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- Herausgeber: Tracey McDonald Publishers
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
'Professor Marwala has sought to understand what good leadership should mean by drawing on the collective experience of authors who have written on many topics.' – Former President of South Africa, THABO MBEKI We cannot underestimate how critical strong leadership is in all aspects of our lives. It enables us to run our lives, homes, communities, workplaces and nations. Given its importance, it is pertinent to ask: What is the source of good leadership? Albert Einstein once said, 'The only source of knowledge is experience.' Many philosophers have observed this and, if we accept experience as the only source of knowledge, can we extend this conclusion to leadership? Or is the basis of good leadership intuition or instinct? Or is it perhaps a combination of these? In Leadership Lessons From Books I Have Read, Tshilidzi Marwala adopts the thesis that the source of good leadership is knowledge, and the source of knowledge is experience, which can take many forms: reading widely, listening, and engaging in discussion and debate with other knowledge seekers. If leadership is derived from knowledge and knowledge is derived from experience, the 'experience' in this book is from 50 books that Tshilidzi has read, and so the source of knowledge informing leadership is the collective experience of the more than 50 accomplished authors who wrote those books including, among others, Chinua Achebe, Thomas Sankara, NoViolet Bulawayo, Nelson Mandela, Mandla Mathebula, Eugène Marais, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Daniel Kahneman, Karl Marx, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Nassim Taleb and Aristotle. Divided into four sections, Tshilidzi shares his leadership lessons in the areas of Africa and the diaspora, the search for the ideal polity, science, technology and society, and the leadership of nations. 'Those who do not read, should not lead.' – THILIDZI MARWALA
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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LEADERSHIP LESSONS
FROM BOOKS I HAVE READ
The collective wisdom, knowledge and experience from the pages of fifty books
Tshilidzi Marwala
First published by Tracey McDonald Publishers, 2021
Suite No. 53, Private Bag X903, Bryanston, South Africa, 2021
www.traceymcdonaldpublishers.com
Copyright © Tshilidzi Marwala, 2021
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission from the publisher.
ISBN 978-1-77626-092-8
e-ISBN 978-1-77626-093-5
Text design and typesetting by Patricia Crain, Empressa
Cover design by Tomangopawpadilla
Cover photography by Devin Lester Photography
Digital conversion by Wouter Reinders
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
Thabo Mbeki
In this book, Professor Tshilidzi Marwala discusses the critically important matter of leadership. In this regard he has done a very original thing by assessing what lessons about leadership can be drawn from a truly wide spectrum of books and therefore ‘the collective experiences of more than 50 authors who wrote these books’.
Readers will of course determine for themselves whether an outstanding intellectual in our country and the world, and Honoured Member of the Order of Mapungubwe, has succeeded in his task.
This would include an assessment of the correctness or otherwise of the statement the author of this book has made that it ‘adopts the thesis that the source of good leadership is knowledge and the source of knowledge is experience’.
All known history of humanity is a moving story of progress towards generally what we can call a better life. However we must recognise that the very concept of progress is itself open to debate.
One of the matters which cannot be disputed is that through the millennia gathering in communities has been a feature of human existence from the time of the emergence of Homo sapiens.
Progress in this regard has meant growth from dispersed homesteads, to dispersed villages, to clan and ethnic affiliations, to nations, to towns and cities, to forced larger communities through imperialism and colonialism, and to cooperation and integration among the nations especially through the process of globalisation, facilitated by modern digital means of communication.
It stands to reason that, necessarily, the notion of community implies leadership. Obviously, without leadership, whatever form it takes – an important matter in itself – no community can exist.
This would suggest that the ‘goodness’ of leadership of which Professor Marwala speaks must be assessed on the basis of whether it is advancing the interests, welfare and well-being of the human community or society at large.
This brings us back to the matter of a better definition of the notion of progress which I have mentioned.
Speaking at the grave of Karl Marx in 1883, Friedrich Engels said that Marx ‘discovered the law of development of human society’. In that context he went on to say, ‘mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.’
