In the first article in this series, I made the case for African immigrants recording and sharing in mass all their successes so that future immigrants have a shorter learning curve than those who came before them.

Today we’ll expand on just how we might be able to go about this

Mwangi What’s In It For Me

I wish I could tell you that your doing this will somehow make you a millionaire or the King of the World, but it won’t.

In doing so, you give back to the community from which you came and help raise up  future generations-or rather a future boat load of immigrants -”to your level” quicker so that all our boats can rise together and we can become the economic and social powerhouse that we know we can be.

I don’t know about you, but personally, I know I would not be as far along as I am in my life had people not taken the time out of their busy day to invest in me and my future.

Mwangi I Have No Expertise

That’s the wash of a hog, that is. If you are in a foreign country and you have a roof over your head, then you have a skill a future African immigrant needs to know about. If you have any form of hard earned income coming in, you have something to share.

If you have a rock-solid relationship in this Western world where everyone is a commodity, you have something to share. If you have had trials and tribulations and overcome, you have something to share. If you have been abroad and the culture shock has not driven you mad, you have something to share.

Alright, Alright, Alright, I Accept, I Have a Tip or Two to Share: How Do I Do It?

I think the primary principle we should remember is:

The information and the intention are most important. The Internet, blogs, telephone, letters, newspapers, radio etc etc are all just distribution tools.

The tools are not the ends in and of themselves.

These tools are used to disseminate information guided by a particular intention - e.g. the intention to see future immigrants do better. (Please tell me in the comments section if this idea is too abstract and I will describe it in another way that will make it clearer)

Here are a couple of ideas on how to do it:

a) Share on a blog: You knew I had to give this tip. Blogs are free to start up and if you want to host it yourself, it’s so cheap there really is no reason not to.

Speaking from personal experience, the greatest advantage that blogging provides, if you choose to follow in my footsteps or the footsteps of people like Thinkers Room, is that it strengthens and proliferates your brand and your name within a particular community both online and offline. Not a bad side effect for doing something positive.

b) Community Forums: Almost every African country, and in many places we as a continent have an online community. Whether its a forum, social bookmarking site, blog aggregator or just a blog where many people gather. Head on over there and assist anyone who might be making the move to a new country or is a newbie immigrant that needs some tips.

c) Get some penpals: If you know that someone in your community is about to immigrate over, start talking by phone, email or letter. Let him know how he can do things that you did. Give him some tips, some shortcuts, some ways to go around, under, above or through obstacles.

d) Give lectures at immigration organizations: If you are visiting your home country, go to the institution that helps people immigrate and just offer yourself up to give a talk during their lunch break about the pitfalls to avoid and the opprtunities to be seized abroad.

e) Write free reports: This is a tactic from the world of Internet marketing. You sit down and right everything you know about a particular topic that can be of use to other people and compile it into a free pdf report. Help that report circulate online.

I intend on doing this in the very near future so if you have no idea how to do this, check back in a couple of months and hopefully we’ll have a succesful model.

f) If You Know People from Mass Media Centres: Then go on the radio, tv or newspapers and just talk to the journalist about what future boat-crossers need to know.

For examples of this check out the Displaced African Press and Media Appearances page, and also check out SARFM radio every 2nd Saturday of every month where as of yesterday, I will be doing just that.

g) Youtube: It’s the 3rd most popular website on Earth, according to Alexa, and all you need to do to join in the frenzy is buy a cheap web cam. Check out the Displaced African Youtube page here. For examples of succesful African Youtube pages check out:

i) Ikahara

ii) AfricanRemix

Quick tip: If you can find a way to mix in music into your Youtube page that is a sure recipe for success. Poll after poll, article after article and simple observation will reveal that music is hands down the most popular thing on Youtube.

h) Podcasting: Again, an incredibly cheap and easy to implement endeavor. Put your podcasts on Itunes and they are accessible to millions.

Some Examples of What This Would Look Like

Not all these examples are specific to African immigrants:

1) Kelly’s article on Interview tips: Now picture this, tips for interviewing for a job in the States.

2) How to immigrate to Australia within a week guide.

