Welcome to Achimota School Archive

This archive has been established to serve as::

  • a repository for historically valuable documents and artifacts
  • a repository that stores resources for celebrating the school’s heritage.
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Recent Submissions

  • Item type:Item,
    Educating an African Leadership: Achimota and the Teaching of African Culture in the Gold Coast
    (Indiana University Press, 2002) Coe, Cati
    Founded by the British colonial government in the Gold Coast in the 1920s, Achimota was an elite school that sig- naled the colonial government's commitment to the provi- sion of education and the concomitant belief in the role of education in managing the future of the nation. This study explores the contradictions of the school, in which "African culture" was used to substitute for anglicized activities, lessons, and entertainments within the school's dominant Western frame, "African culture" had to be transformed and reified. The school's practices were the result of interac- tion between the differing expectations of colonial officials, "traditional experts" brought in to teach customs and arts, local intelligentsia, expatriate and African teachers, and the students themselves. Achimota therefore provides a lens on the nuances and tensions within the colonial enterprise in Africa.
  • Item type:Item,
    The Politics of Educational Borrowing: Reopening the Case of Achimota in British Ghana
    (Comparative Education Review, 2000-08) Steiner‐Khamsi, Gita; Quist, Hubert O.
    Scholars in comparative education frequently cite the case of Achimota as an early example of an educational transfer in which an American model—industrial education for African Americans—was transferred to the African continent.1 Achimota College, located north of Accra, the capital of the Gold Coast (colonial Ghana), was the first British educational institution in colonial Africa to implement the Hampton-Tuskegee model of industrial education. Borrowed specifically from the Hampton Institute in Virginia and the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, this model provided industrial education for African Americans living in the racially segregated South. Upon transfer from the United States to Africa, the model was relabeled ‘‘adapted education,’’ and it was focused on agricultural and manual training of Africans. This particular educational concept for ‘‘blacks’’ and ‘‘natives’’ was heatedly debated both in the United States and in African countries. In colonial Africa, supporters of adapted education kept emphasizing the need to ‘‘adapt’’ the education of natives to their rural environment and tribal practices rather than to European urban and modern culture. In contrast, opponents pointed at the imbedded racism underlying the concept that advocated nonacademic and segregated education for Africans. For critics, adapted education was the educational pillar of the colonial order that suffered from the assumption that the education of natives had to be ‘‘adapted’’ to the limited intellectual abilities and needs of Africans.
  • Item type:Item,
    Achimota 52 - 59 Including Independence - Images
    (Achimota School, 1952) Unknown
  • Item type:Item,
    At Bortiana & River Densu
    (National archives (PRAAD), 1926)
  • Item type:Item,
    At Akuse
    (National archives (PRAAD), 1926)