Moses Zeh Blah (born 18 April 1947) is a Liberian political figure. He served as Vice President under President Charles Taylor and became the 23rd President of Liberia on 11 August 2003, following Taylor’s resignation. He served as President for two months, until 14 October 2003, when a United Nations-backed transitional government, headed by Gyude Bryant, was sworn in.

Blah was born in Toweh Town, Liberia, a Gio-speaking hamlet in north-eastern Nimba County, close to the border with the Ivory Coast. He joined with Taylor because of a shared hatred of the current president, Samuel Doe, who had killed Blah’s wife along with hundreds of others in an ethnic-related massacre. He trained with Taylor in a Libyan guerrilla camp and served with him as a general during Liberia’s civil war in the 1990s. He held the post of ambassador to Libya and Tunisia after Taylor was elected in 1997. In July 2000 Blah was appointed as Vice President after the death of Enoch Dogolea who was rumoured to have been poisoned.  Blah was known as a quiet and unassuming man, driving his own jeep around town rather than using a motorcade and driver, and wearing flowing African robes instead of the normal olive green military uniform.  He was constantly annoyed about the bodyguards who followed him around.

 In June 2003, Taylor had left the country for peace talks in Ghana, and while there he was indicted by the war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone. Blah was urged by the United States to take power from Taylor during his absence, but Blah made no such attempt. After Taylor’s return, Blah was held under house arrest for ten days, but was subsequently absolved and reinstated as Vice President. When Taylor resigned in August of that year, Blah briefly succeeded him as president. He was condemned by Liberian rebel groups for his close ties to Taylor; they charged that he would simply continue Taylor’s practices. Blah responded by calling the rebels “brothers” and saying “Let bygones be bygones. If there is power, we can share it.” He invited the rebels to negotiate in his own house. On 7 April 2008, Blah said that he had been sent a subpoena to testify at Taylor’s trial before the Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague. He said that he would testify and “speak the truth”,^[1] and he testified on 14 May 2008, describing child soldiers and the relationship between Taylor and Foday Sankoh. (Wikipedia, 2011.)

I asked the president to meet with the Democracy in Africa course when they arrive in Monrovia. That is when I learned at Mrs. Blah, the former first lady was an excellent cook. (President Blah said so.) I then struck a bargain that I would bring the delegation of approximately 20 to the former President’s home for meeting with him and if Mrs. Blah would prepare the meal, I would pay for it!  It was agreed! In summary, the class will be meeting the former president in his home over a meal prepared by the former first lady of the Republic!

When I left Botswana in March this year after my second visit, I was still marveling over what a peaceful, civil place that country is. Botswana achieved independence without a civil war, revolution, insurgency, or anything like that. Independence without violence? Multi-party elections and known no violence to persuade the British to leave? What kind of democracy is that!

Actually, the Portuguese left Mozambique without so much as a fight, but then again there was that extraordinarily destructive civil war between the Frelimo and Renamo parties, a nasty brotherly fight that claimed the lives of more than a million people. They had a democracy, so they fought each other after the colonists left. (Okay, they started with one party rule by Frelimo, but who says that a democracy has to have two parties?) We see this story again and again and again: India and Pakistan, for example, were formed after indigenous groups really went after each other – kind of like opposing liberation groups in Iraq, Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt today.

A colleague of mine at Wayne State University and I are now embarking on the third course in the Wayne State University African Democracy Project. We have chose Liberia. It is focused on national elections, as was the Mozambique course in 2009.

Why Liberia? There are many reasons. First, democracy is not new to Liberia. One might argue that Liberia has always been a democracy and one can just as easily argue that it was never a true colony in the tradition of British, Portuguese, French, and Dutch Africa. (Incidentally, Botswana was not a colony either. Technically, it was a protectorate of Britain. After diamonds were discovered, Britain really protected it!) Liberia was settled by freed slaves and other black free men from the United States who, on their own volition and at the urging of others, left the U.S. to find a place back in the homeland. Then there were other Africans who, on their way to the “free” world to become unfree, were liberated by the British from slave ships and dumped – not back in their homelands, but onto the nearest shoreline in what is now Liberia. This mixture of free and freed, liberated and castaway, formed what became collectively known as the Congo people of Liberia. They basically took over the free people of Liberia to create the first and only colony formed by people (not citizens) of the United States of America. (Of course, this depends somewhat on how you look at what Teddy Roosevelt did in Panama to get the canal. But let’s not go there.)

Why Liberia? Because the people are much like us and, furthermore, wanted to be like us. For heaven’s sake – they formed the True Whig Party! The Liberian flag – except for missing 49 stars and two stripes – looks exactly like ours.

