Reclaiming leadership knowledge: Decolonising the study of leadership in Africa

Leadership studies have long been dominated by Western paradigms, often overlooking the diverse cultural, political, and socio-historical contexts that define leadership in Africa. Scholars have increasingly acknowledged the need to decolonise leadership studies, advocating for a more representative and inclusive approach that integrates African perspectives. Decolonisation in this context refers not only to addressing historical biases but also to creating frameworks that are rooted in African realities, traditions, and philosophies. This paper asks: to what extent has leadership scholarship moved beyond Western-centric frameworks to meaningfully integrate African perspectives? To address this question, 72 English-language, peer-reviewed articles on African leadership published between 2012 and 2022 were reviewed. The analysis reveals a growing, albeit uneven, engagement with African leadership paradigms, the enduring impact of colonialism, and the importance of integrating indigenous knowledge and philosophies such as Ubuntu into conceptualisations of leadership. Conceptual advances have consistently outpaced institutional and developmental change, and the field’s reliance on a small number of indigenous frameworks risks reproducing the reductive tendencies it seeks to displace. The study’s restriction to English-language publications also means that leadership perspectives from Francophone and Arabic-speaking Africa, including North Africa and the Maghreb, remain largely absent from the analysis. These findings contribute to ongoing scholarly debates on the decolonisation of leadership knowledge and offer an evaluative assessment of how far that effort has progressed. They also carry implications for cross-cultural management scholarship, which can only offer a fuller account of how leadership operates across cultural contexts by engaging African perspectives as independent sources of leadership knowledge.