scholarly journals Developing transformational leadership for sub-Saharan Africa: Essential missiological considerations for church workers

2014 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kalemba Mwambazambi ◽  
Albert K. Banza

Aware of the particular importance of efficient leadership for Africa, this article investigates how Africans can develop the kind of leadership their continent needs to contribute to effective transformation. Therefore, essential notions and procedures are analysed and described; the meaning and qualities of transformational leadership that can effect solid transformation of both individuals and their communities are explained. Lack of theoretical and practical understanding of effective leadership, colonial history of the continent, inappropriate spirituality amongst post-colonial Africans, poor ethical role-modelling in African communities, and poor awareness of the need for effective leadership development are amongst the main causes of poor leadership in African communities. So, developing efficacious transformational leadership for Africa requires that the causes of poor leadership be removed. Subsequently, the flourishing of the strong moral and socio-political qualities necessary for solid transformational leadership equally demands an intentional work.

2010 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 147-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cassis Kilian

The history of African film began in the 1960s with the independence of the colonies. Despite all kinds of political and economic difficulties, numerous films have been made since then, featuring wide-ranging processes of consolidation, differentiation and transformation which were characteristic of post-colonial sub-Saharan Africa. However, these feature films should not merely be viewed as back references to specifically African problems. The glimmering fictions are imagination spaces. They preserve ideas about how the post-colonial circumstances should be approached. Seen from this perspective, the history of African film may be studied as a history of African utopias.


Urban History ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 412-434 ◽  
Author(s):  
LUCE BEECKMANS ◽  
LIORA BIGON

ABSTRACTThis article traces the planning history of two central marketplaces in sub-Saharan Africa, in Dakar and Kinshasa, from their French and Belgian colonial origins until the post-colonial period. In the (post-)colonial city, the marketplace has always been at the centre of contemporary debates on urban identity and spatial production. Using a rich variety of sources, this article makes a contribution to a neglected area of scholarship, as comparative studies on planning histories in sub-Saharan African cities are still rare. It also touches upon some key issues such as the multiple and often intricate processes of urban agency between local and foreign actors, sanitation and segregation, the different (post-)colonial planning cultures and their limits and the role of indigenous/intermediary groups in spatial contestation and reappropriation.


Author(s):  
Helen Tilley

There is no escaping the fact that the history of science took European places and people, broadly construed, as its original object of study. There is also no escaping that in African history, scholars interested in science, technology, and to a lesser extent environmental knowledge have concentrated the bulk of their investigative energies on developments since European (and North African) conquest. This focus on the period since the 1870s has tended to foreground dynamics relating to colonial rule and state-building, extractive economies and development, and decolonization and geopolitics. A handful of Africanists in the history of science have explicitly worked to cross the colonial divide, often taking single topics deeper back in time. The field as a whole, however, still needs to debate more systematically what the overarching narratives and benchmark phenomena should be for the precolonial periods. It also needs to grapple more explicitly with methodological tensions that arise from a focus on human agency and specific places (and the languages this requires) versus a focus on ideas, tools, and phenomena that transcend local or state containers (and the trade-offs this produces). As historians of science extend their reach into Africa’s pasts and bridge the colonial and post-colonial divides, it raises thorny questions about different approaches. Among others this includes how we produce histories of science, why they matter, and what we ought to bear in mind as we do. To this end, four goals are advanced here simultaneously: First, is the aim to open a dialogue with historians of science working outside Africa about ways Africanist scholarship speaks to and could be incorporated into the field as a whole (encouraging non-Africanists to consider the blind spots of “global” histories). Second, is the objective to draw attention to the pitfalls and benefits of different research methods and theoretical assumptions, especially as they relate to expert knowledge (an analysis that may be most useful for students entering the field). Third, is the ambition to explore a set of topics that connect deeper time periods to more recent developments (topics that invite critical scrutiny from specialists and generalists alike). Finally, is the desire to foreground the many different ways people across sub-Saharan Africa have initiated, responded to, and been incorporated into the production of knowledge. Africa has been a site of rich and varied epistemological and material experiments for millennia—some deleterious, some beneficial, and all imbued with different kinds of power. Acknowledging this long-standing history can serve to correct stereotypes that suggest otherwise. It can also contribute to debates within the history of science as the field continues to move away from its original focus on Europe and Europeans.


Author(s):  
Brian Stanley

This book charts the transformation of one of the world's great religions during an age marked by world wars, genocide, nationalism, decolonization, and powerful ideological currents, many of them hostile to Christianity. The book traces how Christianity evolved from a religion defined by the culture and politics of Europe to the expanding polycentric and multicultural faith it is today—one whose growing popular support is strongest in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, China, and other parts of Asia. The book sheds critical light on themes of central importance for understanding the global contours of modern Christianity, illustrating each one with contrasting case studies, usually taken from different parts of the world. Unlike other books on world Christianity, this one is not a regional survey or chronological narrative, nor does it focus on theology or ecclesiastical institutions. The book provides a history of Christianity as a popular faith experienced and lived by its adherents, telling a compelling and multifaceted story of Christendom's fortunes in Europe, North America, and across the rest of the globe. It demonstrates how Christianity has had less to fear from the onslaughts of secularism than from the readiness of Christians themselves to accommodate their faith to ideologies that privilege racial identity or radical individualism.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (10-3) ◽  
pp. 238-246
Author(s):  
Olga Dzhenchakova

The article considers the impact of the colonial past of some countries in sub-Saharan Africa and its effect on their development during the post-colonial period. The negative consequences of the geopolitical legacy of colonialism are shown on the example of three countries: Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of Angola, expressed in the emergence of conflicts in these countries based on ethno-cultural, religious and socio-economic contradictions. At the same time, the focus is made on the economic factor and the consequences of the consumer policy of the former metropolises pursuing their mercantile interests were mixed.


