Leadership Lessons from Books I Have Read: The collective wisdom, knowledge and experience from the pages of fifty books

By Tshilidzi Marwala

'Professor Marwala has sought to understand what good leadership should mean by drawing on the collective experience of authors who have written on many topics.' – Former President of South Africa, THABO MBEKI
We cannot underestimate how critical strong leadership is in all aspects of our lives. It enables us to run our lives, homes, communities, workplaces and nations. Given its importance, it is pertinent to ask: What is the source of good leadership?
Albert Einstein once said, 'The only source of knowledge is experience.' Many philosophers have observed this and, if we accept experience as the only source of knowledge, can we extend this conclusion to leadership? Or is the basis of good leadership intuition or instinct? Or is it perhaps a combination of these?
In Leadership Lessons From Books I Have Read, Tshilidzi Marwala adopts the thesis that the source of good leadership is knowledge, and the source of knowledge is experience, which can take many forms: reading widely, listening, and engaging in discussion and debate with other knowledge seekers.
If leadership is derived from knowledge and knowledge is derived from experience, the 'experience' in this book is from 50 books that Tshilidzi has read, and so the source of knowledge informing leadership is the collective experience of the more than 50 accomplished authors who wrote those books including, among others, Chinua Achebe, Thomas Sankara, NoViolet Bulawayo, Nelson Mandela, Mandla Mathebula, Eugène Marais, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Daniel Kahneman, Karl Marx, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Nassim Taleb and Aristotle.
Divided into four sections, Tshilidzi shares his leadership lessons in the areas of Africa and the diaspora, the search for the ideal polity, science, technology and society, and the leadership of nations.
'Those who do not read, should not lead.' – THILIDZI MARWALA

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tracey McDonald Publishers
• Release date: Jun 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781776260935

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

We cannot underestimate how critical strong leadership is in all aspects of our lives. It enables us to run our lives, homes, communities, workplaces and nations. Given its importance, it is pertinent to ask what the source of good leadership is. Albert Einstein once said, ‘The only source of knowledge is experience.’ Einstein was articulating what was already known as empiricism. Many philosophers had already observed this, including Kanada in India and Aristotle in Greece. If we accept experience as the only source of knowledge, can we extend this conclusion to leadership? Or is the basis of good leadership intuition or instinct? Or is it perhaps a combination of these?

Leadership Lessons from Books I Have Read adopts the thesis that the source of good leadership is knowledge, and the source of knowledge is experience. Experience can take the form of reading, listening and engaging in discussion. The experience I describe in this book is drawn from 50 books that I have read. Thus, the source of knowledge informing leadership is, in this instance, the collective experiences of more than 50 authors who wrote these books.

The book is divided into four sections. The first section is derived from books that come from Africa and the diaspora, areas which require a great deal of good leadership. Modernisation in Africa has had a bumpy ride. Colonisation and slavery both devastated the African continent and her people. When African countries gained independence, beginning in the 1950s, it was to be yet another bumpy ride. The continent had to navigate the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States (US), and many countries found out first hand that powerful nations will act to maximise their own interests, and coups d’etat instigated from the outside left a lasting impact on the DNA of governance in Africa. African democracy tends to vacillate between optimism and pessimism, with new governments betraying the people soon after they are inaugurated.

I begin this section with Joseph Conrad’s depiction of the exploitation of the former Belgian Congo by the greed of King Leopold II. Conrad is a controversial figure, and some consider his work to be racially insensitive. The truth is that he was describing the colonisation of the Congo, which was inherently violent and racist. Next I discuss Chinua Achebe’s masterpiece Things Fall Apart. In the COVID-19 era, which began in late 2019, things certainly look as though they are falling apart, making Achebe’s novel an apt point of departure. Given the challenges that confront us, and our failure to tackle them, Ayi Kwei Armah’s classic The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born poses the question: are the ‘beautyful’ ones still not yet born? To germinate the ‘beautyful’ ones and birth a dynamic nation, we need to change our mindset. The next books discussed are Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Decolonising the Mind as well as The Perfect Nine, followed by Thomas Sankara’s Women’s Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle. African liberation will never be fully realised until women are liberated from patriarchy. Beloved by Toni Morrison is about the effect of the trans-Atlantic slave trade which had a profound impact on the African continent, making it poor, and on the Americas, making them, and particularly North America rich. In A Handbook of the Venda Language I discuss the Venda language, which is a composite of the Nguni, Sotho and Shona languages infused with words and sounds from the Great Lakes countries.

Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom reveals that Mandela acted not as an individual but as part of the collective. He represents a generation that included Govan Mbeki, Walter Sisulu, and Oliver Tambo as well as the lesser known Andrew Mlangeni who is the subject of The Backroom Boy. As Heraclitus put it, ‘No man ever steps in the same river twice…’ We encountered the Mandela generation once, and that is it. The collective he embodied was probably the closest we came to encountering ‘the beautyful ones’. Since the Mandela generation is past, we now need to forge a new path for a just society on our own. In Unbowed we look at climate change through the eyes of Nobel Prize Laureate Wangari Maathai. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s two books Americanah and Purple Hibiscus and NoViolet Bulawayo’s book We Need New Names are stories of wandering Africans who are disappointed by the failed project of a liberated Africa but inspired by the opportunities of globalisation amid a backlash of hyper-nationalism. This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga describes the anatomy of a decaying country, Zimbabwe. Africa’s Business Revolution is on the enormous opportunities that Africa presents.

The second section of this book is on searching for the ideal polity. I discuss Plato’s The Republic and use some ideas to theorise about how to build resilient countries. This would naturally entail building ethical democracies based on virtues, as Aristotle’s Politics explains. However, establishing this Republic requires understanding the mechanisms of undermining democracies and How to Win an Election by Cicero is turned to next. Furthermore, we need to understand how to build a social contract between the government and its citizens. Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince is an important reference on what power is and how to wield it for a particular end. Here, it is essential to study lessons from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract. But such a contract cannot be achieved if we are stuck in an era of superstition. It is vital that, as the African continent, we attain our era of enlightenment. The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine helps us navigate this transition. The role of religion in development is an essential consideration in the context of the African continent because the African continent is rapidly becoming more religious.

I discuss three books on the French Revolution: A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, The Twelve Who Ruled by Robert Roswell Palmer and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx. Palmer and Dickens show how revolutions descend into violence, while Marx elucidates how conflict between different classes can lead to revolutions. Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism discusses how a particular event in Western Christianity, the Reformation, has been instrumental in developing capitalism. Two books that show how free and open societies can be undermined by state violence are The Open Society and its Enemies by Karl Popper and George Orwell’s 1984. Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil reveals how evil can arise in ordinary men. Finally, Caste by Isabel Wilkerson discusses how the caste system has shaped societies in India, the United States and South Africa.

The themes in the third section are science, technology and society. I begin with The Soul of the White Ant by Eugène Marais which describes intelligence from the termite’s perspective. Then I look at The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn which describes how scientific revolutions manifest themselves, and introduces the phrase ‘the paradigm shift’ into the English language. Irrational Exuberance by Robert Shiller discusses how enthusiasm can cloud our rationality and affect how we participate in markets and politics. In Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond proposes that guns, germs and steel enabled conquest that led to colonisation. Next I discuss Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. ‘Nudging’ is a process of getting people to behave in a certain way without them realising it. Deep Fakes by Nina Schick explains how an AI technique called the Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can be used to generate fake people. In this way videos and pictures can be altered to achieve a particular political agenda. The impact of this on ‘freedom, liberty and prosperity’ is far reaching.

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman discusses how human thinking can lead to irrational decisions. Homo Deus by Yuval Harari is about the future of humanity when humans turn into gods able to augment intelligence and other attributes associated with gods. The Amazon Way on IoT by John Rossman is on the Internet of Things. Things are connected via the internet; for example, clothes and other wearables are connected to the internet, allowing them to monitor people’s health and communicate the information directly to doctors. Deep Medicine by Eric Topol looks at how AI can be used in the medical field to augment and, in many instances, replace health workers such as doctors. Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom deals with how the capability of AI will increase and evolve and the implications this evolution will have on the future of humanity. Profiles in Corruption by Peter Schweizer examines the corruption of politicians in the United States, especially those who claim to be working on behalf of the people. Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb discusses how randomness can deceive decision makers, with severe consequences. The Economic Singularity by Calum Chace reviews how technological advances enabled by AI will significantly impact economic factors such as production and jobs. Range by David Epstein considers how specialising too early can be disadvantageous compared with specialising later in life. COVID-19 by Michael Mosley describes the need to understand the science of the COVID pandemic and the importance of science in tackling health problems.

The fourth section of the book is on the leadership of nations. In this regard, I study two critical leaders of China, Deng Xiaoping and Xi Jinping. Through Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China by Ezra Vogel and The Governance of China by Xi Jinping, I interrogate how Deng laid the foundation for modern China and how Xi is taking China to a new era which, it is expected, will lead to China emerging as the largest economy in the world. I also discuss Leadership in Turbulent Times by Doris Kearns Goodwin, which examines four presidents who led the US in times of great crisis. They are Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson. Finally, I look at A Promised Land by Barack Obama.

In the conclusion, I detail 50 leadership lessons I have identified in all the 50 books I have considered.

