Contents Chapter 1 Leadership in Postcolonial Africa: An Introduction 1

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Lumumba,  came  up  with  a  philosophy  of   authenticité  sup-

ported by a cult of  Mobutuism , which claimed to be fighting off 

the evils of Western political cultures and rejuvenating Africa. 

In reality,  authenticité  and  Mobutuism  were but crude instru-

ments of repression and corruption. They were violent reac-

tions to growing public, especially Catholic Church criticism 

of the rampant corruption and “lack of distributive justice” in 

Mobutu’s Congo (Carney, this volume). Carney reports thus:

  Tensions between church and state reached a crescendo with 

the announcement of Mobutu’s “ authenticité ” plan in October 

1971. Echoing China’s late 1960s Cultural Revolution,  authen-

ticité  posited that Africa’s economic and political liberation 

depended on reversing the colonial process of mental alienation, 

a process closely associated with the “tabula rasa” attitudes 

of colonial Catholic missionaries.  

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   After renaming Congo as 

“Zaire,”  

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   Joseph Mobutu took the “indigenous” name Mobutu 

Sese Seko and soon announced the banning of Christian names. 

Government press organs attacked the Catholic Church and 

its “diabolical bishop” Malula. Meanwhile government agents 

removed crucifixes from Catholic classrooms, banned the cele-

bration of Christmas, forced Catholic seminaries and formation 

houses to institute youth MPR movements, and briefly exiled 

Malula from the country.  

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   In the meantime, MPR propagan-

dists promoted “Mobutuism” over the purportedly foreign 

religion of Christianity. In the words of one government spokes-

man, “our church is the  Mouvement Populaire de la Révolution . 

Our head is Mobutu . . . Our law is  authenticité  . . . our  gospel  is 

Mobutuism.”  

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 David Lamb writes of Mobutu that “Like most African presi-

dents, he rule(d) as half-god, half-chieftain, combining the 

techniques of twentieth century communication with ancient 

tribal symbolism” (1983,43). He was and remains in good com-

pany. An interesting feature of postcolonial African leadership 

is that African leaders not only perpetuate colonial leadership 

cultures, they also heavily draw upon precolonial and indig-

enous notions of leadership to bolster their legitimacy. Since 

no such thing as democracy, human rights and the rule of law” 

existed in precolonial Africa, it seemed advantageous for the 

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new leaders to assume the identities of precolonial African rul-

ers. This would allow them to at once affirm their dedication 

to pure “Africanism” and to assure their people that they had 

now regained their independence and returned to their tradi-

tional roots. Meanwhile, they drove around in expensive, lim-

ousines, kept fat bank accounts in Western capitals and invested 

in Western capitalist real estate and other ventures. They chose 

to be politically “African” and economically Western.  

  There is overwhelming evidence that, either by design or 

accident, African leaders had donned the mantle of traditional 

African leadership not of the colonial subject sort but of the pre-

colonial “royal” sort. In Ghana, Nkrumah, a bitter enemy of cap-

italist imperialism and a fervent advocate for Marxist Socialism, 

also carried the highest leadership titles in the land like  Osagyefo , 

 Okukuseku , and  Kantamanto , “many even came to believe that 

he could never die!” (Dekutsey 2012, 37). While Nkrumah 

encouraged and attended public plays by his supporters lampoon-

ing “the primitive chief,” he himself became the greatest of all 

Ghanaian chiefs, complete with traditional symbols and rituals. 

For instance, Nkrumah remains “the only Ghanaian president 

who had an  okyeame , one who, in the typical Ghanaian tradition, 

reeled off appellations and praises to warm the atmosphere before 

he spoke” (Dekutsey 2012, 36). Much like Sundiata’s griot in the 

ancient empire of Mali, Nkrumah’s  Okyeame  “warmed the atmo-

sphere before he spoke” and ceaselessly extolled his “glories.” The 

situation was not much different in other African post-colonies. 

In neighboring Togo, “Eyadema (had) a presidential cheering 

section consisting of a thousand women and he wouldn’t think 

of making a public appearance without it. The women’s prime 

responsibility (was) to perform traditional dances and lavish 

their president with songs of praise . . . Eyadema also has built a 

huge bronze statue of himself in the downtown square of Lome, 

and commissioned an Eyadema comic book in which he plays a 

Superman-type character” (Lamb 1983, 48).   

 In 2014 Gambia, Yahya Jammeh, a former poor and scrawny 

lieutenant who seized power in a 1994 military coup, is now 

a hefty millionaire with fat, shining cheeks who dresses like a 

medieval sultan, complete with a sword and worry beads in one 

hand and a “holy book” in the other. He claims to be possessed 

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of spiritual and supernatural powers and the capacity to cure 

HIV/AIDS, impotence, asthma, infertility, and cancer among 

other ailments using traditional African means. With only a 

high school education he insists on being called His Excellency 

the President, Sheikh Alhaji Professor Dr Yahya A. J. J. Jammeh 

Nasiru Deen Babili Mansa,. In 2013, he pulled Gambia out of 

the Commonwealth without any form of public consultation 

under the pretext that the Commonwealth was a neocolonialist 

and imperialistic institution and swears that only over his dead 

body would he allow the West to recolonize Gambia. Recently 

(in 2014) he sent a “high-powered delegation” to Russia, a coun-

try he now claims Gambia has a long history of diplomatic rela-

tions with, especially in the fight against Western imperialism. 

This is in spite of the fact that Sir Dawda Jawara, the man who 

ruled Gambia for 30 years before him, was at best a nonaligned 

leader, at worst a bitter, if careful critic of communism and the 

former Soviet Union. The brutal nature of the Jammeh regime 

was demonstrated on April 10 and 11, 2000, when Gambian 

security  forces  shot  into  crowds  of  peacefully  demonstrating 

school children, killing twelve and a young red cross volunteer, 

sending a clear message that demonstrations of any kind were 

not acceptable under his regime, not even from school children 

expressing solidarity with a girl child raped by a security officer 

and a school boy beaten to death by firefighters.  

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 But political repression is only one aspect of the “dark side” 

of postcolonial African leadership. The other, equally devastat-

ing, was economic corruption. Following independence and 

upon coming into power, some African leaders seemed to have 

been victims of a strange kind of squander manic possession. 

Lamb (1983, 44) writes of Mobutu that suddenly finding the 

vast resources of an entire nation at his fingertips, and with 

no immediate authority to fear, he went “on a spending spree 

that made economists’ heads whirl” even though “what he 

sought was not national development, but personal prestige and 

national  grandeur.”  Lamb  summarizes  some  of  Mobutu’s  ill-

advised economic actions in a “poor” African former colony:

  He  built  palaces,  eleven  in  all,  and  linked  them  to  the  capital 

with four-lane highways. He dedicated monuments to himself 

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