‘Uncircumcised boys’ and ‘girl Spartans’: youth, gender and generation in colonial insurgencies and counterinsurgency, c. 1954–59

Abstract

Both male and female youth were significant actors in anti-colonial insurgencies, but their involvement has been neglected in existing historiographies due to the marginalisation of youth voices in colonial archives. This article analyses the causes of youth insurgency and colonial counterinsurgency responses in two British colonies, Kenya and Cyprus, in 1954-59, providing a gendered and relational study of youth as cohort, as liberation generation, as life stage and as kinship position. It argues that a ‘gen[d]erational’ lens is necessary to properly understand how age and gender intersected to shape boys' and girls’ experiences of youth insurgency, and how colonial states punished and tried to ‘rehabilitate’ such rebellious youths. This article argues that colonial responses to youth in insurgency were implicitly shaped by colonial understandings of gender and generation as well as by race and ethnicity, but that counterinsurgency policies failed to effectively integrate gendered and generational perspectives sufficiently into either their security, peno-legal or welfare and developmental responses. The only successful ‘rehabilitation’ programmes focused on male youth, and combined colonial and local understandings of age and gender to provided pathways towards the forms of adulthood desired by youth, rather than just treating them as unthinking, impressionable or irrecoverable children.