Children’s Moral Agency within the Kasena Community, Northern Ghana

Questions have been raised across the human sciences as to whether children’s moral development proceeds as a universal process or whether instead it varies with socio-political factors, culture, or life experiences. However, these investigations rarely countenance children as fully constituted moral agents in their own right. This paper looks at how rural African children demonstrate moral agency in their spontaneous, unstructured and undirected activities on playgrounds around their homes. Such activities take various forms, including musical and poetic recreations of intergenerational oral traditions such as sung and chanted games, folktales, folk songs and riddles. Children adapt, subvert, appropriate, and reinterpret formulae, imagery, and other aesthetic features in response to immediate social phenomena including acts of cruelty, violence, intimidation, bigotry, and coercion – thereby they traverse spectrums of right-wrong, good-bad, just-unjust. Through these moral practices children interpret, speak and act for themselves. Children’s life experiences in northern Ghana demonstrate how they create and transform moral rectitude for themselves and for their communities as a whole.