SECTION A

AFRICA AND THE DIASPORA

This section examines books written on Africa and the diaspora. They were written by, among others, authors such as Joseph Conrad, Chinua Achebe, Ayi Kwei Armah, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Thomas Sankara, Toni Morrison, Nelson Mandela, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and NoViolet Bulawayo. I contextualise these books within the framework of the 4IR and outline leadership lessons that can be drawn from them.

CHAPTER 2

Lessons from

Heart of Darkness

by Joseph Conrad

Princeton University, one of the most prestigious universities in the world, dropped the name Woodrow Wilson from its policy school in 2020.¹ Wilson was a celebrated professor who later became President of Princeton and the Governor of New Jersey, before becoming the 28th President of the United States. But Wilson was perhaps best known for enforcing racial discrimination in the public service. Princeton dropped Wilson’s name 73 years after they honoured him in large part because of the anti-racism movement that gripped the world after the brutal murder of George Floyd in 2020. This movement grew so substantially that statues of men who were once enslavers and colonisers fell. For example, the University of Oxford agreed to remove the statue of Cecil John Rhodes who pillaged Southern Africa through violence and murder.

The Charleston City Council in South Carolina voted to remove the statue of the former US Vice-President John Calhoun who was one of the confederate leaders who fought in the American Civil War to protect the system of enslaving African Americans. It is estimated that he owned around 80 slaves. The statue of another confederate, Johnny Reb, was also removed in Virginia. Other statues of confederate leaders who faced a similar fate include Jefferson Davis and Charles Linn. These statues were removed either because authorities had voted for their removal or the Black Lives Matter activists forcibly removed them.

What is the genesis of the Black Lives Matter movement?

Why has this moment arrived now? Police have been killing African Americans for a long time. Victims have included Eric Garner, Michael Brown and Walter Scott, and there are countless more. This moment came in 2020 because of the confluence of Trumpism, technologies of the 4IR such as social media, the COVID-19 pandemic and economic failures resulting from uncontrolled globalisation. There was also a renewed sense of urgency to resolve some of the issues regarding the American Civil War (1861-65) on how to handle the legacy of the Confederate’s politics.

Is there a middle ground?

Former president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, in his response to an article I wrote on statues, wrote,

… people should be free even to pose such questions as – what shall we do with the Voortrekker Monument? But nobody has a unilateral right to decide to blow up the Monument on the basis that the Voortrekkers oppressed the indigenous people – which they did!

In 2020, the then Vice-Chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand, Adam Habib, penned a critical piece where he advocated for the reimagination of the statues as an option rather than their destruction. Unfortunately, statues are monuments which honour rather than shame. For instance, in Bristol in the United Kingdom the statue of Edward Colston, who made his fortune in the slave trade, was toppled and thrown into the sea. How do you reimagine the statue of former US President Thomas Jefferson, who enslaved more than 600 African Americans? Do we insert a statement as a buffer of sorts that says, ‘here is a man who condemned people to prolonged poverty’?

Given that people are fundamentally flawed, how do we balance the good and the bad of an individual and use it as a basis for honour or condemnation? This suggests that the concept of letting a statue stand or fall is a subjective matter. If only the pure should be honoured then there will be no one to honour because such a person does not exist.

In the Christian doctrine salvation is achieved through repentance. In other words, even if you have spent your entire life killing people, if you repent in your last hour you are absolved from sin. But this cannot be the criterion to determine whether a person is honoured or condemned.

Physicist Pascual Jordan contributed immensely to quantum mechanics. However, he missed out on the Nobel Prize for Physics, which was awarded to his collaborator Max Born, because Jordan joined the brown shirts, a Nazi paramilitary organisation. The Nobel Prize Committee rightly found that his evil deeds far outweighed his excellence in physics. The same must apply for other perpetrators of atrocities such as Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany, King Leopold II for his actions in the Congo, and Cecil John Rhodes in Southern Africa.

No amount of reimagination will atone for the evil deeds of people memorialised through statues, and therefore they belong in a museum.

What is to be done?

But what do we do about books? Fundamentally, I am opposed to the banning or burning of books and the destruction of history. Some books are offensive, such as Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler. This book is a bible for genocide and was the foundation of the Holocaust. Another example is Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.² Conrad was a Polish-British author who, in this novel, describes Africans as objects and uses terms like ‘savages’ and other racially derogatory words. The father of African literature, Chinua Achebe, described Heart of Darkness as a racist book. It is generally believed that Achebe was not awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature because of this criticism. Was Achebe’s assessment of Conrad correct? Or was Conrad writing about the Congo in the context that prevailed in his time? Can a messenger be crucified for the message they carry?

