Leadership in Colonial Africa

Disruption of Traditional Frameworks and Patterns

B. Jallow, B. Jallow

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137478092
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business internazionale
• Index: Business

Taken together, the chapters in this book represent a tapestry of leadership frameworks and cultures in colonial Africa. Scholars across disciplines explore the nature and evolution of leadership born of the colonial encounter between white colonialists and native Africans as well as the leadership that ultimately led to independence.Leadership in Colonial Africa highlights colonial disruptions of traditional leadership patterns in Africa and how African leaders, traditional and nationalist, reacted to these disruptions. Jallow examines the emergence of modern leadership cultures in Africa and argues that leadership studies theory may usefully be deployed in the study of African leadership

Chapter 1

The Case for African Leadership Studies and Leadership in Colonial Africa: An Introduction

Baba G. Jallow

The Case for African Leadership Studies

Studies on African leadership are largely absent from the rapidly growing field of leadership studies. Yet, no other continent faces the magnitude of leadership crisis Africa faces. This volume and the series of which it is a part seek to encourage the process of bringing Africa into the field of leadership studies and encouraging a broader understanding and more systematic study of leadership issues and concepts in Africa. One key objective is to raise questions over how we might theorize African leadership. What new theories or concepts of leadership might an Africa-centered approach contribute to the field? How might contemporary theories of leadership studies—organizational, situational, contingency, transformational, transactional, constructionist, and servant among other approaches—be applied to the study of African leadership? How might organizational theory be used to understand and reframe (Bolman and Deal 2003) the chronic systemic dysfunction plaguing the continent? What are the linkages between, especially, the failure of leadership and the failure of development in Africa?

African leadership studies has no shortage of questions to grapple with: Why do corrupt and tyrannical rulers win election after election in Africa? Why do Africans generally not protest at rulers who oppress them and stay in power for as long as they can?¹ Why do African rulers continue to be celebrated and supported by millions of people who cannot afford to have three square meals a day, who do not enjoy adequate healthcare, and whose children drop out of school for lack of money to pay fees? How could a new nation-state like South Sudan be embroiled in deadly civil conflict so soon after independence? While scholars who study African leadership and governance crises rightfully expose the venal, tyrannical, and unethical nature of African rulership and show how African rulers have succeeded in reducing their countries and their peoples into the ultimate paupers of the global community, they seem to focus more on assessing the failure of democratic experiments rather than the failure of leadership itself. Some scholars decontextualize African leadership and developmental crises by attributing them to the mistaken and untested assumption that Western theories and styles of leadership are not appropriate for African and other non-Western cultures. It is my contention that the problem lies not with the Western theories or styles of leadership per se, but with the nature of African leadership and the cultural context from which it emerges, within which it is embedded, and within which it is exercised. Africa’s developmental failures reflect first and foremost a failure of leadership. And the theoretical exceptionalism that theories of leadership studies are not suitable tools of analysis for African leadership should be rejected in favor of experimentation.

One may be forgiven for observing that the vast literature of leadership studies reads as if leadership cultures exist only in the West. Their preoccupation with their immediate environments and audiences obscures the presence of other environments and audiences equally invested in solving leadership problems in their communities. Organizations and managers are studied as if they only exist in Western societies, and remedies are suggested that are specifically designed to solve problems in Western organizational cultures. The “we” we encounter in so many works on leadership studies often refers to “we” Westerners, not we human beings. San Diego’s Bob Donmoyer speaks of a certain culture of “regionalism” in leadership studies that urgently needs to be addressed.² Not only is there a need for African leadership studies, Asian leadership studies, Latin American leadership studies, and Middle Eastern leadership, but scholars of Western leadership studies may find much that is useful in looking at other organizational and leadership cultures beyond their immediate spatial and academic environments.

The point is that as valid generalizations on human nature, theories of organizational and cultural leadership apply to their subjects regardless of spatial or temporal differences. Once created, knowledge becomes a universal artifact that recognizes no cognitive boundaries. Organizational culture and leadership theory lends itself particularly well to the study of leadership failure in Africa. Edgar Schein’s (2010) insights help us visualize the African nation-state as an organizational “macroculture” within which many levels of organizational “microcultures” exist. Schein suggests that understanding the “shared assumptions” of group members is a key to resolving intraorganizational conflict and maintains that “leadership and culture are two sides of the same coin” (2010, 3), both insights useful to an understanding of African leadership cultures. Culture “is ultimately created . . . by leaders” (Schein 2010, 3). The cultures of material poverty and political intolerance in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe or Jammeh’s Gambia were created and nurtured by these leaders. They are no mere accidents of history. The saying that people get the leadership they deserve may perhaps more usefully be rendered people’s leadership determines the nature of the culture they get. Leadership as a process cannot be divorced from its cultural context.

