ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns indigenous education in a selected area in Ghana. In the circumstances, the strands of foreign influence, which the contact of at least four centuries has woven into the indigenous fabric, are all the more difficult to detect and separate. The age-group, however, breaks up on other ceremonial occasions like the naming of a child, a funeral, or the stool-rites of the extended family. Several reasons have been given for the inadequacy of the leadership role of chiefs within the system of indirect rule by which the British chose to administer many of their African territories through the indigenous political practices. In indigenous Akan education, the whole group in its institutional relationships is the educative agent, closer than many people in Western Europe to Graham Wallas’ words—a race of unqualified teachers engaged in a joint enterprise for both old and young.
