Hands-Off Leadership and Multicultural Programs

Abstract

A small circle of young women sat in the warm mid-winter sun deep in the Central Kalahari of Botswana. Russian, American and Batswana, they were part of a multicultural program which had assembled a few days earlier. The facilitator was encouraging a discussion of issues of importance to women. The American women, always quick to speak, suggested discussing abortion, a highly charged topic that, to them, clearly symbolized women's issues around the world. However, to the Russians, abortion was not an issue. It was simply an accepted form of birth control. One young woman had already had two. To the Batswana, abortion was not an issue. It was inconceivable that anyone would ever abort a child. So it was left to the Americans to explain why it is a sharply divisive issue in their country, and to try to engender a conversation about something that was at best a curiosity to the other women.

The two of us had been sitting for hours, waiting in the car on a dark roadside north of Gaborone, Botswana, watching the constellations wheel slowly over the silent land. We were looking for a bus from Harare, Zimbabwe that was supposed to arrive sometime around 6 p.m. It had been coming three times a week for years, but nobody seemed to know where it was going to stop on any given day, so we had decided to try intercepting it. Not only that, the Russians we were expecting may not have even made it to Harare as far as we knew. Finally, well past midnight, a bus roared by and we took chase. At the first stop, somewhere in Gaborone, we ran to the door of the bus and found five smiling Russians stepping off. “How was it?” I asked Elena Sadovnikova, their irrepressible leader. “Well, we forgot about visas for Botswana and they refused us at the border. But African bureaucracy is no match for a Russian. Once again, bureaucracy struggled against Elena and lost!”