Palgrave Macmillan has just released the first of two volumes on African leadership edited by Dr. Baba G. Jallow, Assistant Professor and Director of the African Studies Program at Creighton University. Leadership in Colonial Africa: Disruption of Traditional Frameworks and Patterns provides a rich tapestry of leadership frameworks and cultures in colonial Africa. Scholars across disciplines explore the nature and evolution of leadership born of the colonial encounter between white colonialists and native Africans as well as the leadership that ultimately led to independence. The book highlights colonial disruptions of traditional leadership patterns in Africa and how African leaders - traditional and nationalist - reacted to these disruptions. It contains studies on chiefs in colonial Gambia, Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria, Amilcar Cabral of Guinea Bissau, Robert Mugabe and Josiah Tongogara of Zimbabwe, and South Africa’s Apartheid-era leader John Vorster among others.

The book’s companion volume, Leadership in Postcolonial Africa: Trends Transformed by Independence focuses on the crop of African leaders who took over from the European colonialists at independence. Among the leaders studied in this second volume are Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Toure, Hastings Kamuzu Banda, Professor Wangari Maathai, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Joyce Banda, Jerry Rawlings, William Tolbert Jr., and Nelson Mandela. It is scheduled for release by Palgrave Macmillan on December 17, 2014.

The two books are being used by Palgrave Macmillan to launch a new Palgrave Studies in African Leadership series which Jallow co-edits with Dr. Faith Ngunjiri, Associate Professor of Leadership and Ethics at Offutt School of Business, Concordia College (Moorhead, MN). The series was conceptualized to remedy the fact that while Africa faces more serious leadership crises than any other part of the world, African leadership remains largely understudied. Already, interest in the new series has been very encouraging with the receipt of five proposals within the last two to three months.