Whatever may be contentious about this statement, it is obviously correct to the extent that it points to two or more sets of matters which are an imperative to the very existence of a human being and therefore human society.
The progress we spoke about must therefore be measured in terms of the material conditions which sustain life itself, including the provision of food, clothing, housing and health as well as the very construction of society, starting with the family.
It must also be measured in terms of how society is governed or governs itself – what is called its politics. This includes the important matter of how the relations among the nation states are constructed and managed.
Progress must obviously also be assessed in terms of the creation of the ways and means which facilitate the exercise of the gift of thought and therefore the ability to expand the frontiers of knowledge in such fields as the human and natural sciences, mathematics, engineering and the humanities. This also includes the development and propagation of the creative arts.
Our considerations with regard to all this must also take on board other areas and forms of social activity such as matters of faith and religious worship, sports and recreation.
The question that must necessarily arise is whether anything meaningful can be said about good leadership which relates to all the areas of human existence and activity I have mentioned. I believe that this question can be answered in both the negative and the positive.
I will here deal only with those matters which are of general application.
It is self-evident that the leadership we are discussing is about people. It therefore stands to reason that the starting point of good leadership must surely be genuine commitment to serve the people. This means that good leadership must be based on a value system which puts the public good above self-interest.
Part of the challenge in democratic societies in this regard is the phenomenon of the professional politician. These are people whose lifelong occupation is membership of legislatures. Accordingly one of their central preoccupations is ensuring that they always remain electable.
For this reason focus groups and opinion polls become important factors which inform the views and behaviour of such professional politicians. It is also in this situation that populism gains precedence over loyalty to principle. In such circumstances questions may arise as to whether it is at all possible to have a leadership which would be driven to pursue the public good rather than partisan and self-serving interests.
As society has become more complex, so has the discharge of the function of leadership. That complexity means that good leaders must have the capacity to set correct strategic goals, elaborate the operations to achieve those goals and master the required tactics and therefore the flexibility and agility to ensure the realisation of the set goals in the context of a changing objective reality.
Embedded in all this is the absolute imperative for the good leader always to have a full grasp of objective reality, thus to avoid reliance on a false understanding and what has come to be known as fake news.
The increased complexity we speak of also imposes greater challenges for a good leader to find ways and means by which to persuade at least the majority of the constituency she or he leads to buy into, and therefore actively participate in the processes to achieve the defined strategic goals and the related operations.
The good leader must therefore fully internalise the concept and practice of the consent of the governed. Thus would she or he strive at all times to earn the respect and support of the constituency concerned while remaining loyal to the defined strategic objectives.
The author of this book is a leading global expert on the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). Understandably and correctly he insists that the discharge of the task of good leadership imposes an obligation on the leaders concerned fully to understand the 4IR and its revolutionising implications.
Consistent with this view, a 2020 report by the US Brookings Institution, written by two Africans, Njuguna Ndung’u and Landry Signé, speaks of new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing, robotics, the Internet of Things, and so on, which together constitute the 4IR. They say the 4IR ‘has ushered in a new era of economic disruption with uncertain socio-economic consequences for Africa. However, Africa has been left behind during the past industrial revolutions. Will this time be different?’
There can be no doubt that indeed good leadership today includes the imperative to understand the 4IR.
Historical experience tells us that to guarantee good leadership requires great vigilance against the blight of corruption. It seems that this crime readily finds a home anywhere and everywhere, regardless of the socio-economic identity of individual nation states.
In June and August 2020 the Risk and Compliance Portal issued Corruption Reports on Italy and China respectively.
On Italy, among others, it said:
There is a high risk of corruption for business operating in Italy. Public procurement, in particular, presents a high risk of corruption, as it involves large resources and exposes companies to organised crime. The integrity of public officials is marred by their relationships with organised crime and businesses.
