The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.This article draws on historical explorers’ accounts, ethnography and organisational approaches
to examine practices, discourses and perceptions of leadership in 12 prototypical indigenous
communities in West and Central Africa. By so doing, it highlights how leadership meanings
from this context differ from Anglo-centric thinking and writings. Key to this contribution is an
unravelling of ways in which historical cultural hegemonies impose particular discursive formations,
constructed practices and mind-programming in a non-Anglo-Saxon socio-cultural context.
Dramaturgical power arrangement, lucid role substitution and the notion of leadership as nonhuman
emerge as dominant themes in the analysis. Also, featuring significantly are representations
of leadership in symbols, mythology and as transcendental and metaphysical. These conceptualisations
are different from predominant Anglo-Saxon writings that frequently present leadership
as linear hierarchies, dyadic (leader-follower) relationship, acts and behaviours of heroic figures
and as an essentially human action. An Afro-centric indigenous concept of leadership reflecting
the context is proposed which challenges heroism, linearity, individualism and objectivism
