Abstract

In African communities, the spiritual connections to the land and the Indigenous wisdom used to nurture it have been subjugated by Western development and the Eurocentric knowledge that buttress it. Spiritual ecology refers to the intersection between religion, spirituality, and environment. The Indigenous frameworks which inform the daily life of communities as they interact with their environments have largely been replaced by Western scientific discourses which frame the individual as the primary social unit and which commodify the environment for consumption. This chapter examines how it may be possible to re-imagine the community in relationship with its environments, especially as it pertains to land tenure in African contexts. In this process, community participation is a necessity and cannot be a sort of superficial bandage solution but must involve the interrogation of the larger structures and discourses that underpin development and land tenure among the Keiyo community in Kenya. The chapter explores what this commodification means for African education and how a critical pedagogy based on Indigenous knowledges might be used to resist and disrupt Western educational discourses and thus decolonize the land tenure system in Africa.