South Africa\u2019s journey is very personal to me. I grew up in a bi-cultural household. My mother is a born and raised white, Dutch Reformed, Afrikaner\u2014all my mother\u2019s side of the family remain in South Africa (with one cousin now in Malawi). My father is a white American. My mother came of age when apartheid had gained its most virulent, destructive structural and systemic form through the policies of the National Party. Nelson Mandela and my Ouma (grandma) were generational peers but had radically different life experiences in the same country. Apartheid was part of my childhood vocabulary and the focus of one of the first research papers I wrote in a research writing course I took as a sophomore in high school. The year I wrote that paper, concluding apartheid was inherently unjust and unbiblical and must be ended, Mandela had already served 18 years in prison on Robben Island and had been fighting to end apartheid for nearly 40 years. How little I really understood then.<\/p>\n
As I read Nelson Mandela\u2019s profound autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom<\/em>,[1]<\/a> I found myself reflecting on my family\u2019s story, on my story, and the implications of Mandela\u2019s incisive leadership insights. Desmond Tutu\u2019s memoir, No Future Without Forgiveness<\/em>,[2]<\/a> added a theological framework for the work of reconciliation to his leadership insights\u2014central to my NPO. Both books, though intensely personal in nature, are also anthropological, sociological, political, and traumagenic treatises. Their collective experience and wisdom provide a revealing lens and potential roadmap for viewing current debates and challenges in the USA over how to address a painful racially abusive past with its continuing present-day impacts. Their work is also certainly relevant to the continuing destructive apartheid-like realities[3]<\/a> perpetuated by the Israeli government towards both Arab citizens of Israel and Arabs living in the Palestinian territories.<\/p>\n Peter Northouse writes about transformational leadership in Leadership: Theory and Practice<\/em>.[4]<\/a> In essence, according to Northouse, this leadership style focuses on human relationships and tends to be more personality driven. The goal of the transformational leader is to increase positive outcomes for individuals, teams, and organizations. This type of leadership can result in change at the individual and societal level. These descriptions all sound so anemic after reading Mandela\u2019s and Tutu\u2019s lived experience.<\/p>\n Northouse does not discuss the reality of suffering and the impact suffering can have on a transformational leader\u2019s character formation. Simon Walker, in Leading Out of Who You Are: Discovering the Secret of Undefended Leadership,[5]<\/strong><\/a><\/em> comes closer to exploring the contribution suffering can make to a leader\u2019s character formation. He writes: \u201c\u2026leadership is merely an expression of who [a leader] is in inside\u2026circumstances conspire to create an environment, an arena, in which character is put to the test\u2026usually through trial and suffering.\u201d[6]<\/a> Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces<\/em> also writes about the dangers and sufferings facing anyone who undertakes the Hero\u2019s Journey. [7]<\/a> He writes: \u201cThe adventure is always and everywhere a passage beyond the veil of the known into the unknown; the powers that watch at the boundary are dangerous; to deal with them is risky; yet for anyone with competence and courage the danger fades.\u201d[8]<\/a> These two authors offer a more apt description of Mandela and Tutu\u2019s transformative leadership journey.<\/p>\n I deliberately use the word transformative. William Safire, writer of the “On Language” column in The New York Times Magazine<\/em>, wrote a helpful note on the distinction between transformational and transformative: \u201cTransformational<\/em>\u00a0means “relating to a major change,” while\u00a0transformative<\/em>\u00a0is “having the power to\u00a0transform<\/em>.”[9]<\/a> Indeed, the leadership of Mandela and Tutu had transformative influence and impact on other individuals and on an entire nation.