Hello Interaction Leaders

My name is Des Collier and I am a member of the 2006/7 ILP Team for South Africa

I would like to open a forum of discussion on the following topic:

Ubuntu and the Modernising Organisation and its potential impact on Leadership in Africa in a Global Context

I am very interested to get others’ views, understanding and perceptions regarding Ubuntu and pose the following questions to get things moving:

Is Ubuntu still relevant to the people of Africa? Is Ubuntu still practised in Africa?

Can Ubuntu be practised in a modern organisation? How?

Is it possible to integrate Ubuntu with Western Leadership Styles? Is there any value in trying to do this?

In the practice of Ubuntu, how big is the “We”? Does it extend only to my kin? To my ethnic group? To my political party? How inclusive is it? Does it, can it, extend to embrace the common ground of our Humanity?

I offered the topic at The PAE Mauritius as one of the PAE conversations so I can email the following to respondents who are interested;

The feedback from the 2006 Mauritius PAE Conversation

A dialogue with Taso Petrus Jacobs Seleke, another of the 2006/7 ILP participants from South Africa

A paper presented to the University of Cape Town by Mfuniselwa Bhengu, a Zulu from KwaZulu Natal and a member of the South African Parliament, which sets out a comprehensive explanation of the origins and meaning of Ubuntu in Africa

I hope you will find this a worthwhile topic to pursue.

Many thanks
Des Collier

Howdy Des!

This is Mwape. I am Zambian, and yes, also on IAL 2006/7. Say, I am curious to know from you. What is your understanding of “Ubuntu”?

Regards.

Mwape Mumbi.

Hi there!

I think that Africa has lost some of values and traditions that kept us African. Although some of the Western style of living has aided in development efforts for Africa, Africa failed to keep the very traditions and cultures that ensured a social cohesion in oour communities. We now have a huge divide between the rich and the poor, a neighbour can starve to death while the other neighbour is “only” caring for a nuclear family (not even the extended family members.

It would be good if we could share country specific examples of how the social fabric has been torn by the increasing westernization.

regards,

Claudia Shilumani
2004/5 IAL participant

Hi Collier,

Though I am not Familiar to the so-called Ubuntu, but would wish to respond on the question of relevance.

If we may ask the owners’ of that CULTURE, who are practicing it, I believe they will respond that it is and will still have relevance. As we are all aware to the meaning of culture and its diversity, nothing becomes irrelevant to the owner of it. The irrelevance may only appear to us, who looks at it with a distant and different eye. Take an instant of the Tsan and Khoikhoi of the Karahari Desert with the introduced Program.

For ‘Ubutu’ to be practiced in modern orgs. it is possible, but if you may be able to merge the components of indigenous and modern forms of it to form a contemporary practices.
Take an Instance of the indigenous dances (culture) that employs modern musical instruments and result to beautiful combination of a contemporary African Dances, such as; Parapanda and Tatunane in Tanzania.
The only precaution to make is on avoiding to distort it origin meaning.

I believe culture can be adjusted or change to contemporary culture practice in order to accommodate changes, as regard to time and place.

Kind regards,
Grace Matui, Zanzibar.

Thank you to those who have responded to the topic so far. I have sent the paper on Ubuntu by Mfuniselwa Bhengu to those who indicated interest. Below is the feedback on the topic from the PAE Mauritius 2006:

The British Council Pan African Event Conversation Group

Topic: Ubuntu and the Modernising Organisation and its potential impact on Leadership in Africa, in a global context

I had a very clear purpose in offering the topic – it was to test the acceptance, understanding, practice and relevance of the Ubuntu Worldview to modern Africans. The PAE offered the perfect opportunity to get valuable feedback from people from 19 countries of Africa.

I prepared the discussion within the following ILP framework:

·Contexts/Passions:  Africa
Leadership

·Principles:Africa for Africa in collaboration
The Power of Questions

·Assumptions:In any enterprise, there is something that
works – I wanted to test the assumption that this might be Ubuntu in the context of
Africa

I offered the following introduction and two brief stories to create a context for the discussion:

In my business, we offer a leadership training programme that is grounded in a conventional, North-West Atlantic Leadership approach but which has been “South Africanised” as far as it goes. We work with private enterprise but also do a lot of work with municipalities.

Story 1: when we presented the programme to the Port St John’s Municipality the Mayor commented that it was a very good programme but it was not how they do things. In a later conversation, he explained to me that the programme did not reflect how the Pondo People lead and manage. He added that the system was not designed for people.

Story 2: The feedback from various African Labour Unions has been that the trouble with all these leadership programmes is that what we keep hearing is the voice of the Western Manager.

This alerted me to the possibility that, in our programme that has been running very successfully for 17 years in South Africa, there was something missing in the current context – something essentially African.

