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

Abstract

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?