This edited collection makes a salient contribution to the evolving discourse of leadership on the African continent, particularly from a practice-oriented lens and with a focus on Africa’s vast youth potential. As Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf was known to assert: “Africa is not poor; Africa is just poorly managed.” She succinctly echoes Achebe’s frustration with leadership failure on the continent. While many voices argue for theoretical alternatives to grappling with Africa’s leadership deficiencies, the editors of this volume make a practical and equally “transformative” contribution. The editors advocate for transformative leadership as a crucial means of addressing entrenched social injustices, centered on people agency and enabling critical institutional and organizational change (15). In so doing, they draw important distinctions from transformational leadership, which is instead focused on organisational transformation and renewal (22).

The volume contributors trace the essential socio-historical complexities with leadership in African societies, from the pre-colonial times, spotlighting the relationship with leadership, of the different social markers: of societal and community organization, ethnicity, gender, and social stratification (43). In contemporary contexts, the contributors highlight the vital learning points, in the collaborative filmmaking process of The Spirit of Kanju, of African leaders working to solve problems, creating their own things, and serving others (63). Similarly, the contributors also argue for the role that blockchain can play in enabling decentralized governance processes, and offering transformative benefits of fair access and limited opportunism. Additionally, the volume spotlights the example of Marguerite Barankitse as a powerful illustration of women-led transformative leadership on the continent. Her example challenges patriarchal models of leadership as can be found in the amaXhosa tradition, offering more community-driven alternatives that are grounded in compassion, resilience in the face of crisis, and a focus on empowering young people. Accordingly, the contributors emphasize the interplay between feminism and transformative leadership, enabling the deconstruction of harmful structures of inequality and power.

To achieve this, the contributors encourage a robust and all-inclusive transformation in higher education, particularly one which emphasizes greater student agency and rigorous leadership pedagogy. This includes restructuring leadership programmes to prioritize critical thinking, decolonial approaches, and collective action (253–55). In order to buttress this point, the contributors draw on lessons from transformative leaders like Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in Liberia and Jerry John Rawlings in Ghana, underscoring their unique drive for strong democratic institutions, peace, and social justice in their respective countries. Finally, the volume makes recommendations for the application of the philosophy of ubuntu to transformative disability leadership and technological advancements in Africa, reinforcing the view of ubuntu as an inclusive, spiritual, and ethical framework (385).

The volume’s core strengths lie in its careful unpacking of critical perspectives, voices, and case studies that challenge dominant and Western-centric paradigms of leadership (413). These important contributions foreground the salient contributions of youth and women to transformative leadership in Africa, and accomplishes this through efficiently bridging theory with praxis and the lived experiences of African exemplars. Its application of underexplored areas such as disability leadership, use of blockchain technologies in decentralised leadership, ubuntu and the ethical and spiritual underpinnings of African transformative leadership, offer a unique positioning within the broader leadership literature.

This volume comes at a time when African leaders have the weightier responsibility of navigating the continent’s vast youth potential through the turbulence of the current global order shifts. This is all the more pertinent especially with the advancements in artificial intelligence, the precarity of international trade relations and the increasing volatility of global political and economic systems. Good and transformative leadership is required on the African continent to steer its political and economic trajectory away from the haunting specters of colonialism and neocolonial subjugation. Consequently, the contributors relevantly emphasize the role of transformative leaders as institution builders within their various communities, amidst the existing challenge of atrophied institutional frameworks across countries in Africa (402–403).

Africa is in dire need of transformative change and while this is a pressing necessity, it is a daunting challenge. This is because effecting change is a delicate process and the costs of managing its dynamics are equally weighty. As such, this work—born out of the research partnership between the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) and the Mastercard Foundation—in equipping students and graduates from Africa to be masters of change management and leadership is timely. It will be even more interesting to see the impact that these young and dynamic beacons of transformative change make on the continent as they continue to dismantle existing “structures of power” and negotiate African futures of freedom and growth.