This article takes as its starting point a strike among African trainee literacy workers in the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast (now Ghana) in 1952. While the existing literature tends to concentrate on the tensions and contradictions in British colonial education policy, this article uses the strike to investigate how these agendas were experienced by, and engendered opposition from, literacy workers on the ground. It argues that, in their efforts to link mass literacy to community development, and to secure legitimacy for their campaigns, colonial officials depended heavily upon the authority of chiefs. This strategy backfired because it ignored both shorter term instances of chiefly venality, and the longer history of colonial taxation and labour demands which had been enforced on Northern peoples through chiefs. The African trainees went on strike because they were astute in recognising how different forms of educational provision fitted into the re-ordering of local, regional and national power relations as the Gold Coast approached Independence. (Contains 75 footnotes.)