3) Tips from an African Woman Who Started and Sold a Business for Six Figures.

4) Acolyte’s guide to apartment hunting.

5) Mwangi interviews Tabitha Togoi from the African Leadership Academy

6) Gal africana talks a bit about holiday visas

7) Nelson Mandela’s autobiography
Mwalimu.com

9) Dan Kennedy’s Google Videos

In the final part of this series, I will talk a bit about the areas that I feel we most need to record and share our successes so we can take this concept and talk about where we can immediately apply it.

The Newsletter

If you are a fan of this article or blog, I encourage you to join and give me feedback ( ) on my Immigrant Survivor Guide Newsletter by putting your first name and email address in the boxes below.

I Hate Spam, So I Won’t Share Your Email With Anyone.

In newsletter, once a week I send you short emails that give you actionable tips that you can immediately apply to make your immigrant experience better including tips on:

i) Making friends

ii) Finding employment

iii) How to stay healthy on the run

iv) Things to prepare before you immigrate

v) Staying in touch with people from your home country

vi) Tips on how to transition from a student to a permanent resident and/or citizen in Australia etc etc.

So please join, and give me feedback, by putting your first name and email in the boxes below:

I Hate Spam, So I Won’t Share Your Email With Anyone.

You…you’re just special!

You’re weird.

I don’t think of you like I do other people.

You deserve your own bell curve.

You’re not normal!

Are you normal?

You’re crazy!

Do any of the above apply to you? (Except the goat) Do you hear them regularly? If so, you have cause to rejoice. Gal africana, consider this article, a promise fulfilled.

The Madman of the Village is Dead

Gone are the days when being crazy was a debilitating handicap which held you back from any joy or meaningful achievement in society. The days when the ‘madman of the village’ was held as an example of what we shouldn’t do are long gone. The reason why begins with the definition of craziness in this day and age.

What Does It Mean to Be Crazy?

Go to answer.com (where else would you go really, the search results are usually so comprehensive) and they define craziness as…as…..insanity?! OK, that doesn’t help. So what does insanity mean? Insanity is:

Serious mental illness or disorder impairing a person’s capacity to function normally and safely

That’s the technical definition! Now we all know that 9 times out of 10 when people label others as crazy, this isn’t what they mean. They usually mean:

They are not normal, with normal being defined as what majority of people (or just majority of your peers) think, say or do.

That Brings Us to the List of 7 Reasons Why Craziness May Just Be Synonymous With Success

1) ‘Normal People’ Do the Wrong Thing…..A Lot

Social proof has always had power and in truth will probably always have some control over our decision-making as human beings. However, the underlying idea that it’s based on ( “If other people are doing it, it must be right.”) is so far from accurate. Among the things that majority of people have done or continue to do:

• Jim Crow laws
• The Colonial empires of the world
• Thinking of women as inferior
  
• Women wear heels
• Drug abuse
• Consumption of junk food (Mcdonalds is the most successful restaurant on Earth, isn’t it?)
  

Not exactly the smartest herd to follow.

2) The Great Names of the Last Century are All Crazy People
Once upon a time there was a man called Rolihlahla born somewhere in Africa. In the later parts of the last century, Rolihlahla, as well as some of his peers, including Tambo and Steve, began to propose what was a preposterous idea at the time.

He proposed that all black people were….gasp, shock, horror, equal to people of other races. Even worse, he and his peers were demanding that since blacks were equal they should actually have equal rights.

Now many decades later, we all know that because the Brits were too lazy or too incompetent to learn his name, they called him Nelson and his surname is Mandela. We also now consider Nelson Mandela to be one of the great statesmen of our time.

What is interesting though, is that all the way until the early 90s, people like Mandel, Biko and the ANC were considered (you guessed it) stark raving mad by the West.

So much so that Nelson and the ANC were classified as notorious terrorists(actually they still are apparently) as were the Mau Mau and many of the people we consider great freedom fighters today. As a further example, the head of the FBI hated Martin Luther King and called him all sorts of foul names.

In short, if you have a crazy ideology centred on improving people’s lives in the political arena, you may just end up being one of the great minds of the early 21st century.

