The title for Paul Ocobock's ambitious, compelling book is arguably somewhat misleading. Better names for the work may have been Forging an Elder State, or even better Seeing Like an Elder State. An Uncertain Age is certainly passionately concerned with the vicissitudes of youth, as well as the dynamic tensions shaping traditional and emergent constructions of manhood in colonial and postcolonial Kenya. Beyond completing exhaustive archival research, Ocobock went to considerable lengths to conduct interviews with local men who shared recollections of their evasions or transformative involvements with vital forces, fields, and figures of British colonial power. These sets of interview data cast sharp light on the uneven reach and contradictions of all of the most aggressive branches of imperial power: legal-administrative, judicial, disciplinary, economic, and educational. Ocobock's critical reflections on the values and limitations of his collaborative oral-historical work are thoughtful and poignant. He accurately observes that ‘listening to [these] voices allows us to see past the theatricality of the elder state and its archives’ (24).

In final assessment, however, the most vital, recurrent concern of An Uncertain Age is not an exhaustive portrayal of the complexity of twentieth-century Kenyan youth experience. The project's main objective is rather to build a precise, multi-layered narrative of the complicated emergence, potency, and contradictions of ‘the elder state’. This distinctive state was made and refined over decades by a vast spectrum of British figures who struggled to forge or repair what they saw as ideal regional forms of youth development and intergenerational relations. ‘In Kenya’, Ocobock states in the first chapter examining the birth of the elder state in the 1920s and 1930s, ‘colonial officials saw something of what they had lost back in Britain: the comforts of pastoral hearth and home and the social contexts of patriarchs and older kin. They also worried that they had brought with them those same destabilizing forces that had driven British families to cities, broken them apart, and then released uncontrolled, undisciplined young men and women back into the streets.’ In the hopes of countering the social and moral ‘unravelling’ of rural communities that could result from the intensifying development of a settler colony, these same officials ‘seized on local institutions, like male initiation, which they imagined to have been imbued with unquestioned elder patriarchal power’ (37–8).

By the end of the 1930s, most colonial officials knew that these feared processes of destabilization, urbanization, economic disorder, and youthful rebellion were all on the dramatic rise throughout Kenyan provinces, towns, and cities, foremost Nairobi. Each chapter of An Uncertain Age pursues a finely-textured case study of one or more dramatic initiatives undertaken by the state to exercise the moral-disciplinary authority over individual and collective youth development that contemporary Kenyan adults and communities could no longer manage to impose. The series of case studies that composes the bulk of An Uncertain Age make for compelling and often distressing reading. The workings of the elder state as a vast, often anxious, and vindictive engine of youth surveillance and disciplinary intervention became both more dynamic and more disturbing over the duration of British rule.

The 1950s marked the peak of this state's authoritarianism, as well as its idealistic zeal and brutality. Chapter Four investigates a massive expansion in caning across the colony in this decade. The increasingly commonplace use of Indian-made rattan canes ordered by the colonial governor to precise specifications ‘linked an ever-expanding network of African and non-African adult actors and institutions wielding violence in competing yet complementary ways, all in an effort to exert authority over young men’ (116). It comes as little surprise that the Mau Mau rebellion figures very centrally in Ocobock's study of the late-colonial period. Nonetheless, the chapter devoted to Mau Mau's youthful sources and intensity, as well as the following one examining the pedagogical reform strategies and institutions that grew directly from the counterinsurgency, make for fascinating reading, at once illuminating and troubling. With the exceptionally perceptive, multi-layered study, coupled with photographs of the design, intentions, and social-educational regimens of the Youth Camp built at the remote site of Wamumu — a new institution through which British officials sought to create a cohort of Kenyan youth whose upright character and professional skills would spell the eternal defeat of Mau Mau — Ocobock's impressive work reaches its dramatic climax.

The final chapters examine the ongoing potency of the elder state — both as disciplinary-developmentalist ideal and an ensemble of political-pedagogical practices — across the post-independence regime of Jomo Kenyatta and even into the present century. Ocobock's passion for Kenyan studies is evident across every page of An Uncertain Age. That being said, his succinct, illuminating comparative engagements with new imaginings and attempted reconstructions of youth as they unfolded elsewhere — in twentieth-century England and other metropolitan nations and peripheries of empire — make the importance of the book resonate clearly beyond East African Studies.