Crafting Positive Futures for Africa with Bruce Wade

Welcome, Bruce Wade, to our conversation today about your article for the Africa Futures Journal, Crafting Positive Futures for Africa. I'm Charlotte Kemp, and I had the great fun and delight of connecting with some very innovative, futuristic people across Africa who have lived in Africa, studied in Africa, worked in Africa, and are sharing their insights about what the future of Africa could look like. And Bruce Wade is my friend and colleague, and we've had so many conversations about so many different projects and things happening across Africa. We could be speaking for 2 or 3 hours, but we're gonna keep this to around about 20 minutes. But Bruce, welcome to you. I'd love it if, as we start, if you could explain a little bit about the work that you generally do, and then we can start getting more specific.

All right, good. Thank you very much, Charlotte, and greetings to anybody who's watching this. Good to be here. I, I'm a strategist and innovator at heart. I've repositioned myself as the experiential innovator because I'm passionate about how we treat our customers, and that customers is a very broad umbrella. So I kind of say, well, what is experiential hospitality? And I want to spread that umbrella of hospitality from the moment of truth where we interact with our clients. Even if you're a coffee shop or a pharmacist or a 7-star hotel on the North Shore of Hawaii, it's all got to do with client service. And I think we're moving into an area where it needs to be experiential, innovative, and sustainable. So that's where I am putting a lot of my efforts. I'm also a professional speaker, author, and coach, and generally an okay guy to have a glass of wine with.

Or a gin and tonic.

Or a gin and tonic or 2. Great.

All right. I'm going to deviate even before we get into the journal, just because we have this opportunity. You and I have also both been presidents of the Professional Speakers Association of Southern Africa. And as we've talked about the future of Africa under various categories, speaking comes up quite often. So maybe you want to just share a bit of your dream and hopes for the future of speaking across the continent of Africa?

I think Africa is the, is the continent of unrealized hope. And because people have sold the hope, or our hope has been sold from us, and that is reflective in the, in the lack of voice that we have. If you look at the number of speakers in first world countries, like across America and Europe, there's speakers under every rock, in every tree. We're here, There are speakers in Africa, but they're not empowered. They still feel that they've got to start every speech with, I'm sorry, but can I say something? And I think Africa has got a lot to share. We're the most innovative continent. We solve all our own problems, but we are apologetic in nature. And I think that needs to change. So this whole theme about from whisper to roar, hear Africa speak. I'm a good advocate and evangelist for, for anybody with a voice in Africa. And boy, do we have some amazing speakers. We've unearthed and uncovered and been introduced to some amazing, well-educated people, people with double doctorates, and they're too scared to talk. People who've been speaking every day for the past 10 years and are still too afraid to speak. So this empowerment and giving permission for Africa to speak across the continent. I think it's going to change the way we are going to be operating in the future. I'm very excited.

