Watching news and conversing lightly at the University Cafeteria one cold evening, my peers and I inadvertently reflected upon our dear continent Africa. Where exactly, have we lost it at? Africa’s history is indeed replete with creativity, resilience and nobility. Traditionally, Africa has been home to great leadership. Despite leading in extremely difficult internal circumstances and facing external interference, a good number of the first and second generation post-colonial African leaders have left behind impressive legacies. The likes of Nelson Mandela of South Africa, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, to name but four. They proved to be African leaders who rose to the occasion and met the challenges of their time - even if the degree to which they were or were not successful in that regard may be debatable. …show more content…
The indisputable and comparatively recent historical and violent disruption effected by the slave trade, colonial domination, cold war and ideological rivalries and the continued misunderstanding of our situation perpetuated by neocolonialism have left profound effects on our societies. Unlike colonized people elsewhere, we in Africa could not counter these disparaging scourges with the mitigating effect of our own glorious past. Ours being the land of those who invented neither gunpowder nor compass, nor gave birth to universalist religion, still less to expanding empires, these predicaments are bound to be poignantly devastating. No other people in the world are unjustifiably reminded of their purported “inferiority”, and no other people are so disarmed to combat the false allegation. This fact alone invests African leadership with a rather unique challenge to redefine Africa’s story and position in a world dominated by foreign centric models. Invariably, the task to re-examine history, legacy and culture is more significant to African leadership than to leadership in the rest of the