Leadership in Postcolonial Africa: An Introduction

Abstract

In Leadership in Colonial Africa, we demonstrated the existence of three main types of leader in African colonies and how their interaction culminated in the attainment of African independence. We also explicitly rejected the theoretical exceptionalism that Western leadership studies theory is not suitable for the study of African leadership. We argued that theories of transformational, transactional, and servant leadership may be used and have been used (Ello-Hart, Ngunjiri, and Lieberfeld, this volume; Jallow 2014; Saunders 2014) to study leaders like Nkrumah, Mandela, Zuma, Mugabe, and Wangari Maathai among others. We also suggested that organizational culture and information processing theories both lay out for us the physical nature of African governments as macroorganizations and help us put the spotlight into the heads of our leaders (Bolman and Deal 2003; Brown et al. 2004; Schein 2010). In other words, we made the case that Africa too needs “the theoretical benefits to be gained from a better understanding of organizations” (Scott 1987). The teachings of James Macgregor Burns, Warren Bennis, John Gardner, Barnard Bass, Barbara Kellerman, and Boas Shamir, among many other leadership studies scholars, might have been inspired by Western experiences, but they address the human condition everywhere.