Of money and elders: Ritual, proliferation, and spectacle in colonial and postcolonial Kenya

This dissertation examines the social transformation of elderhood as an institution of authority in Kenya from the 1920's until the 2008 post-election violence. I argue that there is a recurring Kenyan anxiety around whether or not elders are reliable guarantors of social reproduction, and that this anxiety is rooted in Kenya's engagement with colonial legal mandates, money, grassroots contestations of authority, and more recently, institutions of neoliberal capitalism and governance. Against this general backdrop, the dissertation argues that the founding of the Central Bank of Kenya served as a baptismal moment in which a new gerontocratic modality of rule was initiated by Kenya's first president, Jomo Kenyatta. Kenyatta's goal was the(re)establishment of a notion of generalized elderhood, with he himself as its generative embodiment. This capacity was epitomized in his own image on the "heads" side of every currency note and coin. My analysis is specifically positioned against contemporary notions of sovereignty, which are rooted in the violence of exception. Kenyatta believed that the violence of Mau Mau, Kenya's anti-colonial insurgency and Kikuyu civil war, was not routinizable for the purposes of nation-building. For Kenyatta and many other Kenyans (not just Kikuyus), Mau Mau's violent rituals of recruitment (characterized by a radical expansion of "traditional" ritual symbolic repertoires and the use of violence) indicated a loss of elder control over particular forms of ritual authority and efficacy. What was sought instead was a sovereignty based on the fetishized creation and distribution of money. Thus, Kenyans have experienced state sovereignty through patrimonial redistributive rituals of state largess, which, before Cold War levels of donor aid were cut, continually ratified the president and the principle of gerontocratic authority as legitimate. The dissertation then examines the unraveling of Kenyan patrimonialism in everyday life under the rule of Kenyatta's successor, former President Daniel Arap Moi.