Pioneering business leader Sam Motsuenyane
reflects on leadership and management in
A Testament for Hope: The Autobiography of
Dr Sam Motsuenyane. This is an edited extract.
While our female students are getting serious and committed to getting good grades, we must not forget that it is equally important for the men also to appear at the forefront. While I was in the United States and observing a similar trend, I made an investigation into why it was that in most of the black universities in the US there were more women than men.
I am not sure how true the answer given was, but I was told that part of the explanation lay in the fact that women were the first to be emancipated from slavery before men were. Apparently, even while still enslaved, women would get a more lenient handling from the masters who often enough had “friends” across the colour line.
This, however, does not justify the men remaining behind forever. This situation has caused a problem for families in the US where the women often marry below their academic levels of attainment and such marriages very often end up in divorces. Children from such broken families also quite often end up being caught in a vicious cycle of moral dysfunction resulting in varying terms of incarceration.
This problem must be addressed if we are to avoid the maladjustment that creeps into our families and breaks them down to the detriment of the future behaviour of our children. I believe this is one of the key issues that needs to be looked into in the future.
These are some of the things that need to be imbued very strongly into our children, both in their homes and everywhere else. I find our Africanness is largely based on that. In our typical African culture you care for others; you don’t just write them off. You have hospitality, you have humility and you have respect for others.
All of these values are being eroded today and if some of us still have them, we have to strengthen and multiply them in the lives of our children.
Take the example of ubuntu and its emphasis on togetherness. There’s got to be that sense of togetherness and common destiny. Ubuntu is of course something that is regrettably weakened today.
One of the bad influences of westernisation has been the ongoing erosion of the cultural values of black people. We must revive those cultural practices which have sustained our communities in the past and which enabled them to survive under the hardest of conditions and circumstances.
We need to rebuild our collective sense of togetherness. If we don’t do that we just do not have a good future. And we must learn from other nations, nations like the Chinese and the Japanese that have acquired a lot of the Western way of life, but have done so without negating their cultural essence.
We need to always remember that no person is an island. We all depend on others for our livelihoods. I have, throughout my entire life, been assisted so many times by other people, including people who did not even know me.
These are my reflections as an elderly person in retirement. I now have the time to look back and also to reflect on what the future holds for generations of our children in this beautiful land of ours. May God bless South Africa and all her children.
A Testament of Hope: The Autobiography of Dr Sam Motsuenyane is published by KMM Review Publishing Company