‘Beach-Boy Elders’ and ‘Young Big-Men’: Subverting the Temporalities of Ageing in Kenya's Ethno-Erotic Economies

ABSTRACT

In the 1980s, Samburu men from northern Kenya began migrating to coastal tourist resorts to sell souvenirs and perform traditional dances for European tourists. Many of them engaged in transactional sex or marriages with European women attracted to the image of the exotic African young male warrior. Through relationships with European women, some Samburu men managed to rapidly accumulate wealth, becoming so-called ‘young big-men’. As a way to transform their wealth into more durable forms of respectability, these men used their money to marry local women and speed up their ritual initiation into elderhood. Meanwhile, there also emerged the figure of ‘beach-boy elders’, men who aged before accumulating sufficient wealth. They returned to coastal tourist resorts, dressed as young warriors, and waited to find European partners. In the article, I argue that beach-boy elders and young big-men produce queer moments in the temporalities of ageing, in that they subvert normative expectations of ageing at the very same time that they seek to produce them.

KEYWORDS:

• Age
• temporality
• sexuality
• Samburu
• Kenyan tourism

Acknowledgements

I thank Robin Bernstein, Jean Comaroff, John Comaroff, Jennifer Cole, Janet Hoskins, Kathryn McHarry, Nancy Munn, Francesca Merlan, François Richard, Rupert Stasch, and the participants in the African Studies Workshop at University of Chicago and the Harvard Africa Workshop for their comments on earlier presentations of the material in this article.

Funding

I acknowledge grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [#752-2009-0092] and the Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture, Quebec, Canada [#135285] that enabled me to carry out research in Kenya and write up this material.

Notes

1. Throughout this article, I use the abbreviations “M.” and “S.” to mark words and phrases in Maa and Swahili, respectively. Many young Samburu men and women use both languages alternately or in combination, in various contexts.

2. Similar instances of accelerated ageing existed in other parts of Kenya throughout the twentieth century. Among the Maa-speaking Chamus of Lake Baringo, since the 1900s, age set climbers were young boys who, as a way of claiming rights in property, sought circumcision into moranhood long after the moran age set had been ritually closed (Spencer 1997: 181–189). Similarly, during colonialism, Kikuyu rich men in central Kenya paid an “ox of climbing” to become senior elders and gain political power (Lonsdale 1992: 345).

3. The age practices of young big-men also affected women's ageing and life course. A woman once complained to me that her husband had pulled their daughter out of high school in order to marry her to a young big-man. Despite the mother's protests that her daughter did not finish her education, the suitor had managed to gain the support of the wives of his soon-to-be affinal clan. These women persuaded the mother that this was a unique opportunity for her daughter to live a life of comfort that schooling no longer guaranteed. While some women desired marriages to young big-men, others considered these marriages unstable and undesirable.