Leadership Series

Author: Dr Brighton ChirekaFounder and Medical Director, DOCBEECEE Leadership Academy Date: 12 March 2026 Suggested citationChireka B. Dare to Care: Reclaiming Leadership through Hunhu and Dare in African Health and Social Care. DOCBEECEE Leadership Academy Insight Paper No. 1. Dare to Care: Reclaiming Leadership through Hunhu and Dare in African Health and Social Care Why African leadership must be rooted in dignity, participation and fair belonging Executive summary Leadership in African health and social care is often taught in borrowed language. It is frequently presented through imported managerial concepts that may be useful in some respects, yet still feel detached from the lived moral worlds of the people expected to lead. This paper argues that African leadership, and Zimbabwean leadership in particular, does not need to remain conceptually homeless. We already possess deep moral and social resources for leadership in our own cultural traditions. Among the Shona, two of the richest are Hunhu and dare. Hunhu offers a moral foundation rooted in dignity, reciprocity, accountability, service and shared humanity. Dare offers a process of leadership grounded in hearing people, creating space for voice, reasoning together and making decisions in ways that are publicly recognisable as fair. As Van Breda argues, ubuntu is not just a cultural slogan but a serious African theory for practice. In a similar way, Jaure and colleagues show that dare is not merely a meeting place, but a participatory way of hearing, reasoning and deciding together. Read together, these concepts point towards a different kind of leadership: one that is not defined first by title, visibility or control, but by conduct, legitimacy, participation and the ability to protect dignity in community. This paper introduces Dare to Care as a leadership framework for African health and social care. It argues that leadership must be reclaimed not only from imported language, but also from narrow and uncritical readings of tradition. True leadership is not just about belonging, but about fair belonging. It is not just about preserving community, but about shaping communities in which dignity, justice and inclusion are visible. That is why this paper insists that African leadership must be relational, ethical, participatory and critically inclusive. The goal of this paper is not merely to offer a concept. It is to strengthen a movement. It is to help leaders, educators, coaches and institutions think differently about what leadership means, how it is taught, and how it is embodied in the everyday work of care. 1. Why this paper, and why now? There is a gap in the way leadership is being taught, discussed and practised in African health and social care. Leadership is constantly called for. We speak about leadership in quality improvement, in patient experience, in team culture, in safeguarding, in service redesign and in community trust. Yet when many people are trained in leadership, they are still introduced to it as though it arrives from somewhere else. The language is often polished, technical and imported. It may sound impressive, but it does not always feel rooted. That matters because leadership is not just a set of tools. Leadership is a moral and social activity. It shapes how power is used, how people are heard, how decisions are made and how dignity is protected. In health and social care, those questions are not theoretical. They are lived every day by patients, families, staff, students and communities. This is why this paper matters now. African health and social care needs leadership that is not only effective, but also recognisable, humane and culturally grounded. We need leadership language that speaks to our people without sounding foreign. We need frameworks that help us lead with both competence and moral depth. We need concepts that can be taught, embodied and used in real life. Among the Shona, we already have such resources. We have Hunhu, which teaches that our humanity is proved in how we treat one another. And we have dare, which reminds us that leadership is not simply about deciding for people, but about hearing people, gathering wisdom and making fairness visible. This paper is therefore an act of reclamation. It says that leadership in African health and social care should not remain conceptually dependent on language that was never designed with our realities at its centre. It should be able to grow from our own moral soil. Zimbabwe’s Constitution, together with Chigwata’s work on traditional leadership, reminds us that indigenous leadership is not merely historical memory; it still carries public meaning and social legitimacy in contemporary life. 2. The problem with borrowed leadership language Borrowed leadership language is not always wrong. It can be useful, and some of it offers helpful tools. The problem is deeper. The problem is that when leadership is framed only through imported categories, it can become detached from the ways people already understand dignity, legitimacy, wisdom, responsibility and communal life. In many African health and social care contexts, this creates a quiet tension. Leaders may be taught frameworks that speak fluently about strategy, performance, influence and systems, yet leave too little space for the deeper moral questions that communities often care about most: Can I trust this leader? Does this leader hear people? Does this leader act fairly? Does this leader protect dignity? Does this leader serve the people, or merely occupy office? The result is that leadership may become technically competent but emotionally thin, structurally organised but socially distant, visible in title but weak in moral authority. That is one of the reasons some leadership training inspires briefly but does not always transform culture. It can teach methods without fully addressing moral imagination. Johnson and colleagues, writing about Sub-Saharan Africa, and Phillipson and colleagues, reviewing healthcare leadership training more broadly, point to similar concerns: many programmes remain unclear in theory, weakly grounded in context and inconsistent in evaluation. This is not a call to reject everything external. It is a call to stop treating African ideas as though they can only decorate leadership, never define it. We do not need