How Modern Humans Populated Africa

In his thoughts on the origins of our species, Charles Darwin speculated that the first humans most likely arose in Africa. This was not a popular view in Victorian England where the need to justify the colonial oppression of other races led, almost unquestioningly, to the assumption that Europe must have been the source of such a dramatic evolutionary shift of gears. Ever the rationalist, but a cautious one, Darwin did not retract his views but neither did he press his point—he had stirred up enough controversy already.

Finds in Kenya show the presence of modern humans around 180,000 years ago. In no other part of the world do we find evidence of modern humans anywhere close to this date. In fact, although there was a small colony that died out in the Middle East 115,000 years ago, the first sustained movement of people out of Africa only occurred 70,000 years ago. The mitochondrial DNA evidence also suggests that all humans had a common ancestor—the approximate mutations clock dates this to about 200,000 years ago in Africa. The Y-chromosome evidence also points to a common male ancestor in Africa around the same period.

The African continent has a dozen or so mitochondrial DNA lines and has far greater genetic diversity than any other region in the world. In fact, Africa has more genetic diversity than the rest of the world put together. Much of this diversity parallels linguistic boundaries; there are over 2,000 ethno-linguistic groups in Africa. In fact, the continent contains a third of the world's languages. This diversity is another piece of evidence that points to an African origin for modern humans, as genetic diversity decreases the further one gets from any source population of a species. However, other features of the African landscape have also helped preserve this extensive differentiation—and this diversity has had a major impact on African cultural DNA.

Subsequent genetic analysis of African populations, in particular by Sarah Tishkoff and her colleagues, indicates that there are nine ancestral clusters in Africa that are closely related to modern linguistic divisions.¹ Mitochondrial analysis is helpful in outlining how Africa was populated. The original mitochondrial line is referred to as L1, and this is the source of all lines anywhere. There is debate as to where L1 arose—southern Africa is a possibility. However, it appears that East Africa was the place where the line expanded and there was a movement of L1 to central Africa and back possibly to southern Africa about 120,000 years ago. About 100,000 years ago another divergent line appears, L2, probably also in East Africa. L2 populations moved to western and central Africa 30,000 to 70,000 years ago. Yet another line, L3, also seems to have arisen between 70,000 and 100,000 years ago in East Africa and is now spread throughout Africa. One offshoot of L3 is the source line for all humans outside of Africa. The Y-chromosome data are consistent with a movement of people out of East Africa into other parts of the continent, as well as a splinter group moving out to populate the rest of the world.

The above population movements spread hunter-gatherers throughout the continent. Remnants of these populations, such as the Khoisan of South Africa and the Hadsa and Sandawe of Tanzania, remain dotted about Africa. However, later movements have predominantly shaped modern African population structures. About 15,000 years ago some of the humans who left Africa and settled in the Middle East started to feel the pull of their original home and returned in small waves, mixing with local inhabitants, and bringing their agricultural and herding technologies. Five out of the 14 population clusters identified by Sarah Tishkoff have Saharan or Middle Eastern connections. However, these intruders from the north seemed to know that the desert or semidesert was their natural abode and did not penetrate deeply into Sub-Saharan Africa. Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, argues that this north–south challenge in Africa, associated with dramatic shifts in the ecological environment, was a major barrier to the diffusion of agriculture.² In much of Eurasia, it was relatively easy for agricultural innovations to move along an east–west axis. The crops that fueled the agricultural revolution in the Middle East, such as wheat and barley, struggled in the tropics, while the domesticated animal livestock found African wildlife just too ferociously wild.

It was left to people who had developed agriculture locally to settle the Sub-Saharan regions and force the hunter-gatherer populations into niche environments deep in the tropical rain forests or the interior of deserts in the south. About 5,000 years ago on the Nigerian–Cameroon border, an agricultural people who had mastered the art of cultivating yams, oil-bearing palms, and perhaps also bananas arose. Around 3,000 years ago these early African agriculturists started to expand eastward and to the south. On their eastern journey they picked up cereal cultivation and cattle rearing, as well as iron technology. Around 1,000 years ago this expansion gained momentum and in one of the most rapid replacement movements of all time, Bantu speakers pushed into much of Sub-Saharan Africa, replacing or interbreeding with the existing hunter-gatherers. Today there are over 500 Bantu-related languages, such as Swahilli, Shona, and Zulu, spoken in different parts of Africa. However, as this multitude of languages suggest, regional diversity was preserved despite this replacement movement. As well as bringing new agricultural techniques, this Bantu sweep was responsible for the diffusion of a number of specific cultural practices and values throughout Sub-Saharan Africa.

Nature's Crucible: The Forces Shaping Africa's Cultural DNA

The way that humans populated the continent points to a variety of factors that have affected African cultural DNA. The first point is that Africa is our natural home. Nearly two thirds of the 200,000 years or so that modern humans have been around was spent in our African homeland. There is therefore a bit of Africa—and potentially quite a large bit—in all of us. In the accounts of business leaders, certain themes emerge with some persistence and regularity with respect to different parts of the world. When it comes to Africa, people posted there come up with things like “Africa gets under your skin,” or “Africa touches your heart,” or “Africa gets into your blood like nowhere else.” Perhaps we react in this way because at some level it is actually true—Africa is in our blood.

The prevailing consensus is that it was either in east Africa or southern Africa, rather than the west of the continent or the central tropical rain forests, where modern humans first burst onto the scene. Certainly, all modern humans outside of Africa can trace back their origins to east Africa, as this was the jumping-off point for the original global beachcombing jaunt that our ancestors embarked upon 80,000 years ago. When researchers look at the kind of climates and landscapes that people prefer, regardless of whether they live in the freezing tundra of Iceland or in the Saudi Arabian desert, there tends to be a bias toward landscapes and temperatures that prevailed and still exist in east Africa.

While our African origins can help explain, in part, our landscape and climate preferences, a more important point in terms of influence on psychological DNA is that East Africa is the place where modern humans spent two thirds of their time since coming on the scene. This is in substantial measure where we evolved our natural instincts. While some of those who left Africa also found environments that were relatively suitable for humans, others did not. They found themselves, or rather chose to fight for an existence, in places like the Arabian Desert, the Tibetan highlands, or the freezing wastelands of northern Europe and Siberia. The natural instincts that served us well in our original homeland would undoubtedly have needed to be modified in these unfamiliar and strange settings. I will argue that this critical fact helps explain some important features of African cultural DNA, most notably in areas such as attitude to controlling the environment, the use of power, and the approach to human relations.

A second significant feature influencing African cultural DNA is that there is much greater genetic diversity in Africa than in other populations. It is not surprising to find some elevation of variability at the home location of any species or subspecies that then goes on to inhabit broader territories, which is the case in Africa. Only one mitochondrial line out of 30 or so made it out of the continent. What is surprising is that studies of genetic diversity routinely find that there is more variability in Africa than the rest of the world put together. This is an astonishing fact, given that 6 billion of the 7 billion individuals populating our planet live outside Africa—yet it's true. This fact arises from the small founder population that set out from Africa to populate the rest of the world, but probably also due to some significant genetic bottlenecks that affected the early development of African humans, leading to a severe restriction on diversity that subsequent population growth was not able to overcome.

