A We Will Lead Africa Founders’ Conversation, edited by Michelle Mocumbi
Our annual reflection and planning for the year ahead is upon us.
Despite it being a question we regularly return to, on this week, in this year, somehow it felt particularly heavy: What do you see for the future of We Will Lead Africa (WWLA)?
At first, the word future only evoked exhaustion. The world around us seems once again to be cracking open: another political meltdown, another anti-immigration narrative, another devastating kidnapping of schoolgirls, another moment when despair chokes the horizon.
And yet, when we attached the question to WWLA, something shifted.
This, we realised, is the work: continuously returning to story, specifically the everyday African leadership stories that fuel the WWLA movement.
In the conversation, Judith offered the story of the Igbo Landing—those ancestors who, in the face of unimaginable captivity, refused the future laid out for them and walked into the water, choosing dignity and agency over enslavement. In XR Artist Chizara Ibeakanma’s re-imagining of that story, as resistance grew within each person, a light began to glow from inside them. And when they walked into the water, the entire scene glowed—hope as illumination, hope as refusal, hope as belonging to something larger than the moment.
That sense of hope is what we connect with when we envisage WWLA’s future.
Not because the world is less chaotic, but because despite the chaos, there are lights among us—leaders, everyday people—who kindle hope, agency, and shared humanity. We will continue to be the place where that light is named, nurtured, and witnessed.
Yabome affirmed the importance of continuing to kindle this light, especially in this moment where global and continental life feels dominated by relentless noise—small groups shouting loudly, distorted narratives, misinformation and disinformation, weaponising fear, and exhausting an already depleted populace. ‘If I say it enough times, it becomes true’ is the underlying strategy.
Yet in the face of such noise, she recalled something a senior colleague once said to her: ‘You must be as convicted about the rightness of your position as they are.’
This ‘rightness’ refers to a conviction in fundamental laws of human dignity and rights for all people. It is the conviction that Africa and Africans are not ‘developing’ or from the ‘third world’ but deserving of self-determination and the conditions that support human flourishing. It is the conviction that everyday African leadership—shown through the stories of each of our contributors—is worthy of the spotlight. That everyone deserves to be represented in leadership narratives. With this conviction, we don’t add to the noise; we nurture important signals.
The refusal to give up hope for a better future for Africa and Africans serves as creative resistance and transformation of the colonised mind. It is refusing to surrender moral imagination to those who operate from fear or exclusion of Africa and Africans in the global system. It is not self-righteousness. It is choosing to love all humanity over dehumanisation. This includes loving those who do not share such convictions (and who choose self/subgroup interests that subjugate Africa and her peoples on and off the continent), in service of a collectively flourishing world.
It is also a willingness to support African leaders to bridge to the future they imagine. Bridging here isn’t a passive form of acquiescence to the status quo that isn’t working for Africa and Africans. Rather, it is anchored in taking action to go from the world as it is to the world as it ought to be—a place where all of us prosper. Yabome concluded: ‘We cannot give up on the signals of hope. In retrospect, they will be the butterfly effect.’
The story of the future is being written every day—by governments, by media ecosystems, by polarised communities, by those fighting to maintain the status quo and those trying to break it apart. As Sarah reminded us: ‘For better or worse, the story will be written. The question is who holds the pen?’ We often invoke the role of the Griot in many African cultures and communities. Someone has to narrate the story so that we may properly honour it, be nourished by it. So that we may see ourselves as we are.
WWLA is claiming that role.
Not to sanitise or romanticise the moment, but to tell the truth with nuance, with hope, and with fidelity to our core belief: Africa’s futures are already emerging in its people.
We do not shy away from the hard parts. We name the despair, the corruption, the global power imbalances, the exhaustion of systems that have not yet transformed. But we also insist on narrating the signals of hope: the everyday leaders, the quiet innovations, the acts of courage that will someday be understood as part of the continent’s next great turning point when the history of this era is told. We may not be able to see the forest for the trees right now, but we will continue to be one of the platforms where the extraordinary impacts of everyday African leadership are uplifted. As Sarah reminded us, ‘where so many projects are about what we do, WWLA is also about reflecting on, learning from, looking at, interrogating, documenting, observing, narrating what’s happening. That is such an important part of keeping the leadership integrity. That must continue.’
After nearly a decade of gathering stories and learning from leaders across the continent, one thing is clear:
Leadership is not a role.
It is not a title.
It is a decision.
A decision to keep telling the truth.
A decision to keep loving the community you’re accountable to.
A decision to resist cynicism.
A decision to act—even in the smallest of ways—in alignment with the world you want to build.
As we concluded our conversation, Judith asked a powerful question: ‘What if there is no world that works for everyone?’
And yet, even in wrestling with that question, we returned to the importance of artefacts of joining such as music, poems, stories. These are artefacts of our shared humanity, that anchor those moments when people momentarily lay down their arms (literal or metaphorical) and remember they belong to one another.
WWLA is one such artefact.
A lighthouse.
A gathering place.
A memory keeper.
A container for possibility.
A love letter to the continent, and both its present and its futures.
What do you see for the future of WWLA?