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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 June 2017
Situated in the densely populated former North Nyanza District of western Kenya, Chavakali secondary school was the site where the colonial regime, the nationalist government, and international ‘developmentalists’ attempted to dictate the nature of education and by extension the place of the rural citizenry during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s. This goal, however, was not easily achieved because ordinary Kenyans rejected the vocational-agricultural curriculum that school officials and development specialists championed as the ideal education program for rural communities. Chavakali students from Maragoliland, in particular, recognized the inherent contradiction of the Kenyan government's agriculture-as-development model continued from the colonial era – lack of land. Realizing how bankrupt the agrarian development model really was, they used their educational training to enter the wage labor sector on better terms than as simple laborers. Chavakali's nonsensical curriculum thus hardly produced the agrarian revolution that the state hoped would stabilize the countryside in the postcolony.
Funding for this research was provided by Washington University in St Louis’ Chancellor's Graduate Fellowship Program and the Mississippi State University History Department. A previous version of this article was presented at the African Studies Association Meeting. Nicholas Lagoswa and Richard Amwanyi provided valuable assistance in Kenya. Thanks to Timothy Parsons, Jean Allman, Chris Suh, and the anonymous reviewers of The Journal of African History for their close reading and thorough comments. Author's email: msaeteurn@history.msstate.edu
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