The leadership crisis in Africa

Approaching it from a worldview perspective

Abstract

n many parts and many respects Africa can still be called a bleeding continent. Many writers have identified weak and bad leadership as one of the root causes for the African malaise. While different writers have explained the crisis in leadership from political, economic, social and other perspectives, in this article (and the rest of the series) the author provides an explanation from a broader worldview perspective.
The present contribution serves as an introduction or prolegomena to what will follow in the series by providing background information on inter alia the following: (1) The different past and present leadership traditions in Africa. (2) The three major worldview influences on leadership on the Sub-Saharan continent, viz. the traditional African, Western and Christian. (3) An intermezzo on the author’s long-standing interest in and research about the African situation. (4) The different reactions of African leaders to colonial and post-colonial influence. (5) Since what a white, Western-oriented person writes on the leadership crisis in Africa may today in South Africa be misunderstood – and he himself even be called bad names – the author then explains in detail his own approach in dealing with multi-worldview and multi-cultural differences, different from the revivalists, propagating a renaissance of the traditional African worldview, and also the relativism of Western post-modernists. (6) Finally, four basic contours of the traditional African worldview are discussed as preparation for the next contribution that will provide concrete examples, also from our present South African situation, of how these characteristics of the traditional African worldview still influence leadership on the continent.