The impact of a high level of diversity has been accentuated by the heightened level of pathogen threat in Africa. The reasons that make Africa a hotbed of species origination and proliferation also make it a petri dish for pathogen creation—something that early European explorers discovered to their cost. Expedition after expedition into the interior was laid waste by a profusion of tropical diseases. It was not uncommon for parties of several hundred to be reduced to a handful within a few weeks of traveling. This eventually prompted Europeans to move to a model whereby they paid locals to go into the interior in search, for example, of slaves. Our ongoing arms race with invasive organisms has been one of the most powerful engines driving human evolution in the past. Recent research indicates, however, that this battle has also impacted social behavior and attitudes toward out-groups in certain cultures. Specifically, it appears that regions of the world with high pathogen threats developed cultural patterns that emphasized tight social bonding, avoidance of contact with external groups, and general suspicion and wariness toward those outside of one's circle.³

A consequence of both the preceding factors is that many other global cultures are more naturally set up for homogenization, with perhaps the exception of India, which also has a combination of high diversity and pathogen presence. These factors naturally lead to a push toward cultural fragmentation with smaller rather than larger units of social organization. Sure enough we find a profusion of clans and tribes in Africa, in many cases with distinct cultural and biological attributes. There are over 2,000 languages and ethnic groups in Africa, and loyalty and identification within these groups run deep. European colonizers took great care to understand these differences, and used this knowledge to play games of divide and rule. However, they were less careful about the way they left—and for the most part, headed for the exit doors in a disgruntled and unseemly rush. In many cases the Europeans left vast states that had suited them, but which pulled disparate ethnic groups into what people hoped would be a magical, new sense of nationhood. The Congo, for example, which is the size of Western Europe, has close to 250 ethnic groups and languages among its 80 million people. Nigeria has over 500 living languages within its borders. Many of the political and economic difficulties facing Africa stem, in part, from the imposition of artificial national structures on countries embodying extremely high levels of genetic and cultural diversity.

This presence of extremely high levels of diversity both between and within countries is also a common observation of business leaders operating on the continent. Doing business can vary enormously from place to place, perhaps more so in Africa than elsewhere. In addition, this means that the rotation of African leaders within the continent, which is increasingly being pursued as part of Africanization, is not always an easy process. It is not straightforward to transpose a Nigerian leader from one part of the country to another let alone to another country on the continent, without encountering some difficulties either of acculturation or acceptance. In terms of product acceptance, management style, and social orientation, Africa is a complicated mosaic of small groups.

A third broad factor that I believe has influenced African cultural DNA is perhaps less obvious. In spite of the fact that Africa is a natural home for us, this is not necessarily the same as it being an easy environment for humans. All the things that make Africa our original habitat also make it a welcoming home for an extremely diverse and varied range of plant and animal life. Ultimately, there is only one source of energy for the earth, and that is the sun. All other natural energy sources, such as oil and coal, are essentially forms for storing this energy in plant and marine life deposits. Africa quite simply gets more of this ultimate source of energy than most other places—unrelentingly so at times. Every day, more energy is pumped into Africa than just about any other part of the world. In places where water is not an issue, this has led to an explosion of plant life and a huge array of animal species—something that's evident in the lushness of the deep organic and earthy scents that hit you upon touching African soil.

Of course, this abundance creates challenges as well as opportunities. Beyond the obvious risk of pathogens and predators targeting humans, there is the sheer difficulty of holding back plant life—an ever-present threat, especially in tropical Africa, of everything turning into bush. It takes some work to clear a field in Europe, but not a Herculean effort to keep nature at bay thereafter. In many parts of Africa, this is a Sisyphean challenge and one that many people might be inclined to back away from. In terms of climate, the sheer energy that the sun pours onto the continent creates unpredictability and extremes. People living in cooler climates rarely have to worry about cyclones, hurricanes, or violent strong storms that can wash away everything before them.

It is often simpler to live with the power of nature than to try and control it when it comes at you with the energy and ferocity that Africa is able to conjure up. While northern Europe is a difficult environment for humans, it is challenging in a more predictable sense. Once one has worked out a way of living there, unforeseen daily events are unlikely to knock one's equilibrium. The unpredictability of life in Africa and the greater challenge of gaining control and retaining control of the environment are important elements of understanding the cultural DNA of the continent, especially around psychological attitudes toward time, mastery of the environment, and planning.

Another factor that has influenced African cultural DNA is the population dynamics that specifically arise from the unpredictability discussed above. Any species in the animal kingdom faces a fundamental choice when it comes to raising offspring for the next generation. What should the procreation strategy be? Should one raise large numbers of offspring and send them out into the world in the hope that at least some will survive? Or should one be more circumspect, produce fewer children, put more parental investment into care, and hope that a higher proportion survive? Biologists call these choices the R–K spectrum and argue that different ecological pressures influence where a species sits on this spectrum. Environments that are benign but unpredictable typically lead to a preference for R strategies. If you think your offspring do not require too much protection, but also feel that unforeseen, cataclysmic events could cause premature death, or the turn of fate could unleash a bountiful era of plenty, then it makes sense to put a lot of chips on the table. The reverse applies if high levels of investment are needed or the environment is inherently fairly predictable. Humans, unlike other species, can make conscious choices about these matters.

The pattern of a relatively benign but nevertheless highly changing and unpredictable environment is exactly what prevailed, and to some extent still prevails, in Africa today. Psychologist J. Philippe Rushton argues that Africans are culturally—as well as more controversially biologically—more R than Europeans who, in turn, are more R than East Asians.⁴ Fertility rates support this view. For example, Niger tops the list of global fertility rates with an average of 6.86 children per woman. Nineteen of the top 20 countries in the world in terms of fertility rates are African. The only exception to this is Afghanistan, a country where one presumes years of endemic uncertainty and unpredictability have also led people to invest in having large numbers of children.

The fact that Africa has probably had historically and certainly today a population structure heavily skewed toward youth also impacts its cultural DNA. This pattern creates great vitality and is a potential source of future talent, consumers, and overall economic dynamism. However, a powder keg situation can arise when the energy and optimism of youth hit the brick wall of frustration that societies that are languishing economically deliver to many of their young people. The world's press circulates countless stories of armies of young children terrorizing many African countries, prone to casual and almost unthinking violence. The root cause of these armies may not be obvious, but it may lie deep in African DNA and the gravitational pull of certain life strategies, particularly, when times are uncertain and difficult. The value people place on life in Africa may also arise in part from this and not just the level of poverty on the continent.

These five factors—Africa being our natural home, huge levels of diversity, high pathogen threat, the sheer difficulty of predicting or controlling the environment, and the preference for R-life strategies—have driven many of the distinctive psychological themes within African cultural DNA. They have created profound strengths in the underlying psychology and culture in Sub-Saharan Africa, which are a source of hope for the continent. However, they also highlight some challenges that will need to be negotiated as Africa takes its rightful place in the world. There are many aspects of this DNA that others can learn from, and Africa has much more to teach the world than is commonly recognized.

Community and Beyond

The head of the African division of a major multinational once reported to me an experience that initially mystified him, but which helped him gain a deeper insight into African relationship culture. Given the growth in the African market and its future importance to the company, he was promoted to the top executive leadership team. When he made the announcement to his people, he noticed that the African leaders expressed an unusual level of personal pride and satisfaction at his elevation. They kept talking about it, went around with an extra spring in their step, and insisted on wanting to acknowledge it at gatherings. At first, the Managing Director thought they were just managing upward well—if not a little too enthusiastically. After a while, however, it dawned on him that in a very deep and profound way, the African managers felt that they too had been promoted. In this sense, they did not see a difference between the MD and themselves. His elevation was their success, too. He began to understand that one's identity in African culture does not stop and start at the individual level. Rather, a person exists wrapped in a deep set of relationships and connections with others. The idea of an individual being an island is an alien concept to the African psyche.

On the Hofstede dimension of individualism–collectivism, African societies typically score strongly as collectives—but not as collectivist as Far East societies. There is a subtlety here that simply rating societies on a single dimension fails to capture. The Globe study has two dimensions relevant to this area: in-group and institutional collectivism. The former refers to the strength of ties to one's immediate social circles and the latter to commitment to wider social and organizational institutions. African societies score highly on the first, but achieve some of the lowest scores globally on the second.

Michael Minkov's dimension of exclusionism versus universalism, which looks at how widespread one's relational net is thrown, is relevant here—as African societies are some of the highest in the world on exclusionism. This data and considerable experience on the ground indicate that Africans are typically highly collectivist in their immediate team and within defined groups and tribes, but much more wary of other groups or wider identification. So while the African exists in a world where he or she feels intimately connected with others—often to the point of not seeing themselves as an individual at all—beyond their immediate community lies a world that needs to be treated more cautiously; a world of strangers and potential threats from others.