It commented, in part, as follows about China:
Corruption in China presents business operating or planning to invest in the country with high risks. The Chinese government, led by President Xi Jinping, is in the midst of a sweeping anti-corruption campaign that has led to thousands of arrests … Companies are likely to experience bribery, political interference or facilitation payments when acquiring public services and dealing with the judicial system.
The essential point to make about all this is that good leadership demands a strong, principled and sustained hostility to corruption. This is particularly important because in all nation states, government, and therefore its leadership, plays an important role in the economy in various ways. Bribery by business and rent seeking by public officials can become quite prevalent in such a situation.
There can be no gainsaying the fact that every day and throughout the world, we see examples of disasters brought about by bad leadership. The examples are legion. This interesting book brings into sharp focus the need for all societies which wish to succeed to take the greatest care to produce the right leadership.
Professor Marwala has sought to understand what good leadership should mean by drawing on the collective experiences of authors who have written on many topics. However we could also say, drawing on his comments about good leadership, knowledge and experience, that it might be best to seek such understanding by studying the various experiences of the very exercise of leadership.
March 2021
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
We cannot underestimate how critical strong leadership is in all aspects of our lives. It enables us to run our lives, homes, communities, workplaces and nations. Given its importance, it is pertinent to ask what the source of good leadership is. Albert Einstein once said, ‘The only source of knowledge is experience.’ Einstein was articulating what was already known as empiricism. Many philosophers had already observed this, including Kanada in India and Aristotle in Greece. If we accept experience as the only source of knowledge, can we extend this conclusion to leadership? Or is the basis of good leadership intuition or instinct? Or is it perhaps a combination of these?
Leadership Lessons from Books I Have Read adopts the thesis that the source of good leadership is knowledge, and the source of knowledge is experience. Experience can take the form of reading, listening and engaging in discussion. The experience I describe in this book is drawn from 50 books that I have read. Thus, the source of knowledge informing leadership is, in this instance, the collective experiences of more than 50 authors who wrote these books.
The book is divided into four sections. The first section is derived from books that come from Africa and the diaspora, areas which require a great deal of good leadership. Modernisation in Africa has had a bumpy ride. Colonisation and slavery both devastated the African continent and her people.When African countries gained independence, beginning in the 1950s, it was to be yet another bumpy ride. The continent had to navigate the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States (US), and many countries found out first hand that powerful nations will act to maximise their own interests,and coups d’etat instigated from the outside left a lasting impact on the DNA of governance in Africa. African democracy tends to vacillate between optimism and pessimism, with new governments betraying the people soon after they are inaugurated.
I begin this section with Joseph Conrad’s depiction of the exploitation of the former Belgian Congo by the greed of King Leopold II. Conrad is a controversial figure, and some consider his work to be racially insensitive. The truth is that he was describing the colonisation of the Congo, which was inherently violent and racist. Next I discuss Chinua Achebe’s masterpiece Things Fall Apart. In the COVID-19 era, which began in late 2019, things certainly look as though they are falling apart, making Achebe’s novel an apt point of departure. Given the challenges that confront us, and our failure to tackle them, Ayi Kwei Armah’s classic The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born poses the question: are the ‘beautyful’ ones still not yet born? To germinate the ‘beautyful’ ones and birth a dynamic nation, we need to change our mindset. The next books discussed are Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Decolonising the Mind as well as The Perfect Nine, followed by Thomas Sankara’s Women’s Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle. African liberation will never be fully realised until women are liberated from patriarchy. Beloved by Toni Morrison is about the effect of the trans-Atlantic slave trade which had a profound impact on the African continent, making it poor, and on the Americas, making them, and particularly North America rich. In A Handbook of the Venda Language I discuss the Venda language, which is a composite of the Nguni, Sotho and Shona languages infused with words and sounds from the Great Lakes countries.
Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom reveals that Mandela acted not as an individual but as part of the collective. He represents a generation that included Govan Mbeki, Walter Sisulu, and Oliver Tambo as well as the lesser known Andrew Mlangeni who is the subject of The BackroomBoy. As Heraclitus put it, ‘No man ever steps in the same river twice…’ We encountered the Mandela generation once, and that is it. The collective he embodied was probably the closest we came to encountering ‘the beautyful ones’. Since the Mandela generation is past, we now need to forge a new path for a just society on our own. In Unbowed we look at climate change through the eyes of Nobel Prize Laureate Wangari Maathai. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s two books Americanah and Purple Hibiscus and NoViolet Bulawayo’s book We Need New Names are stories of wandering Africans who are disappointed by the failed project of a liberated Africa but inspired by the opportunities of globalisation amid a backlash of hyper-nationalism. ThisMournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga describes the anatomy of a decaying country, Zimbabwe. Africa’s Business Revolution is on the enormous opportunities that Africa presents.
The second section of this book is on searching for the ideal polity. I discuss Plato’s TheRepublic and use some ideas to theorise about how to build resilient countries. This would naturally entail building ethical democracies based on virtues, as Aristotle’s Politics explains. However, establishing this Republic requires understanding the mechanisms of undermining democracies and How to Win an Election by Cicero is turned to next. Furthermore, we need to understand how to build a social contract between the government and its citizens. Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince is an important reference on what power is and how to wield it for a particular end. Here, it is essential to study lessons from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract. But such a contract cannot be achieved if we are stuck in an era of superstition. It is vital that, as the African continent, we attain our era of enlightenment. The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine helps us navigate this transition. The role of religion in development is an essential consideration in the context of the African continent because the African continent is rapidly becoming more religious.
I discuss three books on the French Revolution: A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, TheTwelve Who Ruled by Robert Roswell Palmer and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx. Palmer and Dickens show how revolutions descend into violence, while Marx elucidates how conflict between different classes can lead to revolutions. Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism discusses how a particular event in Western Christianity, the Reformation, has been instrumental in developing capitalism. Two books that show how free and open societies can be undermined by state violence are The Open Society and its Enemies by Karl Popper and George Orwell’s 1984. Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil reveals how evil can arise in ordinary men. Finally, Caste by Isabel Wilkerson discusses how the caste system has shaped societies in India, the United States and South Africa.
The themes in the third section are science, technology and society. I begin with The Soul of the White Ant by Eugène Maraiswhich describes intelligence from the termite’s perspective. Then I look at The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn which describes how scientific revolutions manifest themselves, and introduces the phrase ‘the paradigm shift’ into the English language. Irrational Exuberance by Robert Shiller discusses how enthusiasm can cloud our rationality and affect how we participate in markets and politics. In Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond proposes that guns, germs and steel enabled conquest that led to colonisation. Next I discuss Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. ‘Nudging’ is a process of getting people to behave in a certain way without them realising it. Deep Fakes by Nina Schick explains how an AI technique called the Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can be used to generate fake people. In this way videos and pictures can be altered to achieve a particular political agenda. The impact of this on ‘freedom, liberty and prosperity’ is far reaching.
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman discusses how human thinking can lead to irrational decisions. Homo Deus by Yuval Harari is about the future of humanity when humans turn into gods able to augment intelligence and other attributes associated with gods. The Amazon Way on IoTby John Rossman is on the Internet of Things. Things are connected via the internet; for example, clothes and other wearables are connected to the internet, allowing them to monitor people’s health and communicate the information directly to doctors. Deep Medicine by Eric Topol looks at how AI can be used in the medical field to augment and, in many instances, replace health workers such as doctors. Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom deals with how the capability of AI will increase and evolve and the implications this evolution will have on the future of humanity. Profiles in Corruption by Peter Schweizer examines the corruption of politicians in the United States, especially those who claim to be working on behalf of the people. Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb discusses how randomness can deceive decision makers, with severe consequences. The Economic Singularity by Calum Chace reviews how technological advances enabled by AI will significantly impact economic factors such as production and jobs. Range by David Epstein considers how specialising too early can be disadvantageous compared with specialising later in life. COVID-19 by Michael Mosley describes the need to understand the science of the COVID pandemic and the importance of science in tackling health problems.
