Efforts continue to calculate the costs and benefits of colonialism in Africa, so that past and present wrongs can be righted by quantities of "aid" or "reparations". The article argues instead for a diffirent approach based on analysis of colonialism's effects on class structures. Class is defined in Marxian terms as a set of economic processes, namely the production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus. Taking the cases of Kenya and Britain as examples, the author argues that both colonized and colonizing countries display interdependent mixtures of exploitative and nonexploitative class structures in their pasts and in the present. He calls for more research on the class structures of African societies before, during, and after colonialism and for considering class changes now as a policy priority.
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