Here the very opposite of common interest and collectivism operates. Due to the colonial creation of vast states with huge levels of tribal heterogeneity, the rapid growth of urban conurbations, and the increasing presence of cross-border multinational companies, this is the world into which many Africans have simply been catapulted without too much preparation. Not surprisingly, in comparisons of global levels of national trust—posing a question such as, “Generally speaking would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can't be too careful in dealing with people?”—African societies score among the lowest in the world. Typically, only 20 percent of people say they can generally trust others in African countries. By comparison, this figure is over 60 percent in the Nordic countries, 36 percent in the United States, and 38 percent and 52 percent, respectively, in India and China.

The reason for the existence of this tight in-group orientation, coupled with distance and suspicion of out-groups, lies in three aspects that strongly influence African cultural DNA. These include the extremely high level of genetic, linguistic, and cultural diversity that characterizes the African continent; high pathogen threat; and the relatively late introduction of settled agriculture, which has meant that the ensuing concentration and development of large-scale collectivist societies has occurred relatively late in many parts of Africa.

This sense of interdependence at the group level is evident in many business practices. In South Africa, in particular, the notion of ubuntu—a word that literally means humanness—is often emphasized in business but also in society more widely. The South African historian Michael Eze sums up the core of this philosophy: “A person is a person only through other people. We create each other and need to sustain this otherness together.”⁵ This sense of interdependence creates a strong emphasis on teamwork and the collective good of one's immediate group—which can lead to a strong drive to employ members of one's clan or tribe. Western leaders can regard this as nepotism without truly appreciating the strong sense of seeing one's identity as being part of a broader group that drives such behaviors. This is why many successful Africans who live away from their community typically downplay their achievements for fear of being inundated with requests for help.

The pressure to provide for others can also be the root cause of ethical violations in companies. A problem that small African entrepreneurs face when they set up business is that members of their community simply want whatever goods and services the business offers for nothing. An African manager once told me how his father's efforts at setting up a shop were ruined because he could just not bring himself to say no to the countless members of his extended family who descended on his shop wanting the products for free.

There is plenty of evidence for this community orientation in African leadership culture. Our own analysis found that a full 51 percent of African leaders have an identified strength around working with and developing their teams, compared with only 24 percent of European leaders and 25 percent of American leaders. There can also be a reluctance on the part of African business leaders to drive a decision unilaterally in their senior teams, however authoritarian they are in the wider organization. It's not uncommon to debate an issue until the group reaches consensus—even often over a prolonged period. This tendency shows up in our data, too. A full 25 percent of European leaders and 23 percent of American leaders had a development need around intellectual openness and inclusive thinking, a dimension that looks at how actively one engages other people's opinions when formulating views. Only 9 percent of African leaders had a development need in this area, the lowest score globally.

This orientation also has an impact on how performance is judged. Success is often pinned on individuals in Western business cultures—something that can make people in African business contexts feel uncomfortable. There is a natural inclination to see everything as a team outcome, which means that conversations on individual performance or lack of it have to be handled carefully. Gary Watson, a consultant based in South Africa who works across Africa on human resources-related areas, says:

Many African markets are characterized by individuals that strongly relate personal identity to group identity. People in Africa tend to shy away from direct confrontation in the workplace and holding an individual accountable in a public forum only results in a passive-aggressive response. Taking people aside, exploring reasons for failure, and offering assistance is far more effective than admonishing them or threatening them on an individual level.

This sense of human interrelatedness is a deep source of strength in African culture more widely. When disease strikes parents down, other relatives or the wider community typically bring the bereaved children into their fold, looking after them as their own. If fortune smiles on the member of a community, it smiles on the whole community in a very tangible sense. A successful African is expected to take his or her community with them and to give and share without so much as thinking about it. African politicians, who do not mind taking the toughest of actions dealing with opposition to their regimes, frequently cannot bring themselves to remove members of their community who come to camp in the gardens of their mansions. In an analysis of power shifts in African societies, Michela Wrong reports how coups and regime change are rarely just an individual grab for power in Africa, but rather are seen as an opportunity for another tribe to enjoy the fruits of office: “It's our turn to eat now.”⁶

However, the other side of the coin—lack of connection to wider entities—also has an impact. When individuals are catapulted into the wider world, other tendencies can take over. It can be tricky to move local managers around Africa because acceptance outside one's own community is only slowly learned. Whole departments can form an identity and then develop mutual wariness or hostility with other groups that have also forged an identity, often around clan or tribal lines. Consultants in our South African office report that African leaders are often at sea when it comes to forming close relationships at a distance, or knowing how to navigate relationships or exert influence in a global organizational structure. Some tend to treat outsiders from other parts of a company with wariness and simply tell them what they think they want to hear.

There are wider consequences, too. The failure of many African states to gel as a nation, the high levels of ethnic and intertribal violence, and the level of crime that exists in large African cities likely stem from this breakdown of identity, so dependent on relatedness, as people are catapulted into unfamiliar worlds.

One answer for organizations is to progressively broaden people's identification with the whole business—not just people's own narrow area. Starting first at the unit level and then broadening to country, regional, and global levels of identification takes time, but reaps considerable benefits eventually. It is also helpful to have people meet others outside their area for relatively prolonged periods of time to build trust. At the national level, interventions or symbolic actions that drive national rather than more local identification are necessary to activate the ubuntu mindset. However narrow people's points of reference, a sense of interrelatedness exists and is a diamond waiting to be polished and made relevant to the context that many Africans find themselves in now.

Naturalness: Expressed and Denied

As many multinationals have moved from an expatriate to a local model of leadership in Africa, they have sought to put in place more coherent programs for developing African talent. At the highest levels, this typically means giving high potential leaders the opportunity to go to HQ, typically in the United States or Europe for Western multinationals. While such rotations can be broadening, they are not without risk. Not infrequently something akin to a personality transplant can take place on the flight from Africa. Confident, outgoing, and emotionally open executives can suddenly go into their shells and become a pale shadow of their former selves, appearing lost and ill at ease in their new environment. Rather than turbocharging their career, such assignments can leave both parties with what is often an unexpressed sense of disappointment. This does not always happen; some executives land on their feet. However, this experience was so common for one company we worked with that they put such assignments on hold until they had worked out a better way of ensuring success.

The inner experience of engaging a wider organizational culture can be jarring for African leaders. Thinking that they are part of a welcoming family that will open up to them, some find the experience of the new culture socially off-putting. “I felt I had had a bucket of cold water poured over me and my first thought was these people are so unfriendly. I wondered what I had done wrong. Then people started to tell me to speak up and that confused me even more,” one leader told me before dissolving into laughter about the whole experience of visiting HQ. Another African woman executive who had worked in the UK for some time said, “I just cannot get used to how cold people are…this makes me seem cold in return.”

These reactions make sense. Anyone who visits Africa will immediately notice the openness and warmth with which people go about their daily business. It becomes obvious just standing on any street corner in virtually any part of Africa that there is a different tone to the way people relate to each other. Greetings are typically effusive to the point of being melodramatic. Back slapping and physical contact is not only accepted but seems, in many instances, to be required. The overriding feeling that one gets in Africa is that laughter is everywhere. Indeed, the African division of one of our clients, Diageo (which has a big beverage business in Africa), identified joy as one of the distinctive features of life in Africa—and therefore one of the main themes that they acknowledge and seek to honor culturally within their African business.

However, this naturalness of emotional expression is only really evident when one sees Africans relating to each other. Those who arrive from the West are greeted with a certain wariness by locals. People may want to be open and warm but are not sure how you are going to take it. This can lead to caution until the rules of the game become clearer. Even a small joke, or sincere attempt at lightheartedness, releases a huge level of relief and helps almost instantaneously to ease and lubricate relationships. It serves as a signal that people can be themselves—an opportunity that is typically seized upon with enthusiasm and also relief. I've talked to many Africans who travel or who have migrated to Western countries. One of the most pervasive experiences that they describe is the jolting shock they feel when confronted with the reserved, restrained, and cool reaction of Europeans and Americans. This can put their naturalness drive in reverse and prompt a much more cautious approach to emerge.

