Abstract:
The paper studies selected African writers’ dreams and fears, the way four novelists have been
diversely excited by the topical issue of African leadership and discerns that artists dig into past
history and tradition to reconstruct epic leaders, while fictionalising contemporary history and
behaviour to critique modern African political leadership. The paper examines how African leaders have
been portrayed in literary works of art, (Sundiata, Nehanda, Man of the People & Last of the Empire),
how they have behaved on the ground and suggests theory for those kinds of behaviour. The purpose
is to argue that the lack of transformational leadership is the bane of African politics. A cursory look at
the relationship between the current crop of African political leaders and their nations’ citizens prompts
effective performance and good governance enthusiasts to question the apparent absence of important
transformational leadership tenets among most African leaders. That relationship is often marked with
a literal cordoning off of the masses from the person they made leader; the leader and the led seem not
to share a vision, yet the leader professes to champion a national vision towards which he pulls the
followers. The paper argues that Nkrumah and Nyerere’s separate calls for African leaders to be
weaned from foreign ideologies attest to the perennial lack of a home-grown vision in the African
leaders by dint of their disregard for the needs and conditions of their followers. Hence, the conduct of
national politics in post independent Africa has been fundamentally antithetical to the tenets of
transformational leadership maybe because after independence most liberation movements either
failed or refused to transform themselves into governing movements with all that goes with statecraft.
To appreciate the behaviour of African leaders we turn to Mazrui’s tribal theories of leadership: the
elder, the warrior and the sage traditions. The research suggests that African politicians could benefit
from borrowing leadership styles from Burns’ (1978) and Bass’ (1985) transformational models of
leadership. It contends that Africa needs transformational political leaders able to personify, articulate
and defend a national vision, and thus garner voluntary support from the diverse masses, but, instead,
has lately been ‘blest’ with inconsistent leaders, those who rule by quid pro quo and, at worst, outright
dictators.
