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The article argues that the primary purpose of education, both formal and nonformal, is the development of interrelated and interdependent sets of human capacity to think, to know and to act by honing social consciousness or awareness, values and skills. Investing in education is therefore viewed as investment in the development of social capital that combines with material resources and other non-material phenomena to produce goods and services, as well as a favourable spiritual environment for human sustenance and development.Education in Africa needs a fundamental paradigm change which entails, among other things, focusing on confronting, with a view to correcting and departing from, hegemonic knowledge and knowledge systems that are predicated on racist paradigms that have deliberately and otherwise distorted, and continue to distort, the reality of who Africans really are. The article visits some of the terrains most in need of this change: contestations about the roles Africans and Africa have played in human civilisation during the four main historical periods to date: Africa's leadership as the cradle of humankind or the Naissance of Humanity; Africa's leadership in all fields of knowledge and human achievements at the beginning of modern civilisation up to about the fourteenth century AD; the fifteenth century AD to the present which marks the only period in human development when Africa and Africans have been dominated and marginalised by mainly European civilisation and its global projections; and, the emerging era of the renaissance of Africa and other marginalised peoples.A model curriculum that requires supplementation by the specific characteristics of each country that adopts it is suggested as a step towards this paradigm change. This modest effort at constructing a model curriculum is informed by the understanding that all Africans and peoples of African descent need to possess some basic, shared common knowledge about Africa, the Diaspora and the world -and to acquire critical approaches to contextualised learning.

In the transformation of pre‐capitalist modes of production into the capitalist one, the superstructures have of necessity also to change. Laws, particularly in their legislative forms in societies that have developed state institutions, are vital as facilitative and protective instruments in the brutal changes required by capital (Marx, Capital Vol.1, Chaps. 26–29). This essay looks into the post‐colonial state use of legislation to establish group title registrations in Maasai rangelands, an exercise which has led to transformation of traditional common property ownership into capitalist private property ownership, albeit on group basis. This is helping to further class differentiations within the rural peasant households. State control that results from these forcible re‐organizations helps the state and international capital, that comes via the state, to penetrate into the hitherto neglected rural areas so as to direct production and expropriate the surplus produced by the peasants. So far the debate has concentrated mainly on production relations in the Central and Rift‐Valley provinces, which were dominated by expatriate settlers during the colonial period. This analysis extends the debate to other areas in Kenya's political economy. The peasant private ownership of what Njonjo calls ‘patches of land’ through the legislations that implemented the Swynnerton Plan starting in the colonial period, is politically significant in dulling the class consciousness of the peasants as an expropriated and exploited class, and who are ‘owners’ of mere subsistence plots, while at the same time being forced into wage labour as ‘workers’. The inability of the economy to generate sustainable industrialisation, and hence lack of employment opportunities leads the ‘peasants‐cum‐wage workers’ to cling more to their ‘patches’ and to demand titles for these where they have not been provided. Produce from these ‘patches’ supplements the miserable wages paid to workers, wages that are sanctioned by the state and hence limits pressure on employers to raise the wages. At the other end the institutionalised low wages make the peasants‐cum‐wage workers cling even more tenaciously to their ‘patches’. The net result at this stage in the development of capitalism and classes in Kenya is a balance between forces of peasantisation and those of proletarianisation.

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