngest imperial subjects, mere boys and girls, could compel the state to consider and control them. As they did, the British found age and masculinity powerful cultural tools with which they communicated their power" (6). The opening chapters outline the tensions between local and global notions of childhood and masculinity which shaped the elder state's engagement with Kenyan boys. Chapter One productively addresses the significance of initiation ceremonies in youth maturation, and highlights the impact that colonial rule had on local ethnic constructions of childhood, shifting age categories and generational relations, and leading to a "crisis of youth" that emerged by the mid-twentieth century, whilst Chapter Two analyses patterns of child migration and child labour to highlight young boys' engagement with colonial economies.

Chapters Three through Five combine to make a substantive contribution to the burgeoning literature on juvenile delinquency and empire. Chapter Three outlines the crimes and offences that brought deviant youth to the colonial state's attention in Kenya, whilst Chapter Four demonstrates how corporal punishment acted as an essential pedagogical tool of the colonial encounter, deploying violence to combat the apparently ever-growing numbers of badly behaved and deviant youth. Chapter Five focuses on postwar juvenile reform efforts, which in Kenya as across European colonies, saw local understanding of childhoods and age-relations increasingly merged with globalized ideas about penal reform and the treatment of juvenile delinquency, generating juvenile reform policies which were welfaristic in intent, if not necessarily in impact. Highlighting the contradictions inherent in colonial penality, and indeed in colonialism itself, Ocobock demonstrates how on one hand juvenile reformatories like Kabete were intended to "function as a corrective for modern influences that had caused indiscipline…[but simultaneously] encouraged now semi-skilled young men to leave their rural homes, seek out higher wages, and circumvent the authority of elder kin and the state" (146).

Chapters Six and Seven however form the core of the monograph, and provide its most original and powerful analysis: here we find Ocobock's investigation of the role of youth in the Mau Mau rebellion, and the state's attempts to recapture and reform these youths, to thereby secure the future of the colonial enterprise in Kenya. Ocobock demonstrates how, after 1945, increasing numbers of male youth were caught between childhood and adulthood. Radicalized by overcrowding on land, underemployment, tax demands and a lack of money and resources for education, they were unable to successfully reach the status of adulthood and instead came to form the vast majority of Mau Mau's forces. Existing scholarship on Mau Mau has shown how colonial officials believed it to be caused by the indiscipline of young men and the disintegration of elder authority. Ocobock develops beyond this to show what Mau Mau's youth were actually fighting for, and how the...