3) Movements started as marginal movements:
Lest we forget, all movements start as a bunch of weird or misguided people in the fringe of society. The civil rights movement didn’t begin at the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Rosa Parks had been part of the struggle long before she refused to sit down. Martin Luther King was also in the game before the boycott. But once those two elements combined in the middle of the last century, they acted as the catalyst for what had been brewing under the surface for a long time but had not been the popular thing to do.

Fashion trends always begin with the crazy people on the margins of the community experimenting with a new way to dress. Once their trends become popular these fashionistas tend to ride of into the sunset looking for the latest weird trend.

Hip Hop began as a niche trend in Jamaica Queens in the late 1970s modelled on the Jamaican toasters and MCs. This niche trend, complete with its own culture, which began as a way of expression for marginalized black youth has now spread, not always in good ways, all over the world.

All movements must begin with one person who is willing to try out something crazy. One person becomes two, two become three, three become ten and before you know it, what was once a crazy, niche idea is now a mass movement that’s taking over.

4) To solve the problems of today you must think and act in a different way
Alby Einstein once said something to the effect of,

“Problems of today, cannot be solved with the thinking of yesterday.”

If you find yourself constantly butting against the same wall over and over and over and over again, perhaps take that as an indication that you have gotten to the edge of your current experience and it’s time for you to move on to something new and out of the norm for you.

5) It’s the essence of innovation in industry
Without craziness there would be no industry.

Can you imagine if Larry Page and Sergey Brin decided that the way information in this world was organized was just fine and could not be improved upon. A lot of y’all would have no idea this little blog exists (and I wouldn’t even know your blogs exist ) if these men didn’t decide to create Google to improve on the way the world organizes and consumes information.
Can you imagine how much of the world’s technology would not exist, if men and women had simply accepted what was the status quo and not tried to improve on something or solve a particular problem. No light bulbs! No electricity! No cheap cars! (Hmmm, considering the impact some of this stuff has on the enviroment, maybe not such a bad thing)

6) It’s only crazy until it’s popular, and then it’s just normal
So, who knows, maybe you’ll be the one who’ll improve on the design and do something new. Yes, you may be derided, chastised and mocked. But can you imagine if you succeed?…Well then one day your idea will be just a normal idea that was once thought of by this absolute genius but was derided, mocked and chastised by a majority of people who were obviously crazy and misguided

7) Being Crazy is Exciting
When you make the conscious decision to no longer live within the boundaries and rules of ‘ordinary conduct’, there go the safety nets of life. Without these boundaries, you now have to beat your own path, a lot of the time with no idea where the road will lead. Sure it’s scary, but it’s also exciting. When we are scared out of our minds, but still act, isn’t that what courage is all about? Isn’t that when we are most alive?

Before I leave,allow me to direct your attention to a nice, short article written by the First Lady of the blogosphere, R. It’s somewhat related and definitely worth thinking about.

With that ladies and gentlemen I hope I have made the case for living an uncoventional lifestyle that others may not approve of. I meandered, I twisted and I weaved, but I hope you and I arrived at the same place. I hope a few of you will release yourself from the shackles that others may chose to place upon you or that you may place upon yourselves and just go nuts (in a good way ).

If you are begining to see the sense in being crazy, make sure you subscribe to the site via RSS or email so that you can learn of more abnormal ways to change the world.

Be blessed and bless others,
Mwangi

How many emotions do you experience in a day?

How many negative emotions do you experience in a day?

How many positive emotions do you experience in a day?

According to Answer.com an emotion is:

A mental state that arises spontaneously rather than through conscious effort and is often accompanied by physiological changes; a feeling

Bring on the List

We recently got into a discussion with gal africana about how many emotions we experience in a day.

Gal, after much careful investigative work (with readers like gal, I really don’t need to work do I?) managed to find a comprehensive list of the human emotions that we are able to experience as people. The list is attached below as a pdf file (which needs Adobe Reader to read):

Comprehensive List of Emotions

Gal told me she was surprised that after reading the list: she realized she experienced a lot more emotions in a day than she initially thought. Now as I write this I haven’t looked at a list.