<\/p>\n Several key practices grounded Mandela\u2019s transformative leadership: his capacity to see the humanity in his oppressors\/enemies,[10]<\/a> his humility demonstrated through his willingness to listen and learn from those younger than him and those who held different opinions with real world consequences,[11]<\/a> his choice to forgive rather than hold onto his pain and anger,[12]<\/a> his commitment to persevere through setbacks and more in order to accomplish his vision for South Africa,[13]<\/a> and his decision to act for the good of his whole country\u2014often sacrificing his personal safety and familial comforts[14]<\/a>\u2014rather than the benefit of only those who looked like him.[15]<\/a><\/p>\n Desmond Tutu\u2019s transformative leadership was grounded in and demonstrated through his commitment to restorative justice[16]<\/a> and forgiveness.[17]<\/a> These two practices are consistent with the black African cultural value of ubuntu, a word difficult to describe in English. Tutu renders it thus: \u201cIt is to say, \u2018My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours.\u2019 We belong in a bundle of life. We say, \u2018A person is a person through other persons.\u2019 It is not, \u2018I think therefore I am.\u2019 It says rather: \u2018I am human because I belong. I participate, I share.\u2019\u201d[18]<\/a> Steven Bouma-Prediger and Brian J. Walsh explore this longing of the human heart to belong in their book, Beyond Homelessness: Christian Faith in a Culture of Displacement<\/em>.[19]<\/a> Were it possible, I would have loved to hear a conversation between Tutu, Prediger, and Walsh on this topic.<\/p>\n As I develop my most viable prototype (MVP) for my NPO this year, I can\u2019t help but hear the plea of the young adults who are my stakeholders\u2014from both the Middle East and the USA. They have shared with me the deep sense of dislocation and isolation they experience. For those in the Middle East it is because their networks of family and relationships have been disrupted and scattered to the four ends of the earth. For those in the USA it is because they are part of a generation that has inherited the increasingly individualistic bent of American culture. Both groups recognize the streams of injustice in their respective cultures. Both feel a sense of paralysis, leaving them asking, \u2018what can I really do to change things?\u2019 Both long for the transformative. I want to listen for how the hero\u2019s journey of both Mandela and Tutu speaks into the questions and yearnings raised by my stakeholders and attend to the implications their hero\u2019s journey might have for how I develop my MVP.<\/p>\n [1]<\/a> Mandela, Nelson. 2013. Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography<\/em>. New York: Little, Brown and Company.<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Tutu, Desmond. 1999. No Future Without Forgiveness<\/em>. New York, NY: Doubleday.<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> \u201cPC-Biz.\u201d Presbyterian Church (USA). \u201cOn Recognition That Israel\u2019s Laws, Policies, and Practices Constitute Apartheid Against the Palestinian People.\u201d Accessed September 1, 2022. https:\/\/www.pc-biz.org\/#\/search\/3000773<\/a>.<\/p>\n [4]<\/a> Northouse, Peter Guy. 2021. Leadership: Theory and Practice<\/em>. Ninth Edition. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publishing, Chapter 8.<\/p>\n [5]<\/a> Walker, Simon P. 2007. Leading Out of Who You Are: Discovering the Secret of Undefended Leadership<\/em>. Piquant.<\/p>\n [6]<\/a> Ibid., 21-22.<\/p>\n [7]<\/a> Campbell, Joseph. 2008. The Hero with a Thousand Faces<\/em>. 3rd ed. Bollingen Series XVII. Novato, Calif: New World Library.<\/p>\n [8]<\/a> Ibid., 67-68.<\/p>\n [9]<\/a> Safire, William. 2008. \u201cOpinion | Is It Presumptive to Be Transformational?\u201d The New York Times<\/em>, March 2, 2008, sec. Opinion. https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2008\/03\/02\/opinion\/02iht-edsafire.1.10615308.html<\/a>. Accessed September 1, 2022.<\/p>\n [10]<\/a> Mandela, 462.<\/p>\n [11]<\/a> Ibid., 293-305, 485.<\/p>\n [12]<\/a> Ibid., ix.<\/p>\n [13]<\/a> Ibid., 561ff.<\/p>\n [14]<\/a> Ibid., 600.<\/p>\n [15]<\/a> Ibid., 565-567.<\/p>\n [16]<\/a> Tutu, 30-31.<\/p>\n