Contents Chapter 1 Leadership in Postcolonial Africa: An Introduction 1

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 Leadership  in  Colonial  Africa  are leadership studies scholars. 

Most are historians, political scientists, theologians, etc. who 

have an interest in leadership studies and in the study of African 

leadership. Their works at this early stage of the growth of the 

field of African leadership studies, therefore, often lack an infu-

sion of leadership studies theory. The expectation is that more 

and more Africanists interested in the study of African leader-

ship will increasingly familiarize themselves with the leadership 

studies literature and employ leadership studies theory in their 

works. It is comforting to note in this regard that some of the 

greatest leadership studies scholars did not study leadership in 

graduate school. Many like Burns were historians, political sci-

entists, psychologists, and sociologists drawn to the field by its 

multidisciplinary nature and expansive research potential. 

 From a distance, leadership in postcolonial Africa seems gener-

ally  negative  and  failed.  This  is  true  to  some  significant  extent; 

there are many cases of negative and failed leadership in postcolo-

nial Africa. In fact, Africa’s seemingly chronic developmental crises 

reflect a failure of state leadership on the continent since indepen-

dence. Former nationalists leaders who took over from colonial 

governors maintained aspects of the colonial state in post-colonial 

space that inevitably engendered civic and civil conflict and sabo-

taged the continent’s prospects for creative leadership and growth. 

However, while some studies in this volume highlight in graphic 

detail the extent of leadership failure in postcolonial Africa, others 

show that good leadership has flourished in Africa in spite of the 

failure of state leadership, in some cases precisely because of the 

failure of state leadership (Carney, this volume; Ngunjiri, this vol-

ume). While there are only a few cases of good political leadership 

in Africa since independence, there appears to be a critical mass of 

civic leaders whose stories need to be studied and shared as done 

by some authors in this volume. In this introductory chapter, we 

start by looking at the “dark side” of postcolonial African leader-

ship and transition into the “bright side” toward the end.  

  Leadership in Postcolonial Africa: The Dark Side 

 In  Leadership  in  Colonial  Africa , we also argued against the 

political exceptionalism that democracy, human rights, and the 

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rule of law are not suitable for African conditions. We showed 

how hearing these words come from their former colonial 

masters; some first generation of independent African leaders 

loudly repeated them at home and used them as justifications 

for the imposition of authoritarian regimes and the invention 

of dubious “philosophies” of “authenticity” to help “fight” 

these Western “evils” (democracy, human rights, and the rule 

of law). “The new governments, challenged by critics, sought 

to bolster their legitimacy by drawing upon a new ‘patriotic’ 

style of history writing, in which the (liberation) struggle was 

seen as leading to a great triumph, achieved by the liberation 

movement on its own” (Saunders 2014). While Saunders refers 

to the leaders of former nationalist guerrilla movements, par-

ticularly Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and Sam Nujoma in 

Namibia,  his  observation  is  equally  true  or  even  more  so  for 

some  of  Africa’s  postcolonial  civilian  leaders.  Authoritarian 

tendencies  reside  as  much  in  civilian  as  in  military  leaders. 

Perhaps they are inherent to human nature and just need to be 

expressed or suppressed. 

 Under colonial rule, Western political structures and institu-

tions were haphazardly superimposed on African political struc-

tures and institutions characterized by notions and perceptions 

of leadership at variance with the new political frameworks. The 

immediate postcolonial situation demanded a transformation of 

the authoritarian cultures, if not structures of the colonial state 

into cultures of inclusiveness and collective responsibility for 

the new national project. The situation demanded “transfor-

mative-servant leadership” that would empower the citizens of 

the new nations, encourage them to actively question their gov-

ernment’s policies and actions, and motivate them to assume 

leadership  of  the  national  project.  

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    Instead,  what  Africa  got 

was mostly autocratic and transactional leadership of the sort 

displayed by Nkrumah in Ghana, Touré in Guinea, Banda in 

Malawi, Mobutu in Zaire, and more recently Mbeki and Zuma 

in South Africa (Jallow, Kamil, Banda, Carney, Lieberfeld, this 

volume). 

 Most postcolonial African leaders misread the demands of 

independence and did little to change the autocratic colonial 

political culture within which their new nation-states were 

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forged (Mamdani 1996). Having justified their struggles 

against colonialism by appealing to the Atlantic Charter and 

the Universal Declaration of Human Rights among other post-

war international rights discourses, the new rulers now branded 

these same discourses harmful vestiges of imperialism and sym-

bols of capitalist neocolonialism designed to undermine African 

independence. The idea of a struggle for freedom and equal-

ity was considered an alien and divisive aberration that had no 

room within the independent nation-state. The leadership and 

political aspirations of citizens were delegitimized; unques-

tioning subjecthood was routinized; citizens were denied the 

right to question the actions of their government or to freely 

support the political movements of their choice. Oppression 

became the preferred mode of governance. An imposed politi-

cal uniformity smothered constructive dissent, stifled political 

creativity, and generated a culture of silent cynicism or anomie 

that has rendered Africa’s populations incapable of effectively 

adapting to the endless challenges arising in their immediate 

environments. 

 As far as the new postcolonial rulers were concerned, inde-

pendence meant doing what they liked and as they wished with 

their own people, “just like any other sovereign government,” 

Avoiding human rights discourses, they now cited international 

instruments that emphasized the “sovereignty” and “territorial 

integrity” of the state and the rights of all sovereign states to 

noninterference in their internal affairs. The sovereignty and 

integrity of the African individual was suppressed and sub-

merged under the sovereignty and integrity of the state, whose 

identity was often rendered synonymous to the identity of the 

leader. In Ghana, the mantra was Kwame Nkrumah was the 

Convention People’s Party (CPP) and the CPP was Ghana. 

Often, territorial integrity was equated with the state’s right to 

control everyone within those boundaries. Rather than see and 

nurture the nation, the new rulers threw a shroud of enforced 

silence over it, suffocating and subverting its creative poten-

tial, the only potential that could lead any nation to develop-

ment, even as they justified their harmful actions in the name 

of national development. Draconian laws—including colonial 

laws—were deployed to muzzle the freedoms Africans struggled 

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