The fourth section of the book is on the leadership of nations. In this regard, I study two critical leaders of China, Deng Xiaoping and Xi Jinping. Through Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China by Ezra Vogel and The Governance of China by Xi Jinping, I interrogate how Deng laid the foundation for modern China and how Xi is taking China to a new era which, it is expected, will lead to China emerging as the largest economy in the world. I also discuss Leadership in Turbulent Times by Doris Kearns Goodwin, which examines four presidents who led the US in times of great crisis. They are Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson. Finally, I look at A Promised Land by Barack Obama.
In the conclusion, I detail 50 leadership lessons I have identified in all the 50 books I have considered.
SECTION A
AFRICA AND THE DIASPORA
This section examines books written on Africa and the diaspora. They were written by, among others, authors such as Joseph Conrad, Chinua Achebe, Ayi Kwei Armah, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Thomas Sankara, Toni Morrison, Nelson Mandela, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and NoViolet Bulawayo. I contextualise these books within the framework of the 4IR and outline leadership lessons that can be drawn from them.
CHAPTER 2
Lessons from Heart of Darknessby Joseph Conrad
Princeton University, one of the most prestigious universities in the world, dropped the name Woodrow Wilson from its policy school in 2020.1 Wilson was a celebrated professor who later became President of Princeton and the Governor of New Jersey, before becoming the 28th President of the United States. But Wilson was perhaps best known for enforcing racial discrimination in the public service. Princeton dropped Wilson’s name 73 years after they honoured him in large part because of the anti-racism movement that gripped the world after the brutal murder of George Floyd in 2020. This movement grew so substantially that statues of men who were once enslavers and colonisers fell. For example, the University of Oxford agreed to remove the statue of Cecil John Rhodes who pillaged Southern Africa through violence and murder.
The Charleston City Council in South Carolina voted to remove the statue of the former US Vice-President John Calhoun who was one of the confederate leaders who fought in the American Civil War to protect the system of enslaving African Americans. It is estimated that he owned around 80 slaves. The statue of another confederate, Johnny Reb, was also removed in Virginia. Other statues of confederate leaders who faced a similar fate include Jefferson Davis and Charles Linn. These statues were removed either because authorities had voted for their removal or the Black Lives Matter activists forcibly removed them.
What is the genesis of the Black Lives Matter movement?
Why has this moment arrived now? Police have been killing African Americans for a long time. Victims have included Eric Garner, Michael Brown and Walter Scott, and there are countless more. This moment came in 2020 because of the confluence of Trumpism, technologies of the 4IR such as social media, the COVID-19 pandemic and economic failures resulting from uncontrolled globalisation. There was also a renewed sense of urgency to resolve some of the issues regarding the American Civil War (1861-65) on how to handle the legacy of the Confederate’s politics.
Is there a middle ground?
Former president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, in his response to an article I wrote on statues, wrote,
… people should be free even to pose such questions as – what shall we do with the Voortrekker Monument? But nobody has a unilateral right to decide to blow up the Monument on the basis that the Voortrekkers oppressed the indigenous people – which they did!
In 2020, the then Vice-Chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand, Adam Habib, penned a critical piece where he advocated for the reimagination of the statues as an option rather than their destruction. Unfortunately, statues are monuments which honour rather than shame. For instance, in Bristol in the United Kingdom the statue of Edward Colston, who made his fortune in the slave trade, was toppled and thrown into the sea. How do you reimagine the statue of former US President Thomas Jefferson, who enslaved more than 600 African Americans? Do we insert a statement as a buffer of sorts that says, ‘here is a man who condemned people to prolonged poverty’?
Given that people are fundamentally flawed, how do we balance the good and the bad of an individual and use it as a basis for honour or condemnation? This suggests that the concept of letting a statue stand or fall is a subjective matter. If only the pure should be honoured then there will be no one to honour because such a person does not exist.
