  The Akan word nnoboa means ‘helping each other to work on the farm’. In the farming communities of rural Ghana, when a farmer realizes that work on the farm cannot be completed within a certain time if he did it single-handedly, he would request the assistance and support of other farmers in the community. The other farmers would readily lend a helping hand to that farmer, who would, in this way, achieve his productivity goals and do so on time. The same request would, when necessary, be made by the other farmers on different occasions. It is this kind of experience that led an Akan traditional thinker to create this proverb which, because of the word ‘life’ (obra), has been made to cover other spheres of the human life than the purely economic (or agricultural). Refusing to offer help to others and consistently seeking one's own good and disregarding the good of others will result in one's being denied the help and goodwill that may be necessary to achieve certain ends. Since you refused to help someone who needed your help or someone who was in distress, you are likely to meet the same refusal or denial when you need some help—perhaps more help at that. The morality of a shared life, as in any community, thus demands mutuality or reciprocity as a moral mandate in a world in which human beings, weak and limited in many ways, are subject to vulnerable situations. Mutual aid, then, becomes a moral obligation.