9 - Leader and Leadership Development

Summary

We do not have any rights over our planet, simply the obligation to respect, preserve and protect it.

—A Native American philosophy of life

Chapter 9 is an opportunity for the authors to reflect on the major themes from the research, especially that of leadership, and their personal leadership experiences. This chapter further makes a few suggestions on how to improve leadership by focusing on leader development in African countries. The chapter brings to the fore leadership challenges that the researchers have encountered as well as their futuristic approach to handling those issues.

A call for a reengagement with indigenous leadership knowledge, values, and practices is becoming increasingly loud in most of the literature on leader development, especially for African leaders (Bennet et al. 2003; Bolden and Kirk 2009). From their concern for sub-Saharan African leadership, Bolden and Kirk (2009, 71–72) posit that existing leadership and leader development studies, although suggesting that there is an inclination for “cultural preferences within these regions, […] offer little insight into how people come to conceive of, and take up, a leadership role, or the impacts of this on society.” Moreover, those studies are not calling for an African renaissance but rather a rediscovery and a hybrid style of leadership that is Afrocentric and that integrates “African ‘indigenous knowledge’ with its emphasis on solidarity and interdependence” (Bolden and Kirk 2009, 74).

When asked if he had received any special training for leadership, Martin Luther King replied, “No, I really didn’t, I had no idea that I would be catapulted into a position of leadership in the civil rights struggle in the United States. I went through the discipline of early elementary school education and then high school, and college and theological training but never did I realize that I would be in a situation where I would be a leader in what is now known as the civil rights struggle of the United States.” (BBC 1961)

Most researchers raise deep and critical questions regarding strategies to be employed in the process of rediscovering, recapturing, reengaging with, and conveying on a global platform this concept of authentic Afrocentric leadership knowledge and practices. To this end, the authors add the questions of brain drain, given the high rate of educated sub-Saharan Africans who emigrate and those of the younger generation who study abroad.