In absence of that, I think, I experience 2 emotions: mild anxiety and flow (state where I am high, happy, exuberant and full of life). Now, in real time like 24 people, I will examine the list and tell you the results.

Drum roll Please……..

In a typical day, I experience:

35 positive emotions

19 neutral emotions and;

30 negative emotions

84 EMOTIONS IN TOTAL ON A TYPICAL DAY

That’s Way More Than I Would Have Ever Thought

Who would have thought I could experience so much sitting in the house working on a computer! So today I challenge you to examine how many of the emotions in the pdf file you experience in a typical day.

A Little Game I Invented: Emotional Switch Game

A little something I came up with I call, the Emotional SWITCH! game (I didn’t want it to be some cryptic name like Emotions from the Abyss, so let’s stick with a nice, simple, straightforward name alright).

The basic point of the game is this:

1. Pick one negative or neutral emotion that you experience regularly.

2. Replace it with a positive emotion that you would like to experience in its place. Example: Instead of anxiety, you would like to feel assertiveness.

3. For the next 24 hour period (or longer if you wish), any time you feel anxious immediately replace feelings of anxiety with feelings of assertiveness i.e. any time you experience the negative or neutral emotion replace it with the positive one.

4. Rinse and repeat until you are consistently feeling the positive emotion instead of the negative or neutral one.

How to Make Yourself Feel Something

Right now let me take this little intermission to discuss ways in which we can make ourselves feel something e.g. How we can make ourselves feel assertive when we are feeling anxious. There are a few ways I know of, credit Tony Robbins for this knowledge:

1. External stimulus: When I watch African American movies I feel very confident, strong and assertive. When I watch a lot of indie films I feel depressed and scared. When I listen to R&B I feel safe, confident and secure. When I listen to hip hop, I feel aggressive. This is in no way a novel idea: Certain forms of media or other forms of external stimulus (including food, people, places, toys and things) make us feel certain ways. Surround yourself with things that make you feel assertive as much as is possible on the day you want to replace anxiety with assertiveness.

2. Remember and recall your internal dialogue when you feel something: You ever noticed how the way you talk inside your head sounds very different depending on how you’re feeling. When I am in a state of euphoria or ecstasy or joy, I don’t think. I maybe have one thought every fifteen minutes but other than that I just am and you may think you are conversing with a conscious, thoughtful being….nah, I’m just letting whatever is in my subconscious flow out. When I am anxious, I THINK! I sit and I over-analyze everything. I think about this blog. I think about the future. I think about my health. I tend to do it in a very progressive, Socratic, detached fashion and I have done pretty much the same thing for four years. What goes on in your head when you are assertive. What song plays in your head? What do you say to yourself? What images do you see? Bring them all back whenever you are feeling anxious and flood it all out with the assertive mental material.

   

3. Use your body the same way you do when you feel the desired emotion: Strictly speaking, what we should do here is pretty much manipulate our body so that we take on the same body language we have when we feel assertive. In my experience though, this hasn’t worked out -not to say it doesn’t, it works extremely well from some. It didn’t work for me because as I would be manipulating my body I would tend to over-think the experience. Therefore my general strategy-not always applicable-is to either go for a run or dance in a very aggressive manner when you feel the anxiety (or -ve emotion you don’t want). This results in you stepping out of your head and focusing on the run and/or the dance. This movement tends to result in a much better emotional state and from there go towards the emotional state you are after- like say the assertiveness.

And In Conclusion

One of the intentions behind the game is to remind ourselves, because we always forget, just how much control we have over our emotional states when you choose to focus on them. Once your confidence in your abilities to manipulate your emotional state have been reaffirmed, slowly move yourself towards a place where your day will be predominantly filled with positive emotions all the time.

In truth, I don’t think we’ll ever be rid of negative emotions because sometimes we need them. But that shouldn’t stop us from creating a head and heart space that is mainly about feeling good.

By the way, out of curiosity:

a) What is your favorite emotion? Mine are two: flow and quiet bliss ( I don’t know the exact name for it, but it’s a feeling where I am quiet, safe, secure and yet have like a volcano of joy just bubbling inside)

b) How many emotions do you experience in a day?