Itinerario ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Keese

The crossroads of nationalist historiographies in sub-Saharan Africa and of the history of developmentalist attempts that characterise the European late colonial states, have left us with very incomplete images of important trajectories. In the seemingly more “liberal” large colonial empires—notably the French and British—sails were set by 1945 towards a policy of investment and economic change. Some of the scholarly debates question whether this investment was genuine or just a last resort to avoid (rapid) decolonisation; others put the emphasis on inadequate routines of development implemented in these territories, many of which have apparently been continued since decolonisation.In this context, we encounter a clear lack of understanding about how decisions made by individual actors on the administrative level interacted with the larger panorama of social conditions in colonial territories, and of the consequences that these interactions had for the paths towards decolonisation. For a smaller empire such as the Belgian colony of Congo-Léopoldville, these processes are still more obscure; and for the colonies ruled by authoritarian metropoles, as in the cases of territories under Spanish and Portuguese rule, stagnation and absence of change are often taken for granted. In other words, these territories, which were under the rule of metropoles regarded as rather weak in economic terms, are treated as unrepresentative of the broader, European movement towards change in colonial policies. However, the conditions of change towards economic and social modernisation in this latter group of empires, even when inhibited by lack of funding and weak professionalisation of the administration, are frequently very telling for the broader range of challenges that the late colonial states faced.


Author(s):  
Claire H. Griffiths

Gabon, a small oil-rich country straddling the equator on the west coast of Africa, is the wealthiest of France’s former colonies. An early period of colonization in the 19th century resulted in disease, famine, and economic failure. The creation of French Equatorial Africa in 1910 marked the beginning of the sustained lucrative exploitation of Gabon’s natural resources. Gabon began off-shore oil production while still a colony of France. Uranium was also discovered in the last decade of the French Equatorial African empire. Coupled with rich reserves in tropical woods, Gabon has achieved, since independence in 1960, a higher level of export revenue per capita of population than any other country in sub-Saharan Africa in the postcolonial era. However, significant inequality has characterized access to wealth through paid employment throughout the recorded history of monetized labor. While fortunes have been amassed by a minute proportion of the female population of Gabon associated with the ruling regime, and a professional female middle-class has emerged, inequalities of opportunity and reward continue to mark women’s experience of life in this little-known country of West Central Africa. The key challenge facing scholars researching the history of women in Gabon remains the relative lack of historical resources. While significant strides have been made over the past decade, research on women’s history in Francophone Africa published in English or French remains embryonic. French research on African women began to make a mark in the last decade of colonization, notably with the work of Denise Paulme, but then remained a neglected area for decades. The publication in 1994 of Les Africaines by French historian Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch was hailed at the time as a pioneering work in French historiography. But even this new research contained no analysis of and only a passing reference to women in Gabon.


2020 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony C Diala ◽  
Jane C Diala

ABSTRACT The fate of marriage gifts during a customary law divorce is significant for the interaction of legal orders in sub-Saharan Africa, especially in the context of scholars' fixation with conflict of laws. In analysing this fatet, this article introduces normative intersectionality as a theoretical framework for a nuanced understanding of how laws and socio-economic forces interact in post-colonial settings. Normative intersectionality rejects a legal positivist view of rights, which neglects people's adaptation of indigenous norms to socioeconomic changes. In this sense, normative intersectionality is useful for addressing the traditional Igbo law of matrimonial property, which regards a married woman's property rights as subsumed in her husband's rights. Using the division of marriage gifts in Southern Nigeria as a case study, the article draws attention to how legal orders speak to, rather than against, each other, and in so doing, stresses the adaptive character of indigenous laws. It argues that normative intersectionality illumines the interplay of gender equality, property rights and legal pluralism. Accordingly, it urges judges to use the imitative nature of legal pluralism in post-colonial settings to remedy entrenched systems of injustice and inequality, which often hide under the banner of tradition. Keywords: Adaptive legal pluralism, marriage gifts, African customary law, matrimonial property rights.


2015 ◽  
Vol 34 (9) ◽  
pp. 1161-1180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teerapun Chaimongkonrojna ◽  
Peter Steane

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of the Full Range Leadership Development Program (FR-LDP) of middle managers of a furniture company in Thailand and explore how they experience the leadership development phenomenon. It addresses the fundamental question of how effective leadership behaviors occur and are sustained. Design/methodology/approach – In total, 31 middle managers completed a six-month multi-methods development program of three alternating training sessions and on-the-job practice. A 360-degree feedback survey of the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire 5X Short, comprising 284 questionnaires of “leaders” and “raters,” was used to measure the change in effective leadership behaviors and the overall leadership outcome. A sub-sample of 20 participants from these managers was selected for in-depth interviews at the end of the intervention. Semi-structured interviews and critical incident analysis was applied to understand the leadership experience of these managers. Findings – The study revealed that leadership behavior and overall outcome performance had improved over the course of the FR-LDP. The program did contribute positively to individual learning. Sustained effectiveness was not due solely to the development or intervention process, but also on individual objectives and action, together with supervisor interest and support. Research limitations/implications – The study provides a valid, in-depth insight into leadership in Thailand, which has practical application. However, the size of the sample may not be sufficient for broad generalizations in other cultural contexts or environments. Originality/value – The study extends the understanding of how middle managers develop transformational leadership in Thailand. The study contributes to how middle managers learn what they need to know, how they get to know it and factors that influence their practice of transformational leadership in their workplace. The findings provide to organizations options on resources, talent retention and sustaining organizational performance.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document