In the Christian doctrine salvation is achieved through repentance. In other words, even if you have spent your entire life killing people, if you repent in your last hour you are absolved from sin. But this cannot be the criterion to determine whether a person is honoured or condemned.
Physicist Pascual Jordan contributed immensely to quantum mechanics. However, he missed out on the Nobel Prize for Physics, which was awarded to his collaborator Max Born, because Jordan joined the brown shirts, a Nazi paramilitary organisation. The Nobel Prize Committee rightly found that his evil deeds far outweighed his excellence in physics. The same must apply for other perpetrators of atrocities such as Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany, King Leopold II for his actions in the Congo, and Cecil John Rhodes in Southern Africa.
No amount of reimagination will atone for the evil deeds of people memorialised through statues, and therefore they belong in a museum.
What is to be done?
But what do we do about books? Fundamentally, I am opposed to the banning or burning of books and the destruction of history. Some books are offensive, such as Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler. This book is a bible for genocide and was the foundation of the Holocaust. Another example is Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.2 Conrad was a Polish-British author who, in this novel, describes Africans as objects and uses terms like ‘savages’ and other racially derogatory words. The father of African literature, Chinua Achebe, described Heart of Darkness as a racist book. It is generally believed that Achebe was not awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature because of this criticism. Was Achebe’s assessment of Conrad correct? Or was Conrad writing about the Congo in the context that prevailed in his time? Can a messenger be crucified for the message they carry?
Heart of Darkness is narrated by Marlow, who sailed up the Congo River to look for Kurtz, an ivory trader. My interest in the story was in Conrad’s descriptions of the brutal treatment of Africans, who were subjected to beatings and killings, forced labour and the pillaging of their resources. Historically, the story is set during the reign of Belgium’s King Leopold II, who personally owned the Congo. In his pursuit of the country’s riches, approximately ten million Africans, who accounted for half of the population, perished.
The book brings to the fore the dispute between Spike Lee and Quentin Tarantino about the latter’s widespread use of the derogatory ‘N-word’ as a racial slur in his movies. According to Lee, only African Americans should have the right to use the ‘N-word’, and not white people, who may very well be descendants of slave masters. A contemporary question that can be asked is whether Conrad’s use of racial slurs and other dehumanising words have a place in our society. What do we do with such books? My view is that we should write stories challenging them. We should identify and discredit flawed or evil aspects of these books. But we should not destroy them because future generations need to learn from them.
LEADERSHIP LESSONS
What are the leadership lessons we can draw from Heart of Darkness? Firstly, we should preserve our heritage, whether good or bad, so that that future generations can learn from it. Secondly, we should challenge the negative aspects of our history intellectually. For example, apartheid must be challenged by writing books that identify its dark underbelly. Thirdly, we should not blame the messenger. If we do, we incentivise the messenger to alter the message to please society now and risk the danger of future harm through ignorance of the original message and the conditions in which it was formed.
In conclusion, like Princeton University, we need to change offensive names of institutions and relocate offensive public statues to our museums. Finally, we need to intellectually challenge books that promote violence and discrimination to ensure they do not capture young minds in their formative stages.
CHAPTER 3
Lessons from Things Fall Apartby Chinua Achebe
In the second decade of the 21st century the world is crumbling amid the COVID-19 pandemic and the global economy is on the verge of an economic depression the like of which has not been seen since the Second World War. The spectre of unemployment, inequality, and poverty facing the global population is unprecedented. There seems to be no real end in sight, and the popular opinion is that the virus is here to stay and that we will have to learn to live with it. At times like these, I am reminded of the opening lines of The Second Coming, a poem by W.B. Yeats:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Things Fall Apart
Yeats’ poem so greatly influenced one of Africa’s foremost writers, Chinua Achebe, that he took a few words from the poem as his title for Things Fall Apart, a book about the transition of a people from independence to colonisation. The main protagonist is an Igbo man called Okonkwo, who had three wives and ten children in Umuofia village in present-day Nigeria. He was a respected leader who had earned his standing through his prowess in wrestling. His greatest fear was that he would be like his father Unoka, who was deemed feminine and was so disrespected that when he died his body was left to rot in the forest with no proper burial. Because of his hyper-masculinity and on the advice of the village Oracle, Okonkwo killed his adopted son Ikemefuna because he did not want to appear weak in the eyes of his community.