If you know your personal answer answer to any of these questions, leave a comment below and let me know what it is.

Be blessed and bless others,

Mwangi.

]]> http://www.thedisplacedafrican.com/2008/04/how-rich-is-your-emotional-experience/feed/ 0 http://www.thedisplacedafrican.com/2008/01/is-africans-what-is-wrong-with-africa/ http://www.thedisplacedafrican.com/2008/01/is-africans-what-is-wrong-with-africa/#comments Sun, 27 Jan 2008 19:53:18 +0000 Mwangi http://www.thedisplacedafrican.com/86/is-africans-what-is-wrong-with-africa/

Hey,

Today I thought I would share with you all two great resources all revolving around answering the same question: What’s wrong with Africa? Is it Africans?

The first is a great article written by my great friend and fellow administrator of the African Dream’s Group. I have posted it below word for word. Great article by a great thinker.
The second is a discussion I had on the forums at www.mashada.com. You can find the discussion Is Africa the Problem? Or Is It Problem Africans by clicking on this link. I post under the name t.D.A. (the Displaced African). Enjoy and I hope it serves and teaches.

Be blessed; bless others,

Mwas

The Poverty of Leadership by O. Tongoi

Africa. That one word has come to be synonymous with social strife, suffering, poverty and myriads other negative connotations. Yet Africa has always been and continues to be the richest continent as far as natural resources are concerned. Why then does it continue to lag behind in terms of development? Why hasn’t it been able to jump on the bandwagon of industrialization?

Many excuses have been offered so far in an effort to explain this phenomenon and make sense of Africa’s current predicament. Many culprits have been named over the years. Among them are poverty, corruption, insufficient foreign aid among others. Yet these challenges have been overcome by other countries, societies and nations the details of which are beyond the scope of this paper. Very rarely is the underlying issue addressed however, that of poor leadership. And when it is addressed it is never done so in a conclusive manner.

“Africa has long been saddled with poor, even malevolent, leadership: predatory kleptocrats, military-installed autocrats, economic illiterates, and puffed-up posturers. By far the most egregious examples come from Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Zimbabwe — countries that have been run into the ground despite their abundant natural resources. But these cases are by no means unrepresentative: by some measures, 90 percent of sub-Saharan African nations have experienced despotic rule in the last three decades. Such leaders use power as an end in itself, rather than for the public good; they are indifferent to the progress of their citizens (although anxious to receive their adulation); they are unswayed by reason and employ poisonous social or racial ideologies; and they are hypocrites, always shifting blame for their countries’ distress.

Under the stewardship of these leaders, infrastructure in many African countries has fallen into disrepair, currencies have depreciated, and real prices have inflated dramatically, while job availability, health care, education standards, and life expectancy have declined. Ordinary life has become beleaguered: general security has deteriorated, crime and corruption have increased, much-needed public funds have flowed into hidden bank accounts, and officially sanctioned ethnic discrimination — sometimes resulting in civil war — has become prevalent.” Robert I. Rotberg could not have put it better. In his article titled “Strengthening African Leadership”, published in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs, Rotberg summed up the single most important issue facing Africa; Leadership…or lack thereof.

This failure of leadership is by no means a recent predicament. It dates back several centuries ago to the time of the slave trade. It is a known fact that the Arabs who facilitated the trade did not acquire the slaves through force or conquest of any kind, rather, they approached the leaders of the communities with beads, cowrie shells and mirrors and offered these in exchange for human beings whom they would later sell as slaves.

Paul E. Lovejoy wrote the following in his article, “Transformations in slavery” published by the Cambridge University Press: “Between 1450 and the end of the nineteenth century, slaves were obtained from along the west coast of Africa with the full and active co-operation of African kings and merchants. (There were occasional military campaigns organized by Europeans to capture slaves, especially by the Portuguese in what is now Angola, but this accounts for only a small percentage of the total.) In return, the African kings and merchants received various trade goods including beads, cowrie shells (used as money), textiles, brandy, horses, and perhaps most importantly, guns. The guns were used to help expand empires and obtain more slaves…”

I had earlier stated that the Arabs did not acquire the slaves through conquest of any kind. Allow me to retract that statement because they in fact pulled off a great coup by obtaining slaves in exchange for mere objects, and that is in itself a great conquest. Sadly, this conquest continues even to this day; African leaders continue to sell their people into slavery.