There is tangible data to support these observations around restraint. Our analysis of African leaders working for the most part in multinational companies found that only 11 percent had an identified strength around emotional openness and authenticity, the lowest figure out of all regions globally, where comparative figures were in the 25 to 30 percent range. Surprisingly, the data indicated that African leaders tended to have low scores across a range of interpersonal qualities, the opposite of what we might have expected. Nearly 15 percent of African leaders were identified as having a development need around being engaging and building relationships easily, by far the highest figure globally. A full 21 percent were also identified as having a development need with respect to forming close, deep bonds. The figures for other cultures were in the 3 to 5 percent range with others. Thus, in global companies one sees the opposite of what one might expect standing on the streets of an African town.

Within Africa, there is evidence that this naturalness is an embedded aspect of the cultural values of many but not all African societies. In an extension of their original model, Hofstede and his team identified two additional dimensions in addition to their original four: one of these they termed indulgence-restraint. Societies high on indulgence were characterized by “a perception that one can act as one pleases, spend money and indulge in leisurely and fun related activities.” High indulgence societies were also typically happier—and unsurprisingly, there was a tendency for wealthy societies to be higher on indulgence given the emphasis on leisure. Yet despite this, many African countries scored very highly on this dimension as well. Out of 93 countries, Nigeria was fourth highest, Ghana tenth, and South Africa twenty-fourth. Only three Sub-Saharan countries were below the world average; Rwanda, Zimbabwe, and Burkina Faso. These three exceptions illustrate the earlier point about this naturalness dimension; just as with executives dropped into Western settings, in conditions of perceived threat, it can go into reverse.

The naturalness of people on the continent is not only expressed in human relationships. The distinguished Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński, who spent the bulk of his life writing about and reporting from Africa, witnessed the following scene after a man blew a whistle in a street:

I couldn't believe my eyes. Instantly the street filled with people. In a matter of seconds they formed a large circle and began to dance. I don't know where the children came from. They had empty cans, which they beat rhythmically. Everyone was keeping the rhythm, clapping their hands and stomping their feet. People woke up, the blood flowed again through their veins, they became animated. Their pleasure in their dance, their happiness in finding themselves alive was palpable. Something started to happen in this street, around them, within them. The walls of the houses moved, the shadows stirred. More and more people joined the ring of dancers, which grew, swelled and accelerated.⁷

The immediacy and vibrancy of many types of African music and dance is reflective of this naturalness. So too is the natural creativity that one sees in the way people communicate. There is another point to the episode described above: There is much less of a barrier between the performer and the audience in Africa. The restrained, passive, and somewhat wooden absorption of a piece of music or theater—with the associated terror of inadvertently making a noise or having one's phone go off that is so common in the West—is alien in the African context. Performance is something people participate in actively, whether it is in a formal setting or on the street, at church or at a work gathering. Even in cinemas, African audiences are not reticent about providing a running commentary on the events unfolding onscreen or engaging in a one-way dialog with the actors.

In communities with African roots outside of the continent, reactions to important events also exhibit this naturalness and theatricality. The play acting that the sprinter Usain Bolt engages in before a critical race, as well as his trademark lightning bolt gesture following victory, is not something that one would expect from, for example, a Chinese sprinter.

One reason why naturalness might be a psychological theme for Africans is relatively simple and straightforward—people in Sub-Saharan Africa are more natural because their culture has evolved in a part of the world to which we are at some level all naturally suited. The roots of our emotional patterns and orientation toward relationships evolved in an African context. When we moved away from this context, we had to put more of a barrier between what we might naturally want to do versus what we actually do. Survival in the arid deserts of Arabia, the steppe lands of north Asia, or the frozen wastelands of northern Europe required an inevitable suppression of certain natural instincts. The everyday notion of warm and cold personalities captures this intuitive understanding.

There is another more recent aspect to explaining differences in this area. Hofstede's team noted that indulgence was highest in societies that had, until recently, been pre-agricultural and those that were post-industrial. Societies that had been or were still highly agricultural were highest on restraint. They argue that, because intensive agriculture requires strenuous work, discipline, and tight social organization, it offers limited opportunities for self-expression. Societies with a stronger legacy of hunter-gathering or horticulture are therefore less burdened by the psychological demands of intensive agriculture to which more advanced modern societies with service-dominated economies are reverting.

Increasingly, however, Africans face a challenge with respect to this aspect of their cultural DNA. The world is moving fast and changes that took place over thousands of years for people in some other parts of the world have been telescoped into a few decades for Africans. The disruptive shock is particularly acute for people from Africa who have migrated to more economically developed economies or executives who are thrown into the unfamiliar world of the multinational corporation. The sheer unfamiliarity of the environment pushes the naturalness engine into reverse, but the underlying yearning still exists. It is not unusual for people to resort to a behavioral pattern of repression, oscillating between periods in which control is released. A great deal of writing on the African or the Black experience in Western countries focuses on how pressure can build up inside people. This pattern was so apparent to author Ken Pryce when he examined the West Indian experience in Bristol, England, that he titled his book Endless Pressure.⁸ The relatively high levels of mental illness, drug use, and crime levels found in many communities of African origin in the West may not simply be a reflection of poverty and socioeconomic status. They may also arise from tensions created by having to manage the drive for naturalness in environments where its expression may not be particularly well accepted or tolerated.

There are lessons for both international businesses operating in Africa as well as for local people themselves. Western businesses and schools, for example, can have a natural tendency to drive prescriptive behaviors that can feel overly suffocating for those whose cultural roots lie in African societies. Indian and Chinese leaders, coming as they do from societies with very high restraint scores, tend to find such pressures much easier to embrace. Businesses that operate in Africa itself can all too often create a culture that represses naturalness. Those like the firm Diageo—which embraces joy as a distinctive theme in its African operations—release more energy and creativity.

Multinationals could also do much more to support executives who move from African cultures to other regions to keep them from undergoing an aversive shock and retreating to their shells. As noted earlier, many African leaders operating in multinationals need help to ensure they show the best of themselves when managing relationships outside of their comfort zones. Overseas executives operating in Africa can also release energy and reduce pressure by simply modeling a lighter touch and being more expressive themselves. Executives from cultures where social restraint is more valued can fail to connect with locals because of this tendency, something that is already proving challenging for Chinese nationals operating in Africa.

More broadly, as African societies go into the next phase of intensive agriculture or industrialization, or encounter internal problems and tensions, one may see this attractive and appealing source of great creative potential in their cultural DNA decline. Hanging on to this naturalness is important for people's own sense of wellbeing, as well as for Africa's contribution to global culture. It is especially essential for releasing creativity, and for developing warmth in relationships—qualities that are profound sources of strength within African cultural DNA and that need to be nurtured rather than allowed to dissipate.

In the Moment

A while back executives at one of our pharmaceutical clients were taken on a trip to Kenya to help them understand how their company could cater to the distinctive needs of this important emerging market. Part of the visit entailed visiting a hospital. Outside the hospital the executives noticed a number of ambulances in various states of disrepair. Some were badly dented, others had doors missing, and all seemed rusted and had flat tires, if they had wheels at all. The executives assumed that these were disused vehicles, perhaps cannibalized to ensure the operation of the main fleet.

While they were there, the hospital received a call that a young girl who lived some distance away had been burned in a domestic accident and needed to be brought to the hospital with urgency. At this point the executives realized that the dilapidated vehicles they had seen were not some disused discards waiting to be ferried to the scrap heap, but actually constituted the main fleet. The hospital workers set to work with gusto putting wheels and tires on one vehicle to enable it to function. It appeared that no one had had the foresight to prepare any of the vehicles for what clearly was not an unusual demand for an ambulance fleet. Although the executives were shocked by this demonstrable lack of planning, they were also deeply impressed by the speed with which a vehicle that had previously looked to be well past its sell by date was made serviceable and dispatched to collect the girl.

