When Thebe Ikalafeng launched his first guide, The Traveller: Crossing Borders and Connecting Africa, readers have been launched to a stressed Pan-African thoughts in movement — a person mapping his journey and a continent via experiences, encounters, conversations and reflections that blurred the traces between enterprise, identification, and belonging. It was half memoir, half manifesto: a document of a life spent constructing a enterprise, constructing a model and discovering oneself by crossing borders each literal and metaphorical.
Together with his new work, Rooted & Rising: Reclaiming Our Tradition and Redefining Our International Affect, Ikalafeng has written not a continuation however a fruits — a name to return house. If The Traveller was about motion, Rooted & Rising is about grounding. It urges Africans to reclaim cultural confidence, to re-anchor management and creativity within the knowledge of their ancestors, and to rise on the planet not as imitators, however as originators.
A Manifesto for Cultural ConfidenceAs is commonly the case with Ikalafeng, the messaging issues. And as with the launch of his first guide, this launch was one other spectacle earlier than a full home at Structure Hill, a web site that when confined freedom fighters and now celebrates liberty. This guide may be very a lot a philosophy, an perspective, a motion. Every chapter attracts from his developed 7-P Framework: Pause, Objective, Proof, Presentation, Presence, Safety, and Individuals. The important thing denominators that ought to drive all African companies
The guide is accompanied by a specifically created Apple Music playlist with legendary composer Lebo M, reworking the studying expertise into one thing immersive and emotional. Proverbs, Adinkra symbols, and African philosophies akin to Ubuntu and Sankofa are woven via its pages, grounding trendy branding and management.
From Id to ImpactWhere many books on African identification finish with aspiration, Rooted & Rising is a name for motion. Ikalafeng has pledged proceeds from each The Traveller and Rooted & Rising to the Africa Model Management Schooling (ABLE) Fellowship and Belief, a multi-million-rand endowment supporting doctoral analysis in model management at UNISA, the College of Johannesburg, and IIE–Emeritus/Vega.
It’s what he calls a pure extension of his life’s work via Model Africa and Model Management, turning twenty years of advocacy into funding. The Fellowship seeks to deal with a persistent paradox: that whereas 80% of essentially the most admired manufacturers in Africa are non-African, perception in Africa’s potential stays overwhelming. “We can’t hold speaking about Africa’s potential with out constructing the mental and institutional capability to understand it,” Ikalafeng writes. “By the ABLE Fellowship, I’m placing motion to phrases.”
A Pan-African ChorusThe guide has drawn early reward from a various refrain of African voices from Queen Nozizwe Mulela, who calls it “a robust reminder that our biggest power is our tradition,” to Jessica Nabongo, the primary Black lady to journey to each nation, who says it “lays the groundwork for Africans to reclaim our energy as arbiters of our tradition and mind.”
“Africa not wants validation,” Ikalafeng declares. “We want imaginative and prescient, rooted in who we’re, rising to who we are able to develop into.” For readers fatigued by the language of deficit and dependency, Rooted & Rising is a refreshing tonic, a piece of conviction, rhythm, and reverence that captures the essence of an Africa that is aware of its value.
