The
Oprah South African Leadership Project provides cross-cultural
immersion and international exposure through travel
and study in South Africa for Morehouse College students.
In the future, it will involve an exchange of students
between Morehouse and South Africa, and will encompass
ethical leadership training and community service
in both Atlanta and South Africa.
May
18, 2005
Patience is more than a virtue for Dr. Walter Earl
Fluker, executive director of the Leadership Center
at Morehouse College. Patience lies at the center
of the story of how it took more than a decade to
bring to fruition an initiative—the Oprah South
African Leadership Project—that would send nine
Morehouse students on a four-week trip to South Africa.
It
was in 1996 that Fluker, then a dean at Colgate Rochester
Divinity School in Rochester, N.Y., traveled to Freetown,
Sierra Leone, on a Ford Foundation grant to interview
youth who were victims of a violent coup in the west
African country. What he saw in the city devastated
him, as well as Dr. R. Drew Smith, who was participating
in the Ford Foundation project and at the time was
a professor at Butler University in Indianapolis,
Ind. He is now a scholar-in-residence in the Leadership
Center completing a Fulbright Scholarship in Johannesburg,
South Africa.
“Many
[youth] were grieving,” recalls Fluker. “They
had been separated from their families and it was
terrible. People were missing limbs cut off with machetes.”
Fluker
and Smith saw remnants of a once-developing nation:
a church that the two had spoken at just a week prior
was torched by rebels; a mass of fresh graves dotted
the landscape. “It was mounds of dirt heaped
on mounds of dirt,” he says.
Fluker
observed the carnage while staying in the crumbling
shells of Freetown’s bombed out hotels. “Young
people had started raiding towns. Most of these kids
were drugged and the idea of being at the intersection
where worlds collide really captured for me the idea
that these young people were extremely vulnerable
to political and economic forces. And they did not
have the skills or the institutional butlers to protect
them from what was going on.”
 “What
I began to understand was that these young people
were being used to disrupt civil society in order
to ensure the traffic of drugs from powerful warlords,”
says Fluker.
Fast
forward to May 17, 2005, after nine men of Morehouse
have spent a school term learning the politics, culture,
religion and economics of Africa and, as part of the
Oprah South African Leadership Project, will take
their lessons and apply them to South Africa’s
HIV/AIDS challenges and the pursuit of ethical leadership.
It is precisely what Fluker envisioned in 1998 when
he took the helm of the Morehouse Leadership Center:
the creation of a bridge between African and African
American youth.
The
men of Morehouse are excited…and observant.
Almost
four hours after disembarking from a 17-hour flight
from Atlanta, Ga., to Johannesburg, South Africa,
(called Jo’burg in local parlance) Morehouse
students are eating at Hombaze African Cuisine, a
restaurant in Randburg, a suburb northwest of Johannesburg.
Will Moore ’06, a psychology major from Dallas,
Texas, notices that all of the restaurant’s
customers—present company excluded—are
eating in parties of four or more. Indeed, most of
the customers are African.
From
this pedestrian occurrence, Moore extrapolates a lesson.
“As
future leaders, we can’t have an understanding
of just American culture. It has to be all over the
world. As African American leaders what better place
to understand leadership outside of the United States
than Africa,” said Moore. “I think we’re
going to be pushed away from Western ideas of society
and more into a communal way of thinking. Here, culture
is more communal than individualistic.”
Also
making the trip to South Africa, but traveling independently,
are two faculty and staff and eight students from
Butler University.
Tomorrow,
May 19, we visit the apartheid museum and tour central
Jo’burg.
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