The above example illustrates a point. The sheer difficulty of controlling the environment in Africa—combined with the fact that failing to do so is not so immediately fatal as in some other environments—leads to an important dimension of African cultural DNA: living in the moment. In response to the challenges of a high energy, biologically prolific, and unpredictable environment that cannot be easily tamed, people on the continent have had good cause to develop an instinct for taking things one step at a time, “as they come.” Planning for the future in a precise rather than more diffuse sense, has, at least in the distant past, been relatively more difficult in Africa than in many other parts of the world. People are more resigned to the vicissitudes of fortune and there is an internal acceptance of the futility of humble humans attempting to control the vigorous and rampant natural world around them. This promotes a stoic approach to life, deep resilience, and inherently high levels of day-to-day flexibility.

There is plenty of evidence for the idea that in the moment is a significant element in African cultural DNA. In our own analysis of leaders, 42 percent of African leaders were considered to have strengths around “intellectual flexibility,” the highest score in the world. By comparison, only 16 percent of American leaders were considered strong in this area. However, 49 percent of African leaders were seen to have a development need around long-term strategic thinking, again the highest scores globally. By contrast, only 28 percent of American and 29 percent of European leaders were identified as having a development need in this area. Only 17 percent of African leaders were assessed to be strong in the area of strategic thinking. The comparable figures for American and European leaders were 24 and 29 percent, respectively.

The second of the dimensions that Hofstede's team added to their original four was long-term–short-term orientation, based on the Chinese Values Survey. In addition, Michael Minkov identified a similar dimension using the World Values Survey. While the precise nature of the constructs varies, African nations tend to score strongly toward the short-term end of the spectrum in all of them. For example, Ghana is the second most short-term oriented society out of 93 countries in the World Values Survey; Nigeria the fifth most and, out of the bottom 20 countries, 6 are in Sub-Saharan Africa. Using the Chinese Values Survey construct of long-term orientation, the only two Sub-Saharan countries out of 23 studied were Zimbabwe and Nigeria, which respectively scored fifth and second from bottom. Although a different construct, African societies also score very low on the Globe measure of future orientation.⁹

Experimental research going back over 50 years or so, predominantly in the United States, on the concept of delayed gratification—or in popular parlance, the marshmallow test—also alludes to such differences. In fact, the first study on the subject by Walter Mischel was in Trinidad where the researchers found huge differences between Black and Asian respondents, with the former much more likely to prefer a smaller reward now to a bigger one later.¹⁰ Subsequent research has also tended to confirm this pattern. For example, African-American and Mexican 10-year-olds are much more likely to prefer $10 now to $30 in a month's time or a smaller present immediately to a bigger one in the future.¹¹

Some researchers have tended to put value labels on these reactions without appreciating that a bird-in-hand strategy makes perfect sense in many unpredictable situations. Rather than being a fixed orientation, the perceived predictability of the environment influences people's behavior on such tests. For example, children will readily pick up if the experimenter seems unpredictable or unreliable, and start preferring immediate rewards. Indeed, in the very original study in Trinidad, the researchers found that black children from single parent families—where the father figure was presumably an unpredictable presence—were much more likely to make short-term choices. The notion of taking rewards now is also something many traders playing the chaotic uncertainties of financial markets would understand. Being a strong futures discounter is a perfect strategy in the highly volatile and unpredictable casino world of financial markets.

This African tendency for living in the moment is evident in many areas of life. Outsiders frequently express surprise and disappointment at the way buildings and amenities that have been created with considerable effort and expense are simply left to decay in many African countries. In business, maintenance of plants or the creation and implementation of structured approaches to planning or financial management also suffer. Richard Dowden, a journalist for The Economist who spent much time reporting on Africa, comments that when Africans handle machinery or appliances, they will use something until it gets broken and only then worry about repairing it. He does not see the concept of preventative maintenance as being strongly embedded in African culture. Ryszard Kapuściński observes that if a path or a small road is cleared and a tree falls across it, Africans will typically choose to walk around the tree until a new path or small road is created rather than removing the obstacle. In his writings of his life in Uganda, Paul Theroux describes how he was shocked walking through a park when his fellow novelist and mentor V.S. Naipaul remarked, “Some day all this will be bush.” Theroux's accounts of Uganda on his return decades later are full of disappointment at what had happened to things he had cherished and remembered with affection—the library where most of the books were either mutilated or missing, broken doors and windows left unrepaired, and all manner of amenities left to decay in the face of the relentless march of nature.¹²

This is not to say that Africans do not work hard or care. Indeed, just about every observer of the continent sees huge levels of tenacity and resilience on the part of Africans in the face of incredibly difficult life conditions. It is simply that Africans are frequently wise enough to ensure that they expend energy and effort on managing for today as opposed to preserving, planning, or building for an uncertain tomorrow. And this tendency makes perfect sense given the environment that existed historically in much of Africa. Africans were not wrong to be pessimistic about controlling their environment. Rather they were being entirely realistic, adaptive, and flexible.

The unpredictability and futility of controlling the environment has also had a profound influence on the value attached to time in African culture. If you are trying to live in harmony with your environment or trying to escape the vicissitudes of fortune, time at one level becomes less important—or more accurately, is only important for people who have a linear goal in mind, who want to impose themselves on their environment, or change their surroundings in a systematic manner. For such individuals—which is most of us in the modern world—this desire to achieve something or go somewhere means that time is a precious resource measured out, to use T. S. Eliot's language, in coffee spoons.

African philosopher John Mbiti believes that the orientation toward time in Africa is fundamentally rooted in the presence and absence of events rather than having an independent existence; that is, time passes only when events occur. So, if nothing happens, then no time has passed. In Mbiti's view this leads to an orientation toward time in which there is “a long past, a present, and virtually no future.” In this context, future events are only anticipated in as much as they fall within the rhythm of natural phenomenon, such as daily fluctuations or the ebb and flow of the seasons.¹³

The relaxed approach to time is evident everywhere in Africa. People will happily wait for an inordinate amount of time for a bus to fill up for its journey or for a car to be fixed. A colleague who lives in South Africa and runs leadership workshops across the continent finds that the starting time for the workshops is something of a lottery, dependent on when people decide to arrive. As a consequence, she routinely plans to begin two or three hours after the stated start time. Although people working in Western businesses are acculturating fast, it's not unusual for even a senior African business leader to simply not turn up for an arranged meeting, sometimes without subsequent apology or explanation. These experiences—understandably frustrating for Westerners—make complete sense if you don't have an attitude toward time as a precious resource. Paul Theroux notes that there is no word for hurry in Swahili, and that reference to such notions is typically made through words borrowed from Arabic. In his description of his journey across the continent, from Egypt to South Africa, he remarks, “Sometimes it seems as though Africa is a place you go to, to wait.”¹⁴

The in-the-moment mindset creates issues for international businesses operating in Africa, and it's often necessary to reset one's expectations. The natural desire to create tight plans of action can seem theoretical and insufficiently pragmatic to African leaders who are aware of the unpredictable and unreliable context in which they operate. Embracing both patience and flexibility is helpful to leaders from outside. Giving local leaders the freedom to achieve things in their own way and to exercise their considerable creativity and capacity to pull rabbits out of the hat is also helpful. As an executive running a plant told me, “I know it can cause you to have a heart attack, but sometimes you just have to rely on things happening at 1 minute to 12.” The instinct for structure and controls, while necessary in some areas, needs to be managed carefully so as not to slowly suffocate a business.

Westerners tend to regard the African attitude toward time and environmental control as something that needs to be corrected. But does it? The modern, fast moving, and unpredictable world of global business is coming to resemble the original African ecological environment more and more. Intellectual flexibility, creativity, and intuitive responses to new events are necessary for agility. Many Western executives can appear lead-footed in the face of such demands. African cultural DNA is ideally suited to these challenges. Rather than trying to squeeze their African leaders into Western straitjackets, many companies would do well not only to tolerate, but also learn from their African colleagues. The mindset also gives Africans tremendous levels of resilience in the face of what life throws their way. Virtually all the overseas executives one speaks to on the continent will comment on the daily resilience and flexibility Africans exhibit in the face of death, disaster, political turmoil, and all manner of other challenges.