The slavery of which I now speak, however is not the traditional form of slavery in which people are held in physical captivity and made to work for others, rather I speak of an economic form of slavery in which people are bound by debt and kept in servitude by the chains of high interest rates.

Sample the following article by Susan George titled “A Fate Worse than Debt” published in the January 2006 issue of the NewAfrican magazine. She writes, “Debt is not a financial problem. It is a political problem. If you cancelled all the debt of the poorest countries tomorrow, the international financial system would not even notice. However, debt is extraordinarily useful for the [lenders]; it is much better than colonialism as you don’t need the people. But you get tremendous political advantage because you have continuous low prices for raw materials, everyone is forced to export at the same time, and you have political control over the government because of structural adjustment.” This article by George sums up the predicament Africa is in-economic slavery.

But who is to blame? For many years Africans have directed their blame to external parties especially Western powers while in fact the blame lies upon our leaders themselves. It would only make sense for the leaders of the lending countries to seek to improve their economic strength and the financial position of their corporations by creating markets for them. What doesn’t make sense, however, is why the leaders of the borrowing countries would agree to such terms and continue to dig their people deeper into debt.

One of the things that saddens African intellectuals most is the fact that about 40 years ago, at the time when most African countries were gaining independence, they were at par with most Asian countries in terms of economic and social development. However, since then the Asian countries which have come to be known as the ‘East Asian Tigers’, have realized tremendous growth and industrialization and have propelled themselves into the elite class of first-world countries. One can be quick to conclude that their planning was superior. The truth is quite the contrary; the master plans used by the East Asian Tigers borrowed heavily from those developed by the Kenyan government of the time. Why then is Africa lagging behind? Perhaps this excerpt from a speech by Nigerian president Olesegun Obasanjo can help shed light on the matter: “…In 1960, whatever parameters you look at, whether social or economic indicators, Africa has declined compared to the rest of the world, particularly when measured against those parts of the world that were comparable to us at that time such as Asia and Latin America,” he said. “Why are we failing while the rest of the world is succeeding, yet Africa [is not any less endowed compared to other parts of the world?] I believe one word answers that question: Leadership,” he said.

Later on in the speech he went on to give his solution to the challenge. He mentioned that “…it lies in doing things right, and in having the right leadership. The difference between doing things right and doing things wrong is enormous…Africa cannot continue on the same negative road (of having poor leadership) and expect things to work for the better.

One might ask the question, “How and when did this failure of leadership start?”

In my opinion, it all started in the colonial era when the Europeans empowered a few Africans and gave them some sort of education with a view to using them to govern their own people. As a result, a culture in which leadership was imposed on the people began. In this new culture, leaders governed using the divide and rule principle. They oppressed the people placed under them rather than empowering them. They had their own interests at heart and ensured that they kept their fellow Africans oppressed because that way they would remain relevant to the European colonialists and ensure that no other Africans could rise and take their positions.

The greatest tragedy was when Africans came to not only tolerate but accept such leadership, much in the same way as a terminal patient accepts their illness-without a fight and with a sense of defeat and helplessness. I must, however at this point mention the ‘Maumau’ freedom fighters as an exception because failure to do so would be a great injustice to them for the sacrifice they made in their efforts to repel the colonialists. Other than for the exertions of those few brave and fearless souls, the general norm of behavior was inaction.

Returning to my argument, allow me to fast-forward to the first few years of the post-independence era. This was indeed a decisive period in the formation of the continent’s political future. On the one hand we had excellent leaders such as Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and Tom Mboya of Kenya who were totally committed to the greater good of their people. By a sad twist of fate these great men were assassinated either by foreign powers that were against their ideologies or by their compatriots who considered them a threat to their own power.( At this point another great tragedy occurred, for no one rushed to the frontline to take up the fallen heroes’ battle cries, condemning the African dream to the graveyard.) On the other hand, however, there emerged a different breed of leaders. These considered themselves as heroes and rewarded themselves with large tracts of land and other public resources and set off along the path of self-aggrandizement while ignoring the greater good of their people. These sought to create economic empires and political dynasties by surrounding themselves with their tribesmen and appointing sycophants into political office regardless of their level of qualification or lack thereof. Unfortunately, the latter breed of leaders comprised the majority, thrusting Africa backward and in most cases erasing the gains of the newly-acquired independence of the African states they led.

