By Paul Ocobock
“Provocative and meticulously researched, Ocobock’s book demonstrates the importance of age and masculinity in Kenyan history. Readers will appreciate the elegant prose and arresting detail of this rigorous narrative history. Ocobock is unquestionably a historian and writer of first rank.”
Kenda Mutongi, author of Matatu: A History of Popular Transportation in Nairobi
“In Ocobock’s work, intriguing tales about male initiation and other coming-of-age practices show how African youth and elders struggled with colonial officials, missionaries, settlers, and nationalist leaders over the meanings of manhood. His nuanced analysis enriches and expands the history of masculinities.”
Stephan F. Miescher, author of Making Men in Ghana
“In demonstrating the centrality of concerns over age and gender, Ocobock offers a brilliant means of reconceiving Kenyan history beyond the more usual focus on ethnicity. Linking the processes of growing up and state making, he deftly shows how gendered notions of maturity have shaped Kenya’s politics. This superb book will find a wide and appreciative audience.”
Philippa Levine, author of Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire
“With a sure command of the literature, Ocobock argues for the increased importance of gender and generation for historical research.…The core of the book, based on archival material and in-depth interviews, contrasts the colonial era ‘elder state’ to the contemporary postcolonial situation. Although these chapters are informative and detailed, the introductory chapter alone is worth the price of admission’…Summing up: Highly recommended.”
Choice
In twentieth-century Kenya, age and gender were powerful cultural and political forces that animated household and generational relationships. They also shaped East Africans’ contact with and influence on emergent colonial and global ideas about age and masculinity. Kenyan men and boys came of age achieving their manhood through changing rites of passage and access to new outlets such as town life, crime, anticolonial violence, and nationalism. And as they did, the colonial government appropriated masculinity and maturity as means of statecraft and control.
In An Uncertain Age, Paul Ocobock positions age and gender at the heart of everyday life and state building in Kenya. He excavates in unprecedented ways how the evolving concept of “youth” motivated and energized colonial power and the movements against it, exploring the masculinities boys and young men debated and performed as they crisscrossed the colony in search of wages or took the Mau Mau oath. Yet he also considers how British officials’ own ideas about masculinity shaped not only young African men’s ideas about manhood but the very nature of colonial rule.
An Uncertain Age joins a growing number of histories that have begun to break down monolithic male identities to push the historiographies of Kenya and empire into new territory.
Paul Ocobock is an assistant professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. More info →
Table of Contents and Introduction
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978-0-8214-2264-9
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Hardcover
978-0-8214-2263-2
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Release date: March 2017
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Release date: March 2017
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“Compellingly elucidates that Kenya as a colony was no seamless well-oiled machine, but rather a ‘crowded, cacophonous place’ of religious leaders, judges, wardens, and other authorities who all had frequently competing visions about how to shape age and manhood.”
African Studies Review
Generations Past
Youth in East African History
Edited by Andrew Burton and Hélène Charton-Bigot
Contemporary Africa is demographically characterized above all else by its youthfulness. In East Africa the median age of the population is now a striking 17.5 years, and more than 65 percent of the population is age 24 or under. This situation has attracted growing scholarly attention, resulting in an important and rapidly expanding literature on the position of youth in African societies.While
African History · Social History · Children's Studies · African Studies
Taifa
Making Nation and Race in Urban Tanzania
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Taifa is a story of African intellectual agency, but it is also an account of how nation and race emerged out of the legal, social, and economic histories in one major city, Dar es Salaam. Nation and race—both translatable as taifa in Swahili—were not simply universal ideas brought to Africa by European colonizers, as previous studies assume.
African History · Colonialism and Decolonization · African Studies · Race and Ethnicity · Eastern Africa · Tanzania
Violent Intermediaries
African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa
By Michelle R. Moyd
The askari, African soldiers recruited in the 1890s to fill the ranks of the German East African colonial army, occupy a unique space at the intersection of East African history, German colonial history, and military history.Lauded by Germans for their loyalty during the East Africa campaign of World War I, but reviled by Tanzanians for the violence they committed during the making of the colonial state between 1890 and 1918, the askari have been poorly understood as historical agents.
African History · African Studies · History · Military History · Germany · Western Europe · Europe · Africa
Making Modern Girls
A History of Girlhood, Labor, and Social Development in Colonial Lagos
By Abosede A. George
In Making Modern Girls, Abosede A. George examines the influence of African social reformers and the developmentalist colonial state on the practice and ideology of girlhood as well as its intersection with child labor in Lagos, Nigeria. It draws from gender studies, generational studies, labor history, and urban history to shed new light on the complex workings of African cities from the turn of the twentieth century through the nationalist era of the 1950s.
African History · Labor History · Women’s History · Women’s Studies · Children's Studies · Childhood · African Studies · Nigeria