Why Liberia? Among other reasons is the simple notion that it is there and is what it is. And the connection of Liberia to “us” is that we never let slavery and slaves get too far away from our shores, our minds, or our souls. There is a kind of spiritual kinship between Liberia and us. Charles Taylor, a latter-day freeman in an American jail, mysteriously escaped and went back to Liberia to wreak havoc on the country and its people, but that puts me way ahead in telling this story.

Let’s just go with the idea that Liberia, democracy, violence, and America are inseparable. Mary Moran’s book about Liberia, The Violence of Democracy, may help us to understand why these concepts are inextricably linked in Liberia.

We have examined Dahl’s historical analysis of working democracies as our principal conceptual framework. We have challenged our students to think about the dichotomy of Bostwanan democracy vs. Western concepts of democracy.

An alternative framework that is actually being employed to rank governments and nations in terms of their good, or bad, practices in democracy is the Ibrahim Index of good governance. The Ibrahim Index of African Governance is a comprehensive assessment of governance quality in Africa. The Ibrahim Index measures the delivery of public goods and services to citizens by government and non-state actors. It uses indicators across four main categories as proxies for the quality of the processes and outcomes of governance:

–– Safety and Rule of Law
–– Participation and Human Rights
–– Sustainable Economic Opportunity
–– Human Development.

The index is the most comprehensive collection of qualitative and quantitative data that assess
governance in Africa. According to Mo Ibrahim, founder and chair of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, and the father of the index, it is the embodiment of democracy itself. Ibrahim states:

“We are shining a light on governance in Africa, and in so doing we are making a
unique contribution to improving the quality of governance. The Ibrahim Index is
a tool to hold governments to account and frame the debate about how we are
governed. Africans are setting benchmarks not only for their own continent,
but for the world.”

For a detailed presentation of the Ibrahim Index, please visit the following website:

http://www.moibrahimfoundation.org/en/media/get/20101108_eng-summary-iiag2010-rev-web-2.pdf

It is not clear to me that this is a flawless model for judging democracies. Certainly the four criteria and the commitment to serve your constituency are seemingly necessary elements of democracy, although I clearly do not know that experts would consider them to be a sufficient set of criteria. Mozambique and Botswana demonstrated strong ratings on the Ibrahim Index but each has strong questionable results in how they guarantee their democracy.

Now it is clear to me that the exclusive dependence on the Ibrahim process of selecting democracies based on awards to their former leaders was ill-advised. The Ibrahim Foundation has declined to give the award now for two consecutive years after only two leaders on the continent were recognized. Their combined populations were around 20 million out of more than 1 billion people in the 54 nations that comprise the continent.

Regardless of what one may think of Ibrahim’s approach to judging African democracy, it was his influence that stimulated my interest in the concept of African democracy and led to the Wayne State University initiative entitled African Democracy Project.

In the Spring of 2008,  an initiative to recognize former African heads of state that during their terms of office practiced good governance was established by Mo Ibrahim, a British of subject Sudanese decent, who wanted to recognize outstanding leadership. He created The Mo Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership which was intended to be award annually by the Mo Ibrahim Foundation to African heads of state for their commitment and demonstration of good governance. The measures of successful leadership were based on the role the leaders played in advancing security, health, education and economic development during their terms of office. As importantly, candidates for the award were those who “democratically transfer power to their successors”. The recognition comes with a substantial financial award, a portion of it for life.

A panel of former world leaders, chaired by Kofi Annan, the former Secretary General of the United Nations, selected Joaquin Chissano, former president of the Republic of Mozambique as the inaugural recipient of the award. I was intrigued by the concept of an African leader democratically turning over power to someone else. More typical of Africa were coups, civil wars, military interference and downright genocide. I contacted Chissano in Mozambique and sought an audience with him. In November of that year, I traveled to Maputo, the capital of the republic to meet with the former president and told him that I was so impressed with the notion of African democracy that I would like to devise a way for our students to develop a deeper understanding of what democracy in Africa meant. (For the remainder of this visit, see an earlier blog.)

The Chissano recognition was followed by the announcement that Festus Mogae (seated here with me in his study at his villa) would be the next recipient. In March 2009, I traveled to Gaborone, the capital of Botswana to meet with representatives of the University of Botswana and to meet the former president to discuss how Botswana could be the next site of the Wayne State University African Democracy Project.

What is evolving in the eyes of our students is a new way to look at things, namely, in this case, judging what is democratic and what a democracy is. Perhaps as the African Democracy Project evolve so will a new paradigm for examining democracies — one perhaps developed by students themselves.