Another category of early African powerbrokers is curiously missing from the aforementioned list. It is not without intention that I left military dictators out of this equation. These cannot be categorized as leaders but rather as tyrants. For this reason and for the purpose of focusing on the main points of my argument, allow me to exclude them from my argument altogether.

Two score years after the first generation of leaders had taken the reins of government from the Europeans, a new generation of leaders had taken over and these too seemed intent on carrying on the legacy of their predecessors. They continued to widen the rift between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ as a new political and social class system developed.

While I have noted that the first generation had taken over from the Europeans, the next generation was mainly composed of the preferred successors of the first generation. As such they had been groomed to take over and, reminiscent of the colonial eras, they were proposed if not outrightly imposed upon the people.

At this point yet another tragedy occurred; it took the form of the emergence of a new political system based on personalities rather than on issues. The stage was set for the elevation of certain people-mainly sycophants-into “great” political personalities despite their lack of character and/ or competence. Politics became a mere game of words and wordplay. Semantics blurred the underlying issues. Promises were broken almost as soon as they were made, if not sooner. A mockery was made of the justice system and some people turned out to be more equal than others. The mess continues until today.

It would indeed be a sad state of affairs and the greatest of tragedies if we concluded that Africa is beyond help; that it is too late to recover from its past. There is indeed hope for Africa-hope that is vested in a new breed of leaders. You may at this juncture be inclined to think that I am in the advanced stages of plotting a coup attempt; and if you are so inclined then you would be right to some extent.

The leadership which I envisage, however, is far from the traditional quest for coercive power and control of common resources that is as common today as it was in the past. I envisage a form of leadership based solely on unselfish ambition; as opposed to the familiar form of leadership where leaders strive to merge their own selfish ambitions with the common good of the people and attempt to strike a sort of balance between the two. I speak of a leadership style founded in the greater good of those it hopes to serve, such that the leader would spare no effort nor avoid no sacrifice which would result in the greater fortunes of those that it serves. A leadership so deeply rooted in the principles which give it its mandate, that no entity can question its sincerity. Indeed, such leadership has been sought after and striven towards by many whose efforts, sadly, came to naught. The reason? I cannot claim to posses the depth of insight required to provide the answer to such a question but allow me this modest attempt…

The reason why this style of leadership and the success it promises has eluded Africans is based on a number of factors influenced mainly by our perception of leadership. From our up-bringing, lessons on leadership have been focused on the wrong attributes of a leader, concentrating more on what the leader is rather than on who the leader is. We look at the leader’s public lifestyle rather than seeking to know what the leader does when he is out of the lime-light. We place a lot of emphasis on the major decisions made by the leader while failing to see the minor decisions that the leader makes, or rather, ignoring those minor decisions and passing them off as irrelevant. This pattern of selective attention may be attributed to our fascination with the romance of the larger-than-life image created by the media and the fuss over major news-breaking events, oblivious to the fact that today’s news began falling into place yesterday, with the daily, routine and apparently ‘un-newsworthy’ actions and choices that were made in obscurity.

Africans tend to look externally for leaders rather than looking internally and taking initiative to lead in ways which are open to all of us. We have become so accustomed to passing the blame that we fail to see our own failure to make a difference. We each must strive to invest in our own capacity as positive influencers of those around us. We should not only search for virtue in others but must also vow to uphold it in ourselves. Africa is in dire need of people who can lead themselves. Africans have indeed been plagued by poor leadership. But in the end, we cannot blame the leaders who hold certain titles or positions in society. The buck stops with every individual African who is looking to blame external sources for their current situation. Personal leadership and accountability is the key to Africa’s woes.
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