Great. Thank you. I've been involved in the Pan-Africa Speaker Summit, which was a project that I started ready to kind of get this conversation going, that we speakers in Africa find each other, we learn from each other, we encourage each other, we promote each other outside of the continent to other parts of the world. And then that work with the Pan-Africa Speaker Summit and with Voices into Africa then got me to think about the future of futurists in Africa and how many times models that come from other parts of the world are brought into Africa and imposed here. And so I wanted to kind of challenge on both fronts. I'm a speaker and a futurist, and I wanted to challenge on both fronts. And I think for me, the, the deciding incident that really kicked this off was an occasion when I was invited to speak at a conference in Tanzania. And I traveled up from South Africa to Tanzania. My husband, who is British but a resident in South Africa, we traveled up to Tanzania and a colleague of ours from Nigeria traveled with us as well. And, and we got there to the conference, you know, early, a few days early. We connected with the organizer, with the clients. There were a couple of other little sporadic events that were happening and dinners, and we really did what we could to support the organizer. And then one evening he takes us for a drive, a very entrepreneurial event organizer, but he also has these big billboards, advertising billboards that he normally, you know, gets other clients to advertise on. But he had advertised this conference and our little photographs were there at the bottom. But the big picture at the top was a speaker coming from the United States of America, and this was the headline speaker. And everybody was excited for this person to come and speak. And like 2 days before the conference, the speaker just said to his, his people, go talk to those people. I couldn't be bothered to come. This isn't, you know, a big enough event for me. I'm not going to attend. And I was horrified on behalf of— on behalf of the organizer and the clients and everyone else involved. That someone could just dismiss this entire event so unprofessionally. And it was that moment and meeting the speakers at that event that were blowing my mind that I thought, no, we've got to, we've got to support each other in Africa and raise up our voices. And so that's why we kind of got into, into some of these projects. And for me, they all kind of connect around that, that there is so much wisdom, so much talent, so much in this continent, and the rest of the world will be richer for learning from Africa instead of just taking Africa's resources and leaving Africa to deal with whatever is left. So that's how we came to the journal. And, and the journal is designed to hear the voices of futurists in Africa, people who have worked or studied here or had some experience. So, Bruce, in your article, you talk about breaking the chains and a blueprint for transformation. Give us a big picture of what, what that looks like for you in terms of the article that you wrote.

So what I did, it was an interesting thing, because we look at the history of Africa, we always go back to the most recent headline. And it could have been the change of South Africa and our, you know, the freedom we— that was 30 years ago. Or we could go back to some other incident. And there's been many wars and scuffles across there. But if you go right back to the beginning, and that's kind of what I, what I kind of skim through history, I do about 15,000 years. Across in the article. But if you go back right at the beginning, when Egypt was the first kind of kingdom in Africa, it's the same repetitive cycle that we've been through. And what Egypt did to everybody, and then what all the other tribes, the dominant tribes, and it came down to what is now Ethiopia, and then it went across, and then there's been other places in Ghana and other tribes and stuff. It's the same thing. It's a power based, hungry, egocentric, dominant thing. Now, it's not just Africa, because we've seen this worldwide with earlier tribes. And, you know, the, the East versus the West, and the Christians and the Catholics, and the Christians and the Muslims, and everybody else. Whenever there's a difference, there's a clash, and there seems to be a domineering thing. The problem with Africa is we've never been able to rise up against this, because in conflict, everybody has lost. And then we got into the slave trade. And really interesting there, because I've really delved into the, into the slave trade for another book that I'm writing. And looking at it, we always blame the guys in America for the slave trade, you know, the, the guys with the ships. But look at the internal Africa story. There's more slaves who died in the slave trade even before they boarded the ships than the people on the ships and across in America or in Europe or in Malaysia and wherever they were sent and brought in there, because the internal conflict in Africa was just so horrendous. Like Africa killing Africans for financial gain motivated by Western agendas. And that has been our cycle, and we have sold our resources, we've sold our soul, we've sold our futures so much that I believe there's a lot of countries that we are so stuck in debt. It's almost— if you can think of personally, if you've run up your overdraft, your housing bond, or your credit cards, you've spent your pension, you've mortgaged your kids' inheritance, you've then traded against their future earnings, and now you say, now I want to deal out of this. You cannot. And a lot of Africa countries have got themselves so tied into long-term recurring debt that is just happy to be renewed. And we'll just renew that for 100, another 100 years. And the guys go, okay, that's breathing space. But we are sold into generational debt and generational agreements. And the problem is, is we've got resources, but we have to buy our own resources back from the people that we've sold it to at a higher price And we could have done to get it out of the ground and manufacture ourselves. So we're in a bit of a pickle.

Good. Thank you for that summary. All right. So, so you said we're breaking the chains and we've got a blueprint for progress. So how do we start to address that?

