The case for African-centred leadership perspective

In Africa, individual achievements are much less valued than inter-communal relations. The value of economic transactions lies more in the ritual surrounding them and their capacity to enhance group ties. Wealth is first extended family or clan wealth, and second tribal wealth.

In many instances, rituals, ceremonies, allocation of scant resources to clan affiliates, reciprocity, and interpersonal relations are natural responsibilities of leadership in African cultures.

African societies tend to be egalitarian within age groups but hierarchical between age groups. As a result, leaders usually behave and are expected to behave paternalistically. Leaders bestow favour and expect obeisance from their followers.

Consensus is highly valued, and the decision-making process within age-grade levels can therefore take considerable time. Between social levels (downwards), observance of hierarchy means that consensus can be achieved relatively faster.

Afrocentrism shows that just like the Western and Oriental cultures, Africans also have their ideas, norms, traditions, culture, and values that influence their worldview

African cultures also tend to have a great capacity for tolerance and forgiveness. Or how else can we explain the various attempts at reconciliation with former oppressors by African leaders like Nelson Mandela, Jomo Kenyatta, Shehu Shagari, and Julius Nyerere?

Many observers continue to wonder at this remarkable capacity to forgive and forget past misdeeds. Nelson Mandela epitomizes this image of a tolerant leader. He came out of three decades of persecution and imprisonment to become the architect of Black/White reconciliation in South Africa. Where else but Africa can one find this sort of thing?

However, such tolerance runs counter to Western market philosophies, which espouse the Darwinist Theory of ‘Survival of the Fittest.’ In the current paradigm, it is the leader’s job to eliminate poor performers in an organization.

The hard-faced managerial disposition currently employed in most international organizations, with its macho triumphalist tone, is quite revealing. For instance, existing Western management theories suggest that managerial success is to be measured in terms of the magnitude of workforce cuts achieved: organizations are supposed to be ‘lean’ and ‘mean.’

When such leadership rhetoric addresses the willingness to accept mistakes that include the caveat of swift retribution if mistakes persist or are not more than compensated for by successes.

When African management practices are compared to Western models, many scholars have wrongly stated, inadvertently perhaps, that there is an acute shortage of quality leadership and management in Africa.

The crux of the matter here is that such views misconstrue the potential impacts of African leadership orientation and wrongly conclude that greater congruence with Western frameworks is always needed.

In many African societies, greater emphasis is placed on a leader’s ability to honour their obligations to ethnic affiliates without necessarily denying others. Thus, it is expected that an organization will not flounder because of ethnic cleavages.

As outlined in the Western model, vision may therefore be out of place in many African organizations. Debates concerning whether or not transformational leadership is practised in the West make its adoption in Africa even more tenuous.

The fundamental African leadership framework is seen in the theory of Afrocentrism. The main thrust of this theory is the centrality and supremacy of African culture and knowledge for solving African development challenges.

Afrocentrism is a scientific effort towards African development based on African history, culture, behavioural patterns, beliefs, and norms. It is not an imitation of Western leadership models. Afrocentrism is African-centred research on indigenous African cultures as a way of harvesting a variety of leadership principles, patterns, practices, institutions, ceremonies, and ideas for contemporary use.

The history of Afrocentrism can be traced to the works of eminent scholars and activists like W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Cheikh Anta Diop, Malcolm X, George James, and many others. They tried to understand the world from the perspectives of African cultural values.

However, Afrocentrism as a theoretical approach to research in the social sciences has been attributed to Molefi Asante’s monumental work published in 1980 titled: “Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change.” He described Afrocentricity as a framework of reference where a given phenomenon about Africa is viewed through the lens of the peoples of Africa.

Afrocentrism shows that just like the Western and Oriental cultures, Africans also have their ideas, norms, traditions, culture, and values that influence their worldview. Further, Afrocentrists argue that Afrocentricity remains the most appropriate paradigm to apply when discussing Africa’s issues— whether political or otherwise—because it places Africa at the center of such discussions and analysis.

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Afrocentrism is a direct response to Eurocentrism – a cultural phenomenon that places European cultural values as superior to other cultures and universalizes European, and by extension, American experiences, for other cultures in the world.

Eurocentrism is a subset of Western imperialism, and it views the realities of non-Western societies from Western prism and advocates for the broad imitation of a Western leadership model based on Western values – democracy, equality, free markets, human rights, individuality, social justice, and secularity as a panacea for all kinds of development challenges, regardless of the historical and cultural differences of all societies across the world.

European colonization of Africa involved the widespread exploitation of the region and the imposition of European culture, which contributed to the displacement of traditional African leadership institutions and structures. Consequently, even after independence, African countries adopted Western development theories such as neo-liberalism and modernization theories which have failed to achieve the desired objectives.

Afrocentrism argues that Western leadership and its development theories are based on European culture and norms. Given that African experience greatly differs from that of America or Europe, Afrocentrism posits that using Western theories to explain African people’s ethos is inappropriate.