Later, Okonkwo accidentally killed a member of his clan and was consequently exiled for seven years to Mbanta, his mother’s place. While he was away, his community changed and started to adopt Christianity under the influence of British settlers, much to Okonkwo’s dismay. While in exile, Okonkwo’s son Nwoye, whom he deemed to be feminine like his grandfather, adopted Christianity. Okonkwo disowned him. One day, Okonkwo and other villagers burnt the church, and were incarcerated by the British colonial court, humiliated, and physically beaten. At a village meeting after their release, Okonkwo – thirsting for Umuofia to revolt against the white establishment – killed one of the colonial officers trying to put a stop to the meeting. Everyone seemed disappointed with his actions and to avoid being tried in a British court, he hanged himself – an act that was scorned in the Igbo culture.
Colonial transition
So, what is the moral of the story? Okonkwo was a man who lived in a period of transition from an independent people to a colonised people. Transitions are difficult and are often fraught with danger. In physics, there is a concept called the phase transition, when an object changes from one state to another. For example, water undergoes a phase transition at a temperature of 0°C to become ice. Unlike water, where the transition to ice is perfectly reversible, the transition of a society is not entirely reversible. For example, the transition from an independent to a colonial society is not entirely reversible. The African independence movements did not entirely reverse colonialism. In fact, at independence, colonialism was in many ways replaced by neo-colonialism. Paraphrasing the South African activist and intellectual Michael Harmel, colonialism became ‘colonialism of a special type’.
In these transitions something has to ‘fall apart’ or die, and in the case of Okonkwo and his community, it was their culture and independence. Where was the fault line in Okonkwo’s village? Yeats surmised that societies collapse or fall apart because of two forces: internal contradictions and external forces. Umuofia died because the village could not defend itself from external forces such as British colonialism and conversion to Christianity. It also died because of internal contradictions, such as deep superstitions and hyper-masculinity, which manifested as violence towards women and men who were seen as weaklings, excluding them from decision making to the detriment of their society.
Why were outside forces powerful enough to displace a culture that had been around for a long time? Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo surmised that the trinity of conquest are guns, Bibles and coins, whereas Jared Diamond thinks they are guns, germs and steel.3 I would argue that Umuofia collapsed because of guns, Bibles and commerce.
The COVID-19 world
In 2021 we are living in an era where a phased transition to the post-COVID-19 world is taking place. The COVID-19 virus spread across the globe, bringing the world economy to a halt. Globally, by mid-January 2021, COVID-19 had infected more than 92 million people globally, and almost two million had died. Of course, the actual statistics are much worse because many infected people are asymptomatic, showing no signs of the disease and therefore are neither tested nor counted. At the same time in South Africa, COVID-19 had infected close to 1.3 million people and killed over 35 000. The pandemic has spurred the birth of a new culture and has destroyed some aspects of our existing culture. For example, social distancing, wearing masks, and using online platforms such as Zoom and MS Teams for meetings, teaching and learning are becoming standard practices. Some of these practices are transitory and will disappear, but many of them will remain as the new normal.
Black Lives Matter
In 2020, as the world was engulfed by the virus, an African-American man named George Floyd was murdered by a white policeman in Minnesota, which galvanised the Black Lives Matter movement. Although this movement had been established in 2013, the confluence of injustice and strict lockdowns resulted in a global phenomenon with significant protest actions in Europe, America, and New Zealand.