So I think, I think one— and we've seen this. So it's not my, it's not my blueprint. It's just a blueprint that I've observed. There are a couple of countries around Africa that are beginning to break the cycle. They've gone back and they've renegotiated these things. And some of them have just put their foot down and say, everybody who's not part of our country, get out. And I kind of like that approach. Because it's a way to clean house. Now, I'm not, you know, it was a nonviolent thing. It's not like we're going to kill everyone. There was, you know, just like, by next Friday, if you don't belong in here, you are no longer welcome, pack your bags and go home. And that's, it's one approach. But there's been other approaches that have been far more diplomatic. And there are countries that are renegotiating this to say, no more, we will not be abided by other people's agenda on our country, on our people and our resources. And we will start governing not from an autocratic dictatorship point of view, but from— and this is a term that I think is, is kind of being used— but in Africa, dictatorship for the people. And it's slightly different because democracy in Africa doesn't work. We've seen that time and time again. There's no— I don't want to get in the argument, but democracy has got huge flaws everywhere. But the model that works in Africa is what we see in countries where you have somebody who leads with power, but power for the benefit of the people, not power for the benefit of me and my bank account in some, you know, income tax haven somewhere. And I think that's the difference. And we're beginning to see that. So I put forward in the article 10 steps that if you follow these, then you can change your entire community, your family, your country, your town, everything like this, and eventually the entire continent. It's a blueprint for sustainable change for Africa. Is it a feasible option? Probably not. Is it a viable option? Probably not. It's a bit of a dream. But every revolution that we have starts off with a dream, with a kind of a manifesto that says this. So this is my manifesto for Africa that I'm proposing. I'm happy to sit and discuss it with the United Nations, and any other government that wants to come across there, or individuals who just want to have a good conversation about change for Africa. But I think it's It actually is because we've seen evidence of this happening across the continent, and it fills me with tremendous hope for political and economical and a fiscal future where Africa can rise as a continent that is equal instead of being the whipping child and the shame money that we have to give into Africa because they are so corrupt because we're holding them in that corrupt place. Therefore, we have to give them. If you keep beating somebody, they are soon going to enjoy being beaten and a big becomes part of their daily life. We need to stop the cycle of violence and get forward. I feel like I'm starting a political party.

I know, just, just—

I'm a passionate speaker.

All right, let's move to something, um, probably a little bit more, uh, practical in terms of, you know, from, from the politics and the economics. But if you move to the, the actual individual, uh, one of your points is that we need to develop the mindset of an entrepreneur, but we also need to empower entrepreneurs. And Africa is a very innovative space for good reason, because so many things don't work or are broken, or, uh, there's this huge distance from, you know, geographic distance from a place where something could get fixed. So we've become very innovative. Do you want to talk about your experiences and insights about that?

I think, I think those, those are 2 points. Innovation and entrepreneurship are 2 things, and, and we see that's been held so separate across in Africa. Um, but just, just a segue out there. I was speaking to a professor in Munich, and he runs an MBA program for innovation. And he was down here with a group of his students. And he said to me, he says he is so fearful for the people in Germany, because he says we are one generation away from losing the ability to be innovative, because everything in our country works so well. And that's an interesting— that's why he's bringing his students to Africa, because Africa is broken, but it is so innovative. Because we have this term in Afrikaans, a boelmakerplan, which is a farmer makes a plan. Because on a farm, when you're an hour and a half away from the hardware store, or, you know, the local AgriMark, or whatever it is that you've got to fix this water pump with whatever you've got. So there is chewing gum, there is, you know, tape, there is wire, and you're find a lot of irrigation plans are very innovative. But the problem is converting that innovation into an entrepreneurial program is that chasm that hasn't yet been changed. So a lot of the programs that we are, we are working on is to develop taking an innovative mindset and saying, did you know that a water pump fixed with wire and held together with this and this and this and bunches of putty and etc.? Are actually an entrepreneurial venture in its primary form. It's R&D, it's that pilot program, it's a proof of concept, all those things we speak about. And these exactly is where we're going there. We've just got to turn that thing— is that instead of I just have to fix it because this is what I do, to say if I took this to the world, Africa will be better because I could share those ideas as an entrepreneur instead of just being a guy who has to fix everything over I didn't even know that was innovative. That's just my way of life. So I think those 2 elements, if we can bring innovation and entrepreneurship together, we've got such a gem that hasn't yet been suffered. And you don't find that in countries that everything works.