On making further enquiries, I discovered that, in South Africa anyway, the concept of “African Leadership” has been exploding under the banner of the African Renaissance, certainly for the last 5 – 6 years.

Our President, Thabo Mbeki, has been urging South Africans to dig deep in search of an authentic African identity. The President and a growing cohort of South African Black Academics have been looking to Ubuntu to provide some of the answers.

I then offered the following framework of fairly specific questions (already posted above as the opening for this topic) to get the group’s views, understanding and perceptions of Ubuntu and its relevance particularly in modern business practice:

·Is Ubuntu still relevant to the people of Africa? Is Ubuntu still practised in Africa (specifically in the context of age and gender)?
·Can Ubuntu (an ancient African Worldview) be practised successfully in a modern organisation? How?
·Is it possible to integrate Ubuntu with Western Leadership Styles?
·In the practice of Ubuntu, how big is the “We”? Does it extend only to my kin? To my ethnic group? To my political party? How inclusive is it? Does it, can it, extend to embracing the common ground of our humanity (i.e. are there different levels of Ubuntu)?

In closing, I offered the following observations:

The ILP creates space for Africans to identify and articulate what leadership means in Africa:
-After the process so far, are we any closer to being able to say what characterises leadership in Africa? (Could it be Ubuntu?)
-How definitive should we be in developing leaders?
-In the final analysis, does Africa actually have anything to contribute towards the concept of an effective leader in a global context? Or has it all been thought of and done already?

PAE Conversation Feedback

Initially it seemed that no-one had heard of Ubuntu and regarded it as a peculiarly South African phenomenon, and we struggled to get going.

However, once we achieved a mutual understanding of the word, the following emerged:

·The Zambians and Malawians immediately knew the word and what it meant.
·The concept of community is very strong among the Ashantis in Ghana and more generally in West Africa.
·In Botswana the word for Ubuntu is Bhuto and they are familiar with the concept.

The Botswanas, however, felt that not everything about the West is bad. They expressed the concern about Bhuto/Ubuntu that we have to stick together even if one in the group is holding us back. They expressed a preference for people “to see me as an individual, as a human being, first – to see me as I am.”

Participants felt that the Diaspora and dislocation of Africa had dissipated the concept of Ubuntu and also blamed the dislocation of the continent for the apparent lack of concern for human life, which runs counter to Ubuntu, as evidenced by the genocides, ethnic cleansing, famine, civil wars and brutality in Africa.

In the end 6/9 participants were open to the possibility of Ubuntu (or whatever other name it goes by) as a unifying factor for Africa.

In terms of asking what our strengths are in facing the challenges of renewing Africa, one of them must surely be Ubuntu? It is still practised. It was there before the oppression and, indeed it is the one thing that has survived everything.

Des Collier
South Africa
9/1/07

Reflections on African Leadership 1

One of the delegates on the first morning of the British Council’s Interaction Leadership Programme’s Pan African Event in Mauritius asked the house: “What is it that the North-West has or does that enabled them to get so far ahead? What is it that they do that we in Africa don’t do? Why is it that the industrialised nations of the North are so successful, powerful and prosperous and we are not?”

I offer the following response: all other factors of geography and climate being equal, the North-Western manager can define leadership in one sentence of 10 words:

Leaders achieve goals and objectives through the efforts of others

They focus on it. They act on it and they do it very well. This definition is backed by a strong sense of identity:

The message from the North is clear: I think therefore I am – which, in the post, post-modern era, has been transposed to: I can be whatever I want to be. The process is everything.

The message from the West is clear: I am because I have a big dream to save the world from itself.

The message from the East is clear: I am because I continuously improve (Kaizen – the journey towards inner perfection).

The message from the South is still not clear. 

The African Challenge to ILP 2006/7 is: can any leader in the house express in one sentence of 10 words what it means to be an African Leader?

Until every African Leader can do this we are nowhere in the face of the kind of focus, precision and discipline we face in a global context. Until we can do it, we will always be followers to be exploited in the global arena.

So far what seems to be emerging is: An African Leader is whatever you want to be. The process is everything. When you put that up against the very clear definition from the North-West, it just doesn’t really cut it, does it?

The trouble is, in Africa, we will do process until the cows come home and never actually get down to doing anything. Ritual, occasion, ceremony, feasting – process, are all too important already. If we are never going to arrive at some sort of “so what” or a “so this is where we are now” (albeit just a milestone in a bigger journey) then all we will end up doing is going through the motions. If, after the process, we cannot articulate something about African Leadership more clearly or definitively, then it’s all just wheelspin.

As an African, I believe there is something definitive about the way things are done in Africa. It is somewhere on the Wall of Greatness and it has something to do with people, human dignity, empathy and the like.

The North-West Manager will say. “That’s great, let’s work with that idea and maybe add a phrase, something like: leaders achieve goals and objectives through the efforts of others for the good of all” and then sell the whole newly adapted theory back to us at great expense.

