Leadership and statesmanship are among today’s toughest challenges. What it takes to be a good leader is not just well-chosen words, fancy clothes or hollow promises. A good leader must have patriotism and humaneness. This mostly apply to poverty-stricken West Africa because of two main reasons.

Firstly, this region is mostly populated by young people. Secondly, its mineral resources surpasses all estimates. As a matter of fact, West African countries abound in endless rich mines of oil, gold, manganese, bauxite, zircon, iron and uranium. This begs the question: What does it take to jump over the gap between developing and developed?

Like it or lump it, good leadership is in very short supply these days. But the way people behave seems to make one believe that they have the leaders they deserve. In fact, it is only after electing the wrong person to the wrong place that they finally realise they have locked the barn door after the horse is out.

Then as people cannot love a cause in the abstract, they must be careful with whom they want to become the incarnation or personification of their cause. But all across the world we are still being led by the nose by people who arrogantly think they are prophets, act as though they were perfect and whose incompetence gives credit to their poor constructiveness.

A Leader is not a prophet

While some people see in Dr King a brave Christian man who made heroic sacrifices to free his people from the bondage of discrimination (different treatment based on races) and segregation (systematic isolation of races), others consider him a simple icon or someone that used to claim to be so. This is a total misunderstanding of the man’s life and a blissful ignorance of his ideas.

American author Jennifer Yanco was indignant about this distortion of the facts as expressed in her book Misremembering Dr King, Revisiting the Legacy of Martin Luther King (2014). But I am afraid we are at a point where her indignation at people’s amnesia still has a long way to go.

Let me give you one example. In February 2017, two friends paid me a visit. One of them, a Muslim like me, wanted to pray. It was about 2 p.m. So I showed him the ablutions facility and then gave him a prayer mat. When he finished his worship, he noticed that a book in French was laying on my desk, entitled Martin Luther King. It was a French version of Let the Trumpet Sound, the Life of Martin Luther King, Jr.(1982) written by renowned historian Stephen Oates.

When I entered the room where he was, he surprised me saying “This guy thought to be a prophet.” That off-the-cuff remark left me dumbfounded. This friend of mine must have heard Dr King’s name so many times, like so many other people did, that the subject became insignificant. At that very instant I told to myself “People like Dr King and Nelson Mandela are more famous than known. They are widely-known but not well-known.” When you mediatize a person to such a point that you almost deify them, you go blind inside because you will always look up to them but never look to their legacy.

A leader is not perfect

While some may think Dr King was a visionary but did not predict that his name would be romanticised and iconised by the traditional media and social media, let me tell you that he was intelligent enough to deduce from FBI’s phone tapping that high-ranking people would want a mascot for peace issues and the oppressed could be using his name as an emotional outlet once his assassination project came true.

In fact, when President Kennedy was killed on November 22, 1963, he sensed he would meet with the same fate before reaching his forties and expressed his feelings about his death in “The Drum Major Instinct” and “I See the Promised Land” in 1968.

In Hellhound on his Trail, the Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for his Assassin (2010), Hampton Sides wrote “Over the past decade, agents in the Atlanta field office had probably exhausted more man-hours on King following and wiretapping and bugging and attempting to smear him than they’d spent working on any other single subject. Code-named ‘Zorro,’ King was the office bogeyman, the subject with the most voluminous file, and the quarry of a thousand investigatory trails.”

This stalking was at its peak when Dr King became a strong voice for the poor and an outspoken advocate against war. In “Beyond Vietnam” (1967), he recalls the first words of the statements of the executive committee of an anti-war organisation called Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam saying “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” Then in his own words he adds that “Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.”

According to Stephen Oates (1982: 438) when the FBI spread the rumour that Dr King met in motel rooms a California dentist’s wife, the latter stated that like everybody he had a Mr Hyde and a Dr Jekyll (personifications of good and evil) in him and that he was no saint but a sinner like all of God’s children.

Besides, Dr King did not wait until accusations were brought against him to justify himself. In his sermon “Man’s Sins and God’s Grace” (1954), he preached that “There is something in all of us that makes us more than one self. We are all two selves, and if you look at yourself hard enough you will discover that other self. We find ourselves split up against ourselves. We have something of what the psychologists or the psychiatrists would refer to as the schizophrenic personality. We are split personalities. There is something high in us and there is something low in us.”

A leader must not be arrogant

Today many people quote Dr King but they ignore a great part of his famous quotations were not originally from him. History worked in such a way that he became the moral voice of the Movement and his busy calendar gave him no room to quote the sources of all his words.

However, his merit is he was a real bookwork who excelled in almost every subject. In “Conquering Self-Centeredness” (1657), Dr King says that he was so afraid of arrogance that every day this prayer escaped from his mouth:

“0 God, help me to see myself in my true perspective. Help me, 0 God, to see that I’m just a symbol of a movement. Help me to see that I’m the victim of what the Germans call a Zeitgeist and that something was getting ready to happen in history; history was ready for it. And that a boycott would have taken place in Montgomery, Alabama, if I had never come toAlabama. Help me to realize that I’m where I am because of the forces of history and because of the fifty thousand Negroes of Alabama who will never get their names in the papers and in the headline. 0 God, help me to see that where I stand today, I stand because others helped me to stand there and because the forces of history projected me there. And this moment would have come in history even if M. L. King had never been born.”

A leader should be constructive

One of the numerous things we can learn about Dr King’s leadership is his sense of constructive work. His presidency of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) from 1955 to 1956 and then the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) from 1957 to 1968 is an eloquent example through both his courageous deeds and edifying words.

For example in “A Time to Break Silence” (1967), a war indictment speech, he explains the rationale behind his address, makes a scathing attack against the US government and then suggested five solutions that could put an end to the nightmarish war.

In Montgomery, Alabama, in December, 1956, he made an address on “Facing the Challenges of a New Age” that was first published in Phylon no. 28 in April 1957. He made this speech at a time when Western dictatorial regimes ended and when the oppressed in other continents were taking drastic action to face their oppressors.

But if we read it carefully, we realize that it is still timely as it contains thousands of words of advice meant to educate us:

• We must all walk, work and live together because science and technology have rendered the separate continents into welded pieces of one single country;
• We must excel in all fields because all labour has dignity. It is an obligation for every one of us to be the best in whatever we are so that the world will make a beaten path to our doors;
• We need to live like brothers and sisters, and love each other unconditionally;
• We can be free and live in a world ruled by justice, but we need political power, strong legislation and education first;
• We must also be willing to put money in our quest for freedom instead of spending fortunes in frivolities.

Nevertheless, no matter how powerful, brave and educated we may be, whether oppressed or free, we need no eloquent politicians but real statesmen. We need “Leaders of wise judgment and sound integrity who do not love money but humanity and who can overlook their personal interest for the collective cause of those they lead” (King, “Facing the Challenges of a New Age,” 1957).

By Mouhamed DIOP, PhD candidate at Université Cheikh Anta Diop (Dakar, Senegal)