There is another point, too. In the West, we try to squeeze as much as we can out of our day and worry about time slipping through our fingers. In short, we march to its tune. This creates a gnawing feeling that hangs around us, a constant worry that somehow we are not making the best use of our time. Treating time as valuable may help one achieve more than one would otherwise—but does it lead to greater fulfillment? Certain instincts toward achievement and time were necessary for many non–African populations in order to succeed in the novel and unfamiliar environments in which they found themselves. But now that we have successfully dominated our environment in most parts of the world, does it not make sense, at least partially, to revert to the more relaxed African attitude toward time?

This is not to say that the African approach toward time or living in the moment does not require adaptation either. Planning appropriately, valuing time, and recognizing the knock-on effects of one's actions on other people's plans are becoming increasingly necessary in the emerging African economy. Judging where it is appropriate to adapt and where one just has to recognize the reality of how things work is critical. More generally, a shift in perspective may be helpful as well. Countless AIDS workers will tell you that despite the horrendous risks associated with unprotected sex and repeated efforts to inform people of the Russian roulette that they are playing when they have sex without condoms, many Africans simply do not listen. The pleasure of unprotected sex is in the moment; but the consequences of it are far off and indeed often much further out than John Mbiti's unfolding future.

The maintenance of buildings, machinery, and infrastructure would also benefit from this shift. Although they do not necessarily consciously recognize it, many Africans operate with an underlying fatalism about their ability to significantly influence and control the world. Recognizing this pessimism as an out of date attitude, given the resources and technology that humans have accumulated, is necessary, just as it is important for many non-Africans to fight the inner demons that propel them into cycles of endless activity that do not yield the expected returns in terms of greater fulfilment.

Metaphor, Analogy, and the Connectedness of Things

All societies seek to understand events, explain the world around them, and find some kind of method in its madness. There is a powerful body of work in psychology that argues that much of our thinking about our environment is driven not by rationality, but rather by our desire to experience a world that seems more controllable—or at least predictable—than is actually the case. People do seem to have real difficulty accepting that anything around them is randomly determined. For example, if you give members of a group tickets with one being a nominal winning ticket, the winner's self-esteem goes up, despite the manifestly random nature of the exercise. Even more bizarrely, other members of the group start to think the winner is more attractive, intelligent, or powerful in some way. Many issues in social psychology, such as excessive victim blame for random events or a tendency to inflate one's capacity for reading others, are manifestations of this desire for a sense of control.

At a societal level, it is possible to segment broad belief systems about nature into two categories: those that comfort the human soul and help make sense of events that otherwise would seem capricious, versus those that aim to uncover systematically what is going on so as to gain greater levels of actual, rather than illusionary, control over events. Certain religious sentiments, superstitions, and magical beliefs fall in the former category. In the latter category sit the more analytic, experimentally tried and tested theories of mathematics, science, and medicine—ideas that genuinely help us to define, predict, and better control our world.

These systems of beliefs frequently sit in tension with each other or at other times act like an estranged couple, knowing the other party exists but studiously ignoring each other. Nowhere is this truer than in Africa today. Traditional, psychologically satisfying, and intuitively plausible forms of thought jostle uncomfortably with more analytically derived and scientific worldviews. Medically rooted strategies for fighting malaria sit alongside belief systems which suggest that injecting malaria victims creates an opening for the spirits that create the disease to escape—thereby risking afflicting others. Campaigns to educate people on the consequences of unprotected sex and the causes of AIDS coexist with beliefs that unprotected sex is natural, that women need sex in order to stay beautiful, or that one can get rid of AIDS by having sex with a virgin or a young child. Many modern Africans seem to recognize the validity and usefulness of scientific explanation of the world on one level. Yet at another, they cannot bring themselves to give up their beliefs about the world that make intuitive sense or which seem to provide more complete and holistic explanations.

The impact of traditional beliefs is more subtle today but nevertheless powerful. African leaders have an ambivalent attitude about meteoric personal success in business or professional life. People start to get suspicious if someone achieves too much too fast—how has this person managed to leave everyone behind, they wonder? Into this explanatory vacuum drifts the idea that the person has practiced or had recourse to some kind of juju, the catchall African term for magic of some kind. Charms, the storage of potions in pots, and the like are common, particularly in small businesses. This is considered normal practice, but there is a difference between good and bad juju. When success is extraordinary, there exists the strong possibility that the entrepreneur has strayed into bad juju.

Juju can play a part in many areas of African life. Explanations for ill health, accidents, or good luck often center on themes that smack of magical thinking. Football fans will often bring objects or charms to a match or dress up in ways to deliver good juju to their team and bad juju to the rivals. A Gallup survey in 2010 found that across Africa some 50 percent or so of people believed in witchcraft, a figure that rose to over 95 percent in certain Sub-Saharan countries, such as the Ivory Coast. West and Central African counties had a greater belief in witchcraft than Eastern African countries. One sees the impact of these beliefs in the business world as well. When things go wrong, people are reluctant to blame their immediate team—but can be motivated to find malignant influences from other parts of the organization. These beliefs can interfere with the drive to find more rational explanations.¹⁵

There also exists a view in African about how well other cultures understand this aspect of life. There is respect for Western scientific thinking, but also a belief that Westerners are blind to the power of deeper forces and how interconnected the world is. They see only one aspect of reality. The Chinese are wiser and skilled at soft juju. However, the people who win the gold medal in the art and practice of juju are the Indians. I had a conversation with a Ghanaian mini-cab driver in London about this. Apparently when India played Ghana in a football match, Indian juju completely outdid anything the Africans had. The Ghanaian goalkeeper saw multiple balls coming at him every time a shot was fired, phantom snakes were conjured onto the pitch, and the Indian goalkeeper had the capacity to develop, Shiva-like, numerous invisible arms, whereas the Ghanaian keeper had to make do with the more regular two. I pointed out to the driver that this juju can't help India much, as the country has pretty much one of the worst records in international football. However, he had an explanation for this. Indian use of juju had become so outrageous that FIFA had banned its use by the team—apparently, a certain amount of juju is acceptable to FIFA—but you have to stay within reasonable boundaries. Later when I tested out these ideas with other, for the most part, educated people in Africa, they laughed. Some said they had heard similar urban myths about India playing their own national team. However, they pointed out that even if a lot of people are now free of this type of thinking, many still believe that others believe it, and the hint of juju can be helpful in many instances.

The co-existence of these very different approaches to explaining the world arises from aspects deeply embedded in African DNA. The root cause is that the environment is genuinely more ferocious, unpredictable, and difficult to control. However, no human can just wait passively for the roulette wheel of nature to dispense its arbitrary verdicts. You at least have to make sense of things and have recourse to doing something to get even a tenuous grip on events when disaster strikes. As a consequence, at least with respect to traditional African thought, there is a bias toward belief systems that give a sense of comfort, the illusion of understanding and control, or at the very least some sense that the world is not a mad free-for-all.

Ryszard Kapuściński, has described the traditional world of the African as existing on three interrelated but distinct spheres. First, there is the natural world that surrounds everyone—weather, natural phenomena, the plants and living things that are around, including other humans. For many Africans, events in this immediate world are all interconnected. They exist in some kind of coherent whole. It is a world where analogy predominates. For example, if somebody is able to get a picture of you, they then have the means to control you or influence you because they have captured you at one level. A very powerful person is often imbued with special powers because it is natural that somebody of high status will have special aptitudes.

Behind this immediate world lies the world of the ancestors—all the people who have departed this world but who still exist. These ancestors sit metaphorically on one's shoulder watching and observing every move. They have certain expectations that one must be careful to honor. In many African societies, despite incredible poverty, families will do all they can to give their departed loved ones the required burial rites and funerals. Those departed become the living dead and retain their personal identity. The idea of not showing sufficient respect to them is anathema to many, regardless of the cost. When a person dies in Ghana, for example, there is supposed to be a burial ceremony on the third day, followed by funeral celebrations on the eighth day, and then celebrations on the fortieth and eightieth days, as well as the first year anniversary. Adherence to these practices can wreak havoc on a family's finances.

