Earning an Age: Work, Mobility, and Maturity in Western Colonial Kenya Paul Ocobock University of Notre Dame I would first like to thank Zachary Kagan Guthrie for organizing this panel and bringing us all together. And I would also like to thank our intrepid audience who braved our 8:00am, Friday time slot. This paper explores the ways young Kenyan African men earned an age by using the wages they obtained out in the migrant labor market from the 1920s until the end of WWII. These young men, some mere uninitiated boys, viewed their wages, and their experiences working far from home, as new and often necessary possibilities that had profound implications for how they viewed themselves and their relationships with their elder kin. Most of the over eighty Kenyan African men I interviewed, framed the challenges and changes they experienced out to work in terms of a growing awareness of their manhood and generational mobility. With wages in hand, young men returned home to anxious fathers who wondered where they had been and what they had brought back with them. This story reflects much of what historians of southern African like Patrick Harries, Benedict Carton, Meredith McKittrick, and Thomas McClendon have already shown. But previous work on the generational tensions that emerge from migrant wage labor often ends in conflict. Rebellious sons trying to break the yoke of burdensome elder authority, which they some times linked to colonial rule, meanwhile betrayed fathers sought to discipline disrespectful sons with the help of the colonial state. In interwar Kenya, tensions certainly simmered inside family households when emboldened sons returned from far off labor contracts. Yet, rather than intense conflict, these generational tensions often resulted in renegotiation and collaboration – sons working for fathers who in turn worked for sons. On the surface, what appeared as conflict were anxious yet fruitful negotiations about a son’s sense of manhood, his growing maturity, and future mobility. But first, I want to provide a brief background on migrant labor in Western Kenya beginning in the 1920s until the end of WWII. Decisions to leave home and work were never made alone. For Kimeli Too, a young Kipsigis living in Kabianga, near Kericho, his decision to work on the tea estates during WWII was an easy one. He recalls that after his initiation into manhood, he decided to work for a wage “because I wanted to make something of myself. Just staying idle at home when you are grown up would make you look like a fool.” His initiation had transitioned him into a man and to remain at home with nothing to do was the antithesis of maturity. In order to exhibit his newfound age and begin the process of “making something of himself,” he entered the wage labor market rather than remain home. He also did so with the expressed consent of his father, who also worked as a migrant labor on the tea estates.