Yeah. As you were speaking, I was thinking of, of the, the farmer who's fixing something and doesn't realize that his innovation is actually could be a product that other people could purchase. And then the German professor is saying, you know, the people in Germany are one generation away from, you know, losing everything because they don't know how to innovate. Both of those people are really steeped in their own bubbles, in their own experiences, and they can't see beyond it. So they can't see the potential, they can't see the problem. problems. And it's this kind of conversation when we say this is what's happening in Africa, these are the stories that we're picking up, these are the perspectives of futurists and innovators and entrepreneurs in Africa. When we start doing that, we're starting to open the debate about what is possible, we're starting to see things from different perspectives, so that we pop those bubbles, and we can all benefit from that. I think.

Yeah, I think that's, that's it, you know, bringing in, that's why I love resources coming in, especially, you know, Bring in the guys from from Europe because they they kind of understand a lot of that high-tech stuff and they're willing to learn. What what I don't appreciate in Africa are people that come from other countries who think they come in then oh if you just did it my way then your country will also be like our country and then we're going to do that and I'm trying not to put on any accent to be identified but we we kind of there there are a number of countries that come in with this stuff.

stuff.

You know, if you just did it my way, you too will live in this land of wonderful opportunity and green grass and, you know, and stuff. And it's not that way. Africa is Africa. It's a different culture. It's a different way of life. It's a different mindset. We cannot be a German Africa. We cannot be an American Africa. We've got to be an Africa Africa, because that's the only formula that's going to work for us.

Absolutely. Yeah. And it's that kind of co-creation mindset and intention that, you know, if people are visiting from other parts of the world, this is their experience, their model, their learning, and this is the African version of that. And then we come together with humility. We can create something better than we could have done on our own. Yeah, I'm going to share just a bit of a story. I've had the opportunity in this last year as president of the Global Speakers Federation to travel around to different parts of the world and, and speak at the professional speaker conferences. And when I went to Germany, I was asked to do a workshop on Africa, and that it was in the workshop stream, but I wasn't quite sure how I was going to workshop this. But we had a really good kind of roundtable conversation, and then I was asked to do a version of that in Canada. And both of those experiences for me were really interesting to talk to other people and to give them the opportunity to speak and say things. and, you know, with humility learn. But the, the conversation in Canada in particular was interesting because I wanted to position it as in, you're Canadian or North American and you have biases and assumptions about Africa. And I know what some of them are and I'm going to tell you, but not in a way that says you're wrong and, you know, you should be embarrassed by your biases because we all have it. But if we can learn from that, if we can get an insight into another part of the world, a whole continent of a billion people and go, oh my goodness, I have not thought clearly about that place. And then it opens up our minds as professional speakers to think about other parts of the world or other types of people or other industries and to remove some of that arrogance that we know what's going on. So that humility is a lot easier. And, and some of the things that, that I, that I wasn't expecting really blew their mind. And part of that was like the geographic size of Canada versus Africa, because on the, on the map, Canada looks quite large. But when you actually scale them properly, Canada is much smaller than, than Africa is. And then you talk about 54 countries and over 200 languages and 200 religions, and suddenly people are realizing that this is a multifaceted place with so many differences, and you cannot just make one sweeping assumption about an entire continent. And the conversations that came back, There was one person who contacted me 5 months after I did that talk to say, can we have a Zoom chat? I just want to say, I just had never thought of Africa that way. Just because we were willing to have this conversation. And again, us without arrogance, we can't go and tell the rest of the world from that kind of perspective that they've got everything wrong because we all need to be learning from each other. So I like that co-creation position.