The reason this movement has not gained a foothold on the African continent is an interesting sociological phenomenon that requires in-depth study. The confluence of Donald Trump-style politics, police violence, economic hardship and COVID-19 has led to the removal of statues such as those of Christopher Columbus in the US, mass murderer King Leopold II in Belgium, and slave trader Edward Colston in the UK. In 2020, the statue of Winston Churchill in London was placed under guard because of growing pressure for its removal.
What does all this mean? Are we entering a transition to a new world that seeks to free itself from the atrocities of the past? Can past crimes ever be exorcised from our collective consciousness? Does chaos offer us an opportunity to create a new and better world, where exploitation is a thing of the past? These are hard questions that need to be examined in depth. In response, in 2020 the University of Johannesburg (UJ) established an Institute for Gender, Race, and Class to investigate the type of person who will emerge from the confluence of the Black Lives Matter movement and the COVID-19 pandemic.
LEADERSHIP LESSONS
What can we learn from Achebe’s book? Firstly, we should never just resist change; we should rather evaluate its necessity and then adapt accordingly. Okonkwo could not handle the transition in his society and consequently perished. Secondly, hyper-masculinity can be destructive to the development of society. Thirdly, violence begets violence as we are reminded by Okonkwo, who killed Ikemefuna, and then killed himself.
CHAPTER 4
Lessons from The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born by Ayi Kwei Armah
As South Africa commemorated the 44th anniversary of the 1976 Soweto Uprisings on 16 June 2020, I found myself reflecting on The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. The novel by Ayi Kwei Armahcaught my attention not only as an intriguing literary work but also because it depicts disturbing issues that beset many African countries post-independence. Those who have read the book will know that the word ‘beautyful’ in the title is deliberately misspelt.
Ayi Kwei Armah
There is something that I found interesting about the author, who hails from Ghana. He was educated at the elite Groton School in the United States, whose alumni include former US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The headmaster of Groton School, Temba Maqubela, was part of the 16 June 1976 Uprisings. Armah completed his undergraduate degree at Harvard University, which has educated seven US presidents, including Barack Obama. Armah also has a postgraduate degree from Columbia University, which has educated three US presidents and the man who founded the African National Congress (ANC), Pixley ka Isaka Seme. It is intriguing that Armah’s history is so inextricably linked with African and American leaders.
The misspelling in the book’s title indicates that the ‘beauty’ referred to is not outward physical beauty. It means virtue, the best, the most educated and the most patriotic. The expression ‘the beautiful one’ has a long history in Africa. For example, in 1370 BC an Egyptian princess was born who was named Nefertiti, meaning ‘the beautiful one has come’. In essence, Armah represented the characteristics of the ‘beautyful ones’. Columbia and Harvard are elite US universities, among those called the Ivy League. Armah, perhaps because of this background, was described by famous Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe as an ‘alien native’.
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
A brief outline of the plot will shed light on some pertinent and salient points about many African states today. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born is about Ghana in the 1960s, starting during the Passion Week in 1965 and 25 February 1966. The protagonist is a nameless person, called only the man who worked as a railways clerk. He was surrounded by corrupt people. While he did not participate in corruption himself, he did not discourage it either. The man’s wife, Oyo, and his mother-in-law were both quite disappointed that he did not accept bribes and enrich his family.
The man meets Sister Maanan who, after being disappointed by her politician boyfriend, slipped into the margins of society and spent all her time smoking marijuana. He also meets Koffi Billy, who was injured by the white man’s negligence and ultimately commits suicide. Then there is Joseph Koomson, who is a minister in Kwame Nkrumah’s government. Joseph was corrupt and aspired to a life of luxury. His wife Estelle was a socialite who liked the finer things in life, especially those that were imported. Joseph wanted to buy a boat using government money and put it in Oyo’s mother’s name; she would get a regular supply of fish in exchange. Ultimately Oyo signs the deal, but the supply of fish is inconsistent, and the man did not want to eat the fish.
In February 1966, Kwame Nkrumah was militarily overthrown while he was in Vietnam and Joseph fled to the man’s family home. He eventually escaped with the man’s assistance, using the boat to go to the Ivory Coast.