As I sat with the students of the African Democracy Project/Botswana (ADPB) one on one, I was genuinely interested in what they really knew or even thought about democracy. I had encountered the thirteen of them along with the two graduate students as a group once before over our “traditional” African dinner at my home as we all got to interact and, in most cases, got to meet for the very first time.

Now, with only a video camera between us, I urged each of them just to talk about their impending study in the course and to reflect on democracy in general, about their own democracy (mostly U.S. citizens), and about what each of them thought, no matter what, about African/Botswana Democracy. I wanted their very first recollection of Africa. Three things became clear:

Few had any exposure to Africa; those who did agreed that there information was nothing more than stereotypes that they had learned from the popular media, and a significant number had heard only of Africa from a single event: Rwanda, Darfur, AIDS, or starving children. Two or three, though, had fairly significant views and experiences. Two had actually lived in an African country, albeit before the age of 10. Two actually had written papers on Africa in previous classes another had written a significant paper on Ghana.

But the general lack of sophistication about things “African” was not at all surprising. What was surprising was what I learned next. I asked each about the perception of democracy in general and African democracy in particular. Many students took democracy for granted. One of the first week’s readings was a chapter from Robert Dahl’s On Democracy where he raises the question that was the sub context of the course and the challenge to our thinking for the entire democracy project.  Dahl wrote:  …….Just what do we mean by democracy?     What distinguishes a democratic government? from a nondemocratic? ……..If a country is already democratic, how can it become more?democratic?

The students struggled with the concept and democracy and they struggled even more with how a democratic country such as Botswana was different from the West. They knew with certainty that it was. How it was different from Western democracies was vague. To several the questions seem confusing.

By the end of the first class, however, they had delved into the readings for the course and those readings had had a huge impact on their views of democracy — African or otherwise. ! The students had begun to focus on their own issues about democracy. They were critical of Dahl’s formulation and had begun to see real issues with Botswana’s government in its treatment of the Bushmen in the Kalahari Game Reserve as well as to deal with concepts of democracy that had heard in their own homes among family members. They question some of the basic tenets of western democracies. They were beginning to look at the very structure of government as vehicles for democratic practices.

What was clear was that these students had, after one week, arrived at a different place. It was not always the same place as each other, but it was different for each of them from their work just a week before as they sat before the video camera. When I read some of their blogs this week it confirmed for me that the greatest learning was going to be, not in the readings in syllabus alone, but in the deep honest examination that each was about to undertake of her or his own value of democracy, regardless where it was. I fully expect that each will rewrite Dahl’s framework for examining democracies or become advocates for Botswana’s Bushmen!

They had studied diligently for nearly two months, taking on the challenges of heavy readings, visiting lecturers, films and their own blogging. After some initial meetings I had arranged for them, they made appointments and arranged visits with prominent and ordinary citizens of Mozambique in preparation for observing the presidential elections for which they now were going to have unique perspectives that few, if any, other Americans had ever had or would again for at least the next 5 years.

They completed both one of three group projects and individual final projects for the course that displayed their deeply changed outlook from those that they displayed to the faculty and to each other at the first class meetings.  In the Spring 2010, I conducted interviews with our students in order to get their perspective on the whole course and how they had been affected personally by the experience of democracy Mozambique. What I learned were several things, lessons that I will never forget.

First, while my students were highly indifferent to their own democracy, they were deeply committed to understanding democracy in Mozambique and wanted to understand it to a degree unequalled at first in their interest in their own democracy;

Second after the course, they were more circumspect about what democracy meant to them and more analytical of democracy here and in Mozambique;

Third, while every student was highly anticipative of the impending experience upon which they were about to embark, none anticipated the transformative experiences with which they were left at the end of the visit;

Fourth, more than half of the students had some notion of how they wanted to continue their contact with Africa, and while their plans varied widely, most anticipated returning to the continent in the future; and

Fifth and finally, we wanted the students to achieve a stronger connection between their experiences and strategies for impacting and improving democracy as well as solving other problems here at home.

This final point was particularly critical for those of us on the faculty and particularly in the Honors College, the home of our course and the home of many of the service learning projects of the university. Furthermore, FOCIS and the Eugene Applebaum Chair in Community Engagement, co-sponsors of the ADPM initiative, had as their commitments engaging the resources of the university to improved the greater Detroit community.

Correcting this shortcoming was to become a major goal of the next course, African Democracy Project Botswana (ADPB).