Beyond the world of the ancestors lies the spirit world. This, argues Ryszard Kapuściński, is the most shadowy world of all—but it is from this world that nature and most living things derive their energy. In the face of mishaps, you are much better turning to the wizards, sorcerers, and witches who really understand and can influence this world than trusting in Western mumbo jumbo that falls at the first fence of understanding the interconnectedness of things.

An understanding of the interdependence of things and how the world one sees is influenced by the world of ancestors and spirits is provided daily to people through the graphic and poetic stories that are told at sundown across the continent around campfires, under trees, or on street corners. Africans are great storytellers and just like to talk. The traditional African worldview—populated by analogy, metaphor, and flights of imagination—lends itself to creativity and storytelling.

Herein, I believe, lies one of the great strengths of African intellect—the ability to paint evocative pictures with words. Trucks and buses across the continent are plastered with poetic slogans. Award-winning writer Ayi Kwei Armah was struggling at one time with the title of a book depicting the psychological disappointments of life in post-independence Ghana. Then one day at an Accra bus station he saw a vehicle with the words “The Beaytiful Ones Are Not Yet Born” inscribed on the back. At once he knew he had the perfect title for his book, and even preserved the misspelling of beautiful to reflect the title's street origins.

Africans like to talk. An East African saying, “The creator of mountains has passed away, but the creator of words is still at work,” captures this cultural embrace of poetry, language, and stories. The explosive growth of mobile telephones, and their much greater penetration into African markets relative to the economic development of the continent, perhaps also reflects this desire for talking and connection.

Westerners judging African patterns of thinking through their own experience can be inclined to miss the tremendous power of intellectually seeing connection at all levels in the world. Indeed, much modern thinking—from chaos theory and quantum mechanics to Carl Jung's ideas on synchronicity—reflects a move in the direction of seeing complex causality and connection in the world. The lament of many companies that the African education system is not producing enough talent also reflects the narrow reference points around how intellect is judged. This tendency is reinforced by the application of intelligence tests that are overwhelmingly oriented to Western concepts of intellect. When Muhammed Ali was unsuccessfully trying to avoid the Vietnam draft, he failed to do so, in part, because of his poor performance on standard tests of intelligence. Yet anyone vaguely familiar with the evocative poems and epitaphs that he regularly produced, seemingly on a whim, might more fairly have seen a prodigiously creative and inspiring intellect.

Valuing the capacity of African leaders to communicate orally and mobilize others through evocative metaphors and stories would be helpful on the part of Western leaders. Certainly the whole notion of storytelling has become something of a bandwagon in Western business training.

Of course, there is also the other side of the coin. In our analysis, only 9 percent of African leaders were seen to have a strength around analytical thinking, the lowest score globally. Comparative figures for American and European executives were 52 and 44 percent, respectively. As multinationals Africanize their operations and locate a variety of operations on the continent, including research centers, African executives will need to develop their muscle in this area. Overdoing the analytical approach can be a weakness in today's business world, but some capability is helpful. Systematic effort is required to develop these skills, and overseas firms can risk creating a gap between expectations and reality if this does not occur.

The power of valuing different intellectual traditions can be illustrated by the following account from a colleague who attended an academic conference in South Africa. At the end of the day, a leading white expert in the field summarized the conclusions of the conference in an effective and systematic manner. As he sat down, a black African participant stood up and asked if he too could also have a word—an unusual request, since everyone thought that the proceedings had been concluded. The conference organizers reluctantly agreed, mostly to avoid the embarrassment of an outright refusal. The audience then heard an impromptu living poem that memorably and evocatively brought to life the two days of discussion. “It was brilliant, poetic, and compelling. Both interventions were powerful, but I remember the poem more,” my colleague mused.

Perhaps African educational institutions could be less slavish in following Western methods and use, for example, oral methods and storytelling as a means of inculcating ideas and testing knowledge. For their part, Africans could endeavor to be less satisfied with ideas that simply pass the comfort of knowing test, and lift their aspirations about the level of control they can actually achieve now over events. They could take their natural orientation to see connections on to a more rigorous plane. As mobile telephony has benefited from the fact that Africa is relatively bereft of landlines, Africa has the opportunity to leapfrog to an intellectual orientation that the wider world is itself beginning to value.

The Big Man and His Alter Ego

Outside of their immediate team, where consensus and teamwork are generally evident, one sees African leaders project strong confidence, which can easily shade into posturing and bravado. Frequently leaders on the continent can be both paternalistic and caring about their people, while expecting high levels of respect and obedience in return. In fact, everybody is strongly attuned to signs of respect and disrespect when leaders and subordinates engage. These include implicit rules about how you challenge—or rather, don't challenge; how you signal respect; and how you are just expected to wait for prolonged periods to see your boss, knowing that the meeting may be entirely canceled on a whim without the slightest consideration of your feelings. People in an organization expect their leaders to show confidence and to command respect. In short, they expect them to act like the Big Man.

Things happen in African organizations when someone has power and exercises it. In the absence of this, one can get the illusion of alignment without the necessary follow-through. Many functional executives visiting from outside can leave after a few days thinking that what has been decided will get done only to be disappointed on their return. You either need to exercise power or invest time in building really strong relationships to have more than tokenistic levels of influence in many organizations.

This attitude toward power is evident in other areas of life as well—in the way, for example, people treat their servants or deal with the weak in society. Most of all it is seen in the way governments work. It is impossible to read any modern accounts of Africa without encountering the view that bad governance, corruption, and totalitarian rule have been the major impediments to economic and social progress within the continent. Occasionally, states such as Botswana and Ghana are cited as positive examples, but these tend to be very much the exceptions that prove the rule. Across large swaths of the continent, the term government generally conjures up an image of a small group of unelected leaders who have achieved and maintain their position through the barrel of a gun, rule capriciously and at times erratically, and whose motivation is to extract as much wealth for themselves, and their acolytes, as possible.

At the center of these cliques is generally a Big Man who sits at the hub of the state apparatus and to whom all power, privilege, and wealth in the country ultimately flows. American journalist Blaine Harden provides a graphic portrait of this archetypal African ruler. The Big Man frequently lavishes on himself a string of grand titles such as the “the father of the nation,” “the boss,” “the unique miracle,” or “the vanquisher of the British Empire.”¹⁶ This Big Man's picture is everywhere, especially in government offices, on the bank notes of the country, but also on badges worn by his ministers. Television, radio, and the press are full of articles praising his daily activities or impressive insights that the Big Man has shown on local or global issues. Any number of stadia, schools, and hospitals are named after the Big Man. Frequently, this Big Man is assumed to have mystical and magical powers, which even the educated members of the country fear. He is all-powerful and consuming until one day he is deposed or killed by a younger or more ruthless version of himself.

African history post-independence has been full of such Big Men, the most notorious examples being Uganda's Idi Amin, Jean-Bédel Bokassa of the Central African Republic, Congo's Mobutu Sese Seko, and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. One might think that these particular rulers represent an extreme manifestation of all that is not well in African governance. However, until recently such rulers have been very much par for the course. The continent is littered with autocrats who have been carved from the same mold, but have not been publicized by the Western media. The impact of these rulers on their countries is enormous and generally negative, often culminating in the complete ruination of the societies and the economies over which they preside. While some are semirational in their pursuit of self-interest, others degenerate into a twilight world of ostentatious consumption, paranoia, and strange beliefs.

The ubiquity of this pattern of governance across Sub-Saharan Africa, while being dispiriting, also raises a deeper question. Is there anything about African psychology and culture that leads to this mindset on the part of rulers? Here the historical pattern provides answers that are potentially contradictory. At one level, there is strong evidence within small tribal groups or clans of democratic checks and controls. While all such groups typically appoint a leader, there is a strong tradition within African culture for such leaders requiring ongoing permission from their followers to remain in their positions. Decision making in such groups is frequently highly consensual to the point of being laboriously slow.