Bolman and Deal speak of leaders as often incarcerated in a “psychic prison” that prevents them “from seeing old problems in a new light or finding more promising ways to work on perennial challenges” (2003, 7). This is particularly true of postcolonial African leaders. Determined to hang on to power at any cost, many independent African leaders, from behind the bars of their psychic prisons, commit unspeakable crimes against their fellow humans. Bolman and Deal’s concept of psychic prison might help us understand just why they commit these crimes, often in broad daylight, in front of everyone, and with a nonchalant attitude. African leaders of the postcolonial era often wield a “vision” in one hand and a club in the other. It is follow my vision or shut up. They are the subject of this book’s companion volume, Leadership in Post-Colonial Africa.

That Western theories of leadership studies can be applied to African situations is demonstrated in this volume by Chris Saunders, a historian of Africa, who uses transformational and transactional leadership theory (Burns 1978; Rotberg 2012) in his comparative study of the leadership styles and cultures of Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, and Jacob Zuma. He characterizes Mandela as a transformational leader, and Zuma as a transactional leader. Nyasha GuramatunhuCooper, a product of Gonzaga University’s doctoral program in leadership studies, applies theories of charismatic and revolutionary leadership to the study of the two leaders of Zimbabwe’s liberation movement, Robert Mugabe and Josiah Tongogara (this volume). She further translates these two concepts into Bolman and Deal’s (2006) notions of the “wizard” and the “warrior” through which she assesses the leadership styles and cultures of Mugabe and Tongogara. In essence, many sorts of Western leadership studies theory may usefully be appropriated for the study of African leadership.

Adding to this theoretical exceptionalism is an equally mistaken and very damaging political exceptionalism, namely that democracy, human rights, and the rule of law were not suitable for African conditions. Even as harsh a critic of Africa’s irresponsible and brutal leadership as David Lamb (1983) could write that “at this stage most African countries are best served by benign dictators. Democracy can come later, if it is to come at all.” As a widely held belief in Western circles, this political exceptionalism represents a damaging mindset that helps perpetuate bad leadership in Africa. For hearing it come from the West itself, Africa’s postcolonial rulers loudly repeated it at home and used it to justify brutal regimes of repression and dubious “indigenous” philosophies of authenticity. Kwame Nkrumah, a leader of Sub-Saharan Africa’s first independent nation, proclaimed a philosophy of Nkrumahism to prevent “the evil influences of western capitalist political cultures” from spreading in Ghana. In former Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo), Mobutu Sese Seko, head of Africa’s most kleptocratic regime, proclaimed and imposed a national philosophy of “authenticity” to protect his people from the evil influences of Western political cultures. Western economic cultures, however, were quite another thing. Mobutu owned and frequently and lavishly wined and dined in majestic Western chateaux. He is in good company.

Chris Saunders (this volume) has written that after independence: “The new governments, challenged by critics, sought to bolster their legitimacy by drawing upon a new ‘patriotic’ style of history writing, in which the (liberation) struggle was seen as leading to a great triumph, achieved by the liberation movement on its own.” Specifically used to describe the actions of former guerrilla nationalist leaders who had become presidents, Saunders’ “patriotic” style of history writing is as much popular with military as it is with civilian rulers. In fact, the most outstanding experts in patriotic history writing were civilians. In Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, a former “freedom-loving” nationalist leader, used the Preventive Detention Act of 1958 to eliminate any Ghanaian who dared suggest other forms of history writing.

Despite all protestations and assumptions to the contrary, as organizational macroculture the African nation-state system is unequivocally Western in origin and character. Brought in through the process of colonization, the African nation-state system bears all the trappings of the Western nation-state system: it has executive branches of government, legislatures, judiciaries, flags, and constitutions modeled on its Western counterparts; its rights and responsibilities of citizenship and electoral processes are derived from and based on Western models; it has its own national flags, national anthems, and national days, just like the Western nation-state. African leaders are called presidents and prime ministers just like their Western counterparts. And Africans are just as human as Westerners.³ How and why then could the cultures of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law that underpin the Western nation-state system be unsuited to the African nation-state system? The answer, of course, is that they are not. African societies are merely suffering from a particularly bad case of chronic bad leadership.

