Joy rides for juveniles’: vagrant youth and colonial control in Nairobi, Kenya, 1901–52

Abstract

In 1901, the Sub-Commissioner of Nairobi, J. D. Ainsworth, rounded-up twenty juvenile vagrants whom he ‘found wandering about Nairobi […] without parents or any proper home’. 1 In a perverse way, it was a matriculation of sorts for Nairobi at the time barely boasting 8000 residents.2 The burgeoning town rather prematurely joined urban centres such as Paris, Amsterdam and London, each with their own mechanisms for managing their domestic vagrants. The British, on which the majority of vagrancy literature has been written, repatriated vagrants to the countryside as well as institutionalizing them in workhouses, prisons and, for younger offenders, industrial schools.3 The French, too, were concerned with the idleness of vagrants. In 1816, the Treasurer Secretary of the Bureau of Charity in Paris argued that vagrants purposefully eluded authority and their idleness and vice always required punishment.4 By the late 1800s, French authorities had arrested over 400,000 vagabonds