However, the evidence would suggest that more repressive instincts come to the surface when leadership over larger entities is concerned. When Muslim explorer Ibn Battuta traveled to Africa in the fourteenth century, he was taken aback by the extent of abasement activities that African rulers expected from their subjects—such as throwing dust on themselves or crawling on the ground. Early European explorers who encountered African kingdoms were intrigued but also somewhat repulsed by the level of distance that existed between a ruler and his or her people. In some cases, subjects were not allowed to look at rulers on the pain of death, and there is much reportage of arbitrary and somewhat unusual servile rituals that many rulers imposed on their people. In fact, a large number of African leaders enthusiastically embraced the slave trade and, as soon as they knew that good money was to be made of it, worked vigorously to supply Europeans with what they needed.

Journalist Richard Dowden feels that there is something in African cultural DNA that helps create an environment in which the Big Man can flourish:

At the heart of African politics is an attitude to power. Power whether used for good or ill is widely revered for its own sake. The Big Man is given great respect because he has power. Many African societies traditionally had little sense of equality, and even today you can be shocked to see people prostrate themselves before their superiors. This does not just mean little people who line the roads to cheer the Big Man. Ministers who behave like gods themselves become lowly servants in the presence of their Presidents, bowing and hunching their shoulders in deference.

On Geert Hofstede's dimension of power distance, many African countries emerge as having some of the highest scores in the world. Power distance, it has to be said, is not just about the power that those in authority accrue to themselves; it is also about what people let others get away with. In Africa there is a belief in authority and sometimes even quite deeply held superstitious beliefs about the mystical power that those in authority hold. Many African rulers play on these convictions and allow wild rumors to circulate about their prowess and their supernatural skills. Stories about cannibalism are also used to create fear in people. Rulers are frequently perceived by their subjects to have the power to know exactly what everyone is thinking and even at times to be able to control nature and the spirit world. As a consequence, despite appalling governance, one can count on the fingers of one hand the number of African rulers who have been deposed by popular uprisings like the Arab Spring.

So what explains this orientation toward the use of power in Africa? Hofstede and his colleagues provide some clues that point to the answer. Their research looked at power distance scores across more than 180 countries and put in a number of explanatory variables to try and explain these differences. The startling finding was that the best predictor of power distance was a country's distance north and south of the equator. If we take a line down from the northernmost parts of the world, one can see this pattern. Scandinavian countries are, for example, the most equal societies in the world. Britain and Germany are also fairly equal but less so than Scandinavian countries. But inequality increases as you go to the southern European countries. Witness what Silvio Berlusconi was able to get away with in Italy and still win elections. Further south in the North African Muslim societies, one sees a strong pattern of despotic rulers, but at least an effort by some members of the society, as in the Arab Spring, to dislodge these autocrats. In Sub-Saharan Africa, one sees rulers often scooping up large amounts of a country's resources with limited democratic or popular challenge. The only challenge such rulers face is from other versions of themselves who might try to get their hands on the levers of power themselves.

There is no sound explanation for why power distance scores should follow the pattern outlined above. However, it's likely related to the nature of the environmental challenge faced by different cultures. If the environment is one that requires control and shaping for humans to have any chance of surviving—and you have to band together to make this possible—then high power distance becomes a less viable option. In such environments, it is pointless to argue over the division of the cake; you are better off devoting your collective energies to working out how to bake one in the first place. Conversely, in environments where less human shaping is necessary or possible, one can imagine the culture focusing much more on how the spoils are shared and regulating these expectations through hierarchical cultural norms.

The dynamics outlined above were set in motion a long time ago in Africa. Being our natural home, it was a resource-rich environment for humans, where the cake had already been baked by nature. However, there is a modern version of this phenomenon that helps the argument—the so-called resources curse. Development experts coined the phrase to describe the destructive impact that a high level of resources (usually minerals or energy) that a particular country possesses has on a myriad of indicators. Quite simply, the more resources a developing country has, the worse its politics—and condition of the bulk of its people—seem to be. Less resource-rich countries often have better politics and income distribution. Compare Nigeria with Ghana, which has no significant oil, and you see the pattern. The central driver of the resources curse is, I believe, the fact that when a cake is already baked, people devote their energies to fighting over how it should be sliced and in the end some despot emerges. When there is no big shining cake to fight over, more inclusive instincts take over. The underlying dynamic behind the resources curse and the theory of power distance outlined above is one and the same, just on different time scales.

However, one cannot just stop this account of the use of power in Africa at this point. The Big Man, whether in business or government, has an alter ego, which is also rooted in African culture. The expectation for consensus and debate in smaller teams is also there. In my experience what is needed to activate this mindset is the sense that “this is my team.” Once this assumption exists, then a markedly different attitude toward the exercise of power arises. The further one gets away from “my team” or “my people,” the more evident is the unilateral and arbitrary exercise of power.

Even at the level of government one can see different types of leaders emerging with different mindsets. There are newer and more modern-minded leaders moving into government across the continent. Not many people have heard of Pedro Pires of Cape Verde, or Festus Mogae of Botswana, or Joaquim Chissano of Mozambique, all winners of the Mo Ibrahim prize for governance in Africa. What is interesting about these rulers is that they either come from small countries where a common sense of us is more possible or nations that won their independence relatively late and where the memory of the struggle is still alive, prompting an afterglow of nationhood. Of course, the best example is Nelson Mandela, who adopted a strongly inclusive sense of national mission following the struggle with apartheid. Big Men—and Big Women as well—with alter egos are arising all across Africa, representing one of the best hopes for the future of the continent. In fact, one of the interesting dynamics one sees in many African organizations is the challenge to older, more traditionally minded leaders by a newer generation of less subservient “upstarts.” In business, as at a national level, it is encouraging an identification with the wider entity, rather than sectional interest, that releases this alter ego of African leaders.

Looking Ahead

Africa is moving forward in an unprecedented way, which represents huge opportunities for businesses operating on the continent. However, it will not work for Western companies to simply carpet bomb Africa with their cultures. Determining how to release the energy, joy, intellectual flexibility, and creativity that is so much a part of life in Africa is much better than stifling people through the imposition of orthodox corporate values. Respecting and working to broaden the sense of community that binds people together rather than labeling such behavior as tribal or nepotistic would also help Western companies to operate less judgmentally. Chinese and Indian companies operating in Africa also need to realize that, while their flexible ways of operating and understanding what value driven consumers want give them an edge, their introverted and socially exclusive modes of operating may store up long-term problems for themselves on a continent where open, natural, and warm human relationships are valued.

However, there will need to be certain shifts in the underlying assumptions that have governed life on the continent for Africa to take its place in the world. The deep pessimism about control of the environment that is the root cause of many cultural DNA themes needs to be replaced by a much greater sense of possibility that control is now possible. Surfacing, recognizing, and changing this core assumption would encourage a much stronger long-term orientation and lead to lay theories and practices about the world being more rigorously tested for the impact they have rather than the psychological comfort they create.

It will also be critical to expand the sense of community. Without such an extension, organizational and national life on the continent will always seem atomistic, somewhat paranoid, and full of intergroup rivalry and conflict. Such an adjustment on the part of leaders is also the key to unlocking better governance. These mental shifts will be needed if the current economic boom in Africa is to lead to sustained improvements in people's lives.

However, the rest of the world also has something to learn from Africa's cultural DNA. Knowing how to relate as humans, how to find joy day to day, and how to live in the moment rather than always chasing after tomorrow are things that many cultures lost sight of long ago. There is another broader point. Africa has always been a cauldron of activity and change, and this is the reason that virtually all advances in the human species have occurred on the continent. One sees this dynamism in the high birth rates, extremely youthful populations, rapid level of change, as well as less positively, in the wars and disease that are all such a part of life on the continent. Now that many people in Africa are embracing a sense of possibility, there is also a renewed level of drive. All this is creating a sense of dynamism across the continent and Africa has the potential to become the source of creative advancement for humankind, just as it has been for the large part of our evolutionary history.