Leadership in Colonial Africa highlights colonial disruptions of traditional leadership patterns in Africa and how African leaders, traditional and nationalist, reacted to these disruptions. Dr Jallow examines the emergence of modern leadership cultures in Africa and argues that leadership studies theory may usefully be deployed in the study of African leadership
Taken together, the chapters in this book represent a tapestry of leadership frameworks and cultures in colonial Africa. Scholars across disciplines explore the nature and evolution of leadership born of the colonial encounter between white colonialists and native Africans as well as the leadership that ultimately led to independence.
Writing in the introduction, Dr Jallow expostulated: “Studies on African leadership are largely absent from the rapidly growing field of leadership studies. Yet, no other continent faces the magnitude of leadership crisis Africa faces. This volume and the series of which it is a part seek to encourage the process of bringing Africa into the field of leadership studies and encouraging a broader under-standing and more systematic study of leadership issues and concepts in Africa. One key objective is to raise questions over how we might theorise African leadership. What new theories or concepts of leadership might an Africa-centered approach contribute to the field? How might contemporary theories of leadership studies—organisational, situational, contingency, transformational, transactional, constructionist, and servant among other approaches—be applied to the study of African leadership? How might organisational theory be used to understand and reframe the chronic systemic dysfunction plaguing the continent? What are the linkages between, especially, the failure of leadership and the failure of devel-opment in Africa?”
Baba Galleh Jallow who was born in Farafenni was a senior journalist in The Gambia before resettling in the United States. He is now an assistant professor of African History and director of the African Studies
Programme at Creighton University, Omaha, USA. He belongs to the African Studies Association, the International Leadership Association, and the Peace History Society, among other professional bodies. Both books are available at amazon.com.
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