Paul Ocobock. An Uncertain Age: The Politics of Manhood in Kenya. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2017. xi + 356 pp. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. $34.95. Paper. ISBN: 978-0-8214-2264-9.

Abstract

In An Uncertain Age: The Politics of Manhood in Kenya, Paul Ocobock explores how the Kenyan colonial "elder state" used age and gender to rule. He meticulously details how officials viewed colonized Africans as their juniors, in need of guidance and discipline. Through close examinations, the author 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 (18).The beginning of the text explores how the early colonial state manipulated male initiation and circumcision to create men and thus regulate labor needs. Officials enforced earlier circumcision rites in the hope of producing more obedient men at faster rates who could labor and pay taxes. In Chapter Three, Ocobock reminds us that contemporary discourses about men (and women) succumbing to urban temptations, idleness, and criminality in African cities have origins in colonial rule. Officials habitually deterred young people migrating to cities looking for work, where they "grew up ungovernable" in Nairobi because urbanity "uncoupled [them] from elder authority" (89). However, within this system of constraints and violence, we encounter many young African men in the city who found economic freedoms, camaraderie with other migrants, and the excitement of urban nightlife.In the ensuing chapters, Ocobock investigates court-ordered corporeal punishment and child detentions. It is fascinating to read that on one side, the author writes of the governor importing two different sizes of Indian rattan canes for the old and the young, and on the other, he details an administrator's apprehension that the beatings are torture and violate the state's supposed mission of moral civility (119, 129). Beating youth was meant to steer them onto a more productive path, while the state purposed jails (Approved Schools) when all other alternatives were exhausted. Throughout the text, but especially here, Ocobock's observations could have been enriched by troubling the concept of criminality in the colony. © African Studies Association, 2020 E16