I think I always invite people whenever I get people, you know, from overseas here, and they're doing various work. I said, you know, do not talk for the first 3 days that you're here, learn to listen. Because you will learn more than you've come to teach. And I think that is a good mindset rather than, you know, I'm coming in here as the authority, as the professor, as the MBA student, or as the consultant or the coach or the speaker from you know, the large country and stuff is that just shut up and listen. And, you know, we've got one speaker from India that's got this, you know, Nija goes like her theme thing is like shut up and listen. And I love that because it's, it's, it's, it's such a mindset, especially for speakers, because speakers, we want to get up there and speak and we want to spew all our wisdom onto the stage. But I think just going into various places and just sitting quietly, having a meal and meeting the people and observing and listening listening, it gives you greater power when you speak rather than coming and spewing all your infinite so-called wisdom into a place that it's not prepared for you. So doing, doing work in Africa, also, you cannot negotiate anything until you've had a meal. So don't come and sit there and I'm flying in the morning, we'll conclude the meeting by this, we'll have like a working lunch kind of somewhere in the car or the bus, and then we'll sign the deal. No, you know, book 3 days for one meeting. And let's just slow things down there because otherwise you're going to go away with buyer's regret on this side and it's going to fall apart. So Africa is very, very different. The culture is different. We want to get to know you. We want to sit down and have a meal and get to know you and your family before we negotiate any deal because we don't do business with, with individuals. In fact, we do businesses with families and connections. And I think that culture is very, very different.

I'll give one example of that in terms of manners, because from the so-called Western perspective, it is good manners to be efficient and to get to the point quickly and not to waste somebody's time. But when you try to be efficient with some people in Africa, they see that as rude because they've been raised by their grandparents, by their elders, to have that conversation, to get to know someone. So many times I will get a WhatsApp message where somebody will say hi, and I know some of my speaker colleagues get really annoyed with this, like, hi from nowhere, from a number we don't have, and they want to just end it. But I will greet them back and then they will introduce themselves and then I will introduce myself. And those 4 steps could take 3 days because we're not doing it at the same time. And then the person will explain explain, you know, why they are actually contacting me, and then we can get into a conversation. But we have to go through the manners first. And that kind of, like you're saying, slow down, 3 days, shut up, take time to actually just be polite to people. And all of a sudden you realize that there's a wealth of insight there that you would have glossed straight over if you hadn't taken that time to respect somebody else's manners instead of just your own perspective of productivity and Hmm.

Good job. And I think, I think we, we are far too quick to judge people who aren't the same as us. And we put them in different categories. And if we don't like them, you know, oh, your hair's long, I don't like this, or you're so loud, you're this, you're so quiet, and we put them into all these categories. And therefore, we then rise above all these categories of people. And then we think we're domineering. Actually, what you've got to do is you've got to remove your ego and and embed yourself into other people's culture before you understand it.

Brilliant. Okay, as we wrap up, Bruce, what are your hopes and dreams for the future of Africa?

I want, I want the leadership in Africa and the leadership are, you know, obviously political leadership, but also entrepreneurial leadership, because I think that's where change is going to happen. I'm not a politician. I'm not a— I'm not an influencer in that area. I am a big influencer in the entrepreneurial space. I can speak innovation, I can speak change. And I think is we are going to see entrepreneurs in Africa realize their full potential in mass scale. And there's going to be an uprising, a revolution of entrepreneurial, of fiscal empowerment, of ability to influence. And I think the West and the North and the East are going to sit back in horror at what they what they've missed out on, uh, because I think a lot of people here are beginning to ride the wave into a future of Africa. I want to be instrumental in not heading that charge, but instrumental in starting that groundswell, because that's, that's where I'm more effective. I want to be that influencer for people of the future. So I want to be the leader of leaders who are going to take Africa forward.

Marvelous. Fantastic. Thank you very much, Bruce. For anybody else, you can have a look at the website futuresforafrica.online and see this copy of the journal, and there will be some further editions in, in the future, and I promise they won't take 2 years this time to produce. But this is the start of the dialogue, of the conversation, or a continuation actually of that, where we explore and uncover our hopes and dreams for the future of Africa and what we can learn from each other if we slow down, shut up, and listen. Thank you very much.

Thank you.