African leadership studies is aware of the important need to recognize and accommodate cultural idiosyncrasies. No theory or model of Western government may be applied wholesale anywhere, not least in non-Western cultures. But while the culture of democracy, for instance, need to be attuned to local customary sensibilities, it may nevertheless be substantially nurtured regardless of cultural location. This is because democracy, in its ideal form, is kind human behavior welcome in any human society. A democratic spirit would respect all legitimate differences and, therefore, the rights of others to hold contrary political opinions. This spirit is as good for Western societies as it is for African societies. So much, therefore, for the unsuitability of Western leadership studies theory or democracy, human rights, and the rule of law for non-Western cultures.

That said, first experiments in African leadership studies like this project should not be expected to draw too much on leadership studies theory. Few of the contributors to this volume are leadership studies scholars. Most are historians, political scientists, theologians, etc. who have an interest in leadership studies and in the study of African leadership. Their works at this early stage in the growth of the field of African leadership studies therefore often lack an infusion of leadership studies theory. Our expectation is that more and more Africanists interested in the study of African leadership will increasingly familiarize themselves with the leadership studies literature and employ leadership studies theory in their works. It is comforting to note in this regard that some of the greatest leadership studies scholars did not study leadership in graduate school. Many, like James Macgregor Burns, were historians, political scientists, psychologists and sociologists drawn to the field by its multi-disciplinary nature.

Leadership in Colonial Africa

There is no doubt that the African nation-state was born under inauspicious circumstances and faced formidable obstacles to its proper development from the very beginning. Merely a shadow of the fully grown Western nation-state system that gave birth to it, the African nation-state had to contend not only with the cruel legacy of colonialism but also with the unfeeling and alarmingly callous dictates of the global politics of ideological containment that characterized the cold war era. It had to contend with the impersonal forces of global capital and manage economies that, while immensely endowed with potential, were extremely rudimentary and unable to survive without a significant degree of external intervention. However, the African nation-state was also born with immense resource potential waiting to be exploited; immense deposits of natural resources were complimented by an eager and hopeful population ready to grow, work for, and enjoy the promised fruits of independence and freedom from colonial oppression. Unfortunately, their leaders appeared to have promptly built “psychic prisons” where they incarcerated themselves and proceeded to translate the relations of forceful subjugation and exploitation between colonizer and colonized into relations of subjugation and exploitation between the new rulers and the ruled. Little has changed with time.

The power of the state over the individual seems to have dramatically increased with African independence. For while the colonial state had to tolerate nationalist dissent and criticism, the postcolonial state did not and could not be made to feel so obliged. Where colonial rulers considered their subjects as divided into collaborators and resisters, Africa’s new rulers considered their citizens as divided into patriotic collaborators and unpatriotic resisters “out to sell the country to the enemies.”⁴ Patriotic collaborators are rewarded with positions and other enticements, or at the least left at peace. Unpatriotic resisters are branded threats to national security and subjected to forms of repression worse than those inflicted by the colonial state. Where something needed to be dealt with urgently such as closing down a radio station that translated the newspapers into local languages, harsh colonial laws were recycled and enforced on independent citizens.⁵

Following independence, the leader’s former colleagues in the struggle against colonialism were transformed into bitter enemies who had no right to speak on behalf of the nation and who, therefore, deserved to die for speaking out. Men like Guinea’s Diallo Telli and Ghana’s J. B. Danquah died at the hands of former colleagues who had benefitted greatly from their support. Across the board, African leaders of the independence era managed to replicate some the most repressive and unproductive structures and mechanisms of the colonial state in what had now become independent nation space. They woefully failed to properly adapt to the changed circumstances of independence. And they failed mainly because they would not listen to good advice or tolerate criticism.

The focus of Leadership in Colonial Africa is on the nature of leadership cultures that characterized colonial Africa. Since the most powerful among the powerful creates culture, the nature of colonial African leadership cultures was largely determined by imperial priorities. The chapters in this volume reveal processes of imperialism at work and the various ways in which African leaders responded to these processes. Three different types of leaders are studied: colonial administrators, chiefs, and nationalist leaders. The latter category consisted of two subcategories: nationalist politicians and guerrilla leaders. Colonial administrators operated as either metropolitan or settler colonialists. Chiefs existed in all parts of Africa and offer intriguing insights into the workings of the colonial administrative system. The three categories of leaders operated in conceptually distinct but empirically intersecting fields of leadership. Their shared theater of leadership was the imperial cultural framework and, after 1945, the emergent global culture of international human rights discourse that heralded the end of colonial rule in Africa. In what follows, we give a brief outline of each of these categories of leadership in colonial Africa.

Colonial Administrators

Colonial administrators were the patriotic foot soldiers of Empire: governors, district officers, security chiefs, and other political officers; their letters of appointment came from or were tacitly endorsed by imperial governments located in Western capitals. Their job was to rule the colonies on the Crown’s or Republic’s behalf. They managed the colonial trust and imple...