Heart of Darkness is narrated by Marlow, who sailed up the Congo River to look for Kurtz, an ivory trader. My interest in the story was in Conrad’s descriptions of the brutal treatment of Africans, who were subjected to beatings and killings, forced labour and the pillaging of their resources. Historically, the story is set during the reign of Belgium’s King Leopold II, who personally owned the Congo. In his pursuit of the country’s riches, approximately ten million Africans, who accounted for half of the population, perished.

The book brings to the fore the dispute between Spike Lee and Quentin Tarantino about the latter’s widespread use of the derogatory ‘N-word’ as a racial slur in his movies. According to Lee, only African Americans should have the right to use the ‘N-word’, and not white people, who may very well be descendants of slave masters. A contemporary question that can be asked is whether Conrad’s use of racial slurs and other dehumanising words have a place in our society. What do we do with such books? My view is that we should write stories challenging them. We should identify and discredit flawed or evil aspects of these books. But we should not destroy them because future generations need to learn from them.

LEADERSHIP LESSONS

What are the leadership lessons we can draw from Heart of Darkness? Firstly, we should preserve our heritage, whether good or bad, so that that future generations can learn from it. Secondly, we should challenge the negative aspects of our history intellectually. For example, apartheid must be challenged by writing books that identify its dark underbelly. Thirdly, we should not blame the messenger. If we do, we incentivise the messenger to alter the message to please society now and risk the danger of future harm through ignorance of the original message and the conditions in which it was formed.

In conclusion, like Princeton University, we need to change offensive names of institutions and relocate offensive public statues to our museums. Finally, we need to intellectually challenge books that promote violence and discrimination to ensure they do not capture young minds in their formative stages.

CHAPTER 3

Lessons from

Things Fall Apart

by Chinua Achebe

In the second decade of the 21st century the world is crumbling amid the COVID-19 pandemic and the global economy is on the verge of an economic depression the like of which has not been seen since the Second World War. The spectre of unemployment, inequality, and poverty facing the global population is unprecedented. There seems to be no real end in sight, and the popular opinion is that the virus is here to stay and that we will have to learn to live with it. At times like these, I am reminded of the opening lines of The Second Coming, a poem by W.B. Yeats:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Things Fall Apart

Yeats’ poem so greatly influenced one of Africa’s foremost writers, Chinua Achebe, that he took a few words from the poem as his title for Things Fall Apart, a book about the transition of a people from independence to colonisation. The main protagonist is an Igbo man called Okonkwo, who had three wives and ten children in Umuofia village in present-day Nigeria. He was a respected leader who had earned his standing through his prowess in wrestling. His greatest fear was that he would be like his father Unoka, who was deemed feminine and was so disrespected that when he died his body was left to rot in the forest with no proper burial. Because of his hyper-masculinity and on the advice of the village Oracle, Okonkwo killed his adopted son Ikemefuna because he did not want to appear weak in the eyes of his community.

Later, Okonkwo accidentally killed a member of his clan and was consequently exiled for seven years to Mbanta, his mother’s place. While he was away, his community changed and started to adopt Christianity under the influence of British settlers, much to Okonkwo’s dismay. While in exile, Okonkwo’s son Nwoye, whom he deemed to be feminine like his grandfather, adopted Christianity. Okonkwo disowned him. One day, Okonkwo and other villagers burnt the church, and were incarcerated by the British colonial court, humiliated, and physically beaten. At a village meeting after their release, Okonkwo – thirsting for Umuofia to revolt against the white establishment – killed one of the colonial officers trying to put a stop to the meeting. Everyone seemed disappointed with his actions and to avoid being tried in a British court, he hanged himself – an act that was scorned in the Igbo culture.

Colonial transition

So, what is the moral of the story? Okonkwo was a man who lived in a period of transition from an independent people to a colonised people. Transitions are difficult and are often fraught with danger. In physics, there is a concept called the phase transition, when an object changes from one state to another. For example, water undergoes a phase transition at a temperature of 0°C to become ice. Unlike water, where the transition to ice is perfectly reversible, the transition of a society is not entirely reversible. For example, the transition from an independent to a colonial society is not entirely reversible. The African independence movements did not entirely reverse colonialism. In fact, at independence, colonialism was in many ways replaced by neo-colonialism. Paraphrasing the South African activist and intellectual Michael Harmel, colonialism became ‘colonialism of a special type’.

In these transitions something has to ‘fall apart’ or die, and in the case of Okonkwo and his community, it was their culture and independence. Where was the fault line in Okonkwo’s village? Yeats surmised that societies collapse or fall apart because of two forces: internal contradictions and external forces. Umuofia died because the village could not defend itself from external forces such as British colonialism and conversion to Christianity. It also died because of internal contradictions, such as deep superstitions and hyper-masculinity, which manifested