This is the tragic story of Africa, over and over. Others will continue to take our resources, process them, refine them and then sell them back to us at great expense, until we find the clarity, the identity, the unity to stand strong as a continent in a global context. And it all starts with Leadership.

Des Collier
South Africa
9/1/07

Reflections on African Leadership 2

In trying to respond to my own challenge to African Leadership, I have noticed that a basic premise of the ILP seems to be: Leadership is about doing great work.

There are many kinds of great work and one of them is the work of bringing out the leader in others. Leadership then is about enabling, equipping and empowering those around you to do great work. This in itself is a great work.

So we are back to the idea that a true leader is not the one with the most followers but the one who creates the most leaders. The ILP, then, offers a creative and innovative way to do this and, of the 7 principles, surely the greatest is: Enabling others to do great work?

It is interesting that the word educate comes from two Latin words: educare – to rear or raise up, and educere – to lead out from, to elicit. A leader in this sense is anyone who identifies, inspires and educates (leads out) the leader in others. It is a tragedy that the word educate has become bogged down in so much dogmatic, political, patronising, bureaucratic inertia. Education by definition should be focussed on the future and be right at the forefront of leadership, creativity and innovation.

Making a movie provides a good analogy. By my choice, if I worked in the movies, I would be a producer – the one who brings together the whole crew of writers, directors, actors and technicians and provides them with the set and resources they need to make a great movie.

What is clear, however, is that there are two different kinds of work here – there is the leader producer and the leader performer and we will get ourselves into a right proper pickle if we are all so busy enabling somebody else to do great things that nobody actually gets down to doing the performance. Clearly both are crucial.

Surely your leader carpenter is a master cabinet-maker. Your leader mason is a master-builder. Your leader fire-fighter is superb at fighting fires. In medicine, a leader would be someone who finds a way to prevent Polio, or eradicate Yellow Fever, or to combat AIDS. Clearly though, these performers need the space, the training and the resources in order to do such great things.

We are interdependent. What I do best is that which enables you to do what you do best. I am at my best when I enable you to be your best. Is this not Ubuntu (Bhuto, African Humanism) at work?

We can extend the idea further:

I am a leader because you are leader and, because we are leaders, you are a leader.

I am successful because you are successful and, because we are successful, you are successful.

I am prosperous because you are prosperous and, because we are prosperous, you are prosperous.

These are all extended expressions of Ubuntu.

The ILP professes that the 6 passions and 7 principles of the programme are rooted in the ways of Africa. So, can we say then, in Africa: a leader is anyone who achieves goals and objectives by enabling others to do great work?

A leader (for now) in Africa is an enabler who fully comprehends the essentially interdependent nature of all human endeavour. And is this something we can learn from Africa? Is this the message from the South?

If this is true, then there is no reason for Africa to pursue socialism, capitalism, collectivism, nor indeed to have any other “ism” in whatever form imposed upon her. She is already imbued with the values of Ubuntu. Some would say that, in the end, it doesn’t matter who thought of it but I would argue strongly that, for Africa, at this stage of her development as a global player, it is crucial.

The trouble is, sadly, can Africa genuinely claim to place high value on human life? To hold human dignity in high regard? To be a model of leading with humility to serve the common good? The overwhelming evidence of corrupt leaders exploiting their own people, of rapacity, brutality, genocide, famine and civil war weighs heavily against us: muti murders in South Africa involving the abduction and horrific mutilation of babies and children, where a person is worth more dead from the sale of body parts than alive. After 26 years of Mugabe’s rule, the life expectancy of women in Zimbabwe has dropped to 34. We saw genocide and gruesome beheadings in Rwanda and Burundi. 200 000 dead and 2 million displaced and subject to vile atrocities by a religious war in Darfur.

How does Ubuntu as a worldview based on mercy and our common humanity permit this?

Some would blame external forces and foreign powers for this. But are these “other forces” not simply exploiting the willingness of Africans to take up arms against Africans motivated by their own lust for power? Surely Africans can choose to expose these “other forces” for who and what they are? Africans can choose to put down the guns and stop the killing of Africans by Africans to serve the interests of “other forces”?

In order to do this however, Africa must be able to show the world irrefutably that we have our own coherent framework of African values, principles and innovative methods that enable us to find win/win solutions to conflicts such as these with the highest integrity. We cannot do this if we ourselves are motivated by greed and lust for power over each other.

I believe Africa does have an authentic basis for such a coherent framework in Ubuntu. The ILP also gives us some very powerful tools for reframing and managing the conflicts in Africa differently.

Whether our ideals of leadership, with all the hopes and dreams on the Wall of Greatness, will continue to exist only as the rhetoric of debate or become part of Africa’s new reality is what the world is waiting to see.

Des Collier
South Africa
9/1/07