Gadament: Government, Cultural Resilience and Entangled Temporalities in Northern Kenya

This PhD project takes age and ageing as an entry point to study the multiple temporalities engendered by a myriad of social, historical, and political factors in northern Kenya. How do the temporalities imposed by the state administration impact local ways of counting and perceiving age(ing)? The thesis studies the connections of two temporalities invoked by my interlocutors: the “government age” that is included in documents, and the “Boran Age” that invokes traditional concepts of generational belonging.

By comparing the way these temporalities are used, evoked, juxtaposed and intertwined, the research explores experiences of aging and social change among Boran of northern Kenya. The changes are examined against the background of Boran consciousness and romanticization of a more traditional and “customary past”, represented by the age-grading system of hariyya connected to the generation-set system of gada. According to these “systems”, all males born in the same gada (eight-year period) belong to the same cohort or “age-set”, hariyya.

So far, most anthropological works on of the generation-set system Gada focus narrowly on collective identities and neglect the study of individual biographies. This dissertation counters this trend and highlights idiosyncratic, individual experiences across the life course by tracing the experience of being-in-a-world through different renderings of time.

Empirically, the thesis draws on Life History interviews with elderly Boran of Marsabit County, focusing on individual experiences as well as shared narratives of the ways in which life courses have unfolded against the backdrop of chronological time, social and political change. As such, the study reveals the overlapping, mutually reinforcing and at times conflicting ways in which state-related and “traditional” temporal models intersect.

The project contributes to the established field of the anthropology of the state as well as the growing and dynamic field of anthropology of ageing. The study revisits old studies of age-grading in north Eastern Africa through a case study of gada. It offers new perspectives beyond the dominant essentialization and romanticization of the system in the literature. In this regard, it charts changes as well as identifies enduring aspects of the system by juxtaposing it with state-related temporal orders.