Interview with Joaquim Chissano. All photos in this post courtesy of Hannah Kelley

In the conference room of the Chissano Foundation, the former president began to speak to the students about Mozambique, focusing more on its history than democracy. Eventually he touched on the country’s early attempts to establish democracy, and then multi-party democracy. In a quiet voice, he held our attention for nearly an hour before we began to ask questions. When a student asked about the early years of Mozambique before democracy, the group took copious notes and sat mesmerized even though they had studied this topic already in the class lectures back in Detroit.

For the next thirty minutes, the African Democracy Project Mozambique students sought to advance their knowledge about the country that was set to hold its fourth election since independence from Portugal. They had come here prepared to poke around the edges of this emerging democracy, but were slowly growing skeptical as to whether it was a true democracy. Chissano acknowledged this skepticism from Americans and Europeans because of the dominance of Frelimo in both pre and post multi-party elections. As he spoke about the opposition, mostly the Renamo party, I sensed a bit of testiness regarding what more was required of Frelimo to convince outsiders that Mozambique’s democracy is genuinely multi-party. My impression is that Chissano is sincerely committed to the concept but, like many Africans, believes it is not fully achievable – not because the Frelimo leaders in power do not support it, but because the people do not truly want it.

Chissano gave two examples of Frelimo’s and the country’s commitment to multi-party democracy. He described an occasion in which Frelimo encouraged Mozambicans to support the opposition. I got the distinct impression that it was not Renamo. The second instance involved the newly established party called Movement for the Development of Mozambique (MDM). He mentioned that the chaotic situation around MDM resulted in many of their applications to establish candidates being denied because they did not follow the constitutional process. This failure left them able to contest parliamentary elections in only three of the country’s eleven provinces. MDM’s young presidential candidate, David Sammongo, was running in all of the provinces. Showing a bit of frustration, Chissano said that the West was pressuring the government to allow MDM on the ballot although they did not qualify. He saw this as duplicity – on the one hand they were being told to honor the constitutional commitment to the multi-party election, and on the other hand they were being advised to violate the constitution by overlooking the mistakes of MDM.

A growing suspicion was emerging in the ADPM students as they sensed Chissano’s uneasiness about MDM, stemming perhaps from MDM’s origins. It was an offshoot of Renamo, made up of disgruntled former members as well as some independents.

Frelimo on the move

One point was clear as the country approached this election: There would be no change because there would be no transition of power. The platform of Frelimo was not Obama-style change. It was more “steady as we go.” There was no bold new policy, no vigorous new leader, no reaching out to the multi-party democracy to which Chissano had committed preceding the 1994 election. Sadly, Mozambique was not evolving into a multi-party country. Renamo had not become a worthy opponent because it seemed unable to gain the confidence of the south. Frelimo did not have to change because, seemingly, the people had not changed. Tired of war and conflict, they already had their villain and their hero – so why change? Yet Frelimo does have one feature in its favor: There is true passion among its supporters. Guebuza, the standard bearer and the incumbent, is seen as safe and confident, and the people appear to crave no more than that.

I had admired Chissano immensely before I met him, and even more upon this second meeting. I identified with him on many levels, the most immediate being as former president. But that was not the main or the closest similarity between us. I understood and sympathized with him deeply in being identified as the first of one’s race to do something. You always know that you are thought of that way both positively and negatively.

Children and church in Chissano's birthplace

Chissano was the first black student to attend the only high school in the colony, Liceu Salazar in Lourenço Marques (present day Maputo). He became a member and subsequently the leader of the Mozambican African Secondary School Students’ Organization (NESAM). I could only imagine what a curiosity he must have been at his secondary school when he arrived. Do you stand out or stay back? Do you try harder or simply try to survive? Do you overcompensate by being less like members of your race and more like the others, or do you try to dispel the stereotypes locked in the minds of the majority?

Stereotypes have frustrated me the most. The fear of being stereotyped gave me the greatest motivation to succeed and to know within myself the standards to which I would adhere. There were those who implied that ethnic minorities were a part of an inequitable system that allowed us to get where we were at the expense of someone else who rightfully belonged there. There were others who felt we were there rightfully because of the injustice that we had endured, and this was an opportunity to make it up. Neither view felt quite right to me. I honestly felt that the reason for my success was a decision early in my life to formulate my own standard of success. Being the “first” was an opportunity not to be squandered, because it could make the difference to so many others who would follow. But being a “first” places an enormous burden on you. I learned to harden myself against the opinions of others in evaluating myself. I was not as good as some people said I was, and I was nowhere as bad as others thought. This knowledge made a lot of difference in my early life transitions and sustained me to the end of my second university presidency.

I still wonder what sustained Chissano as he made transitions in his own life. Rumors had it that he had not stepped down voluntarily. If so, it seemed not to have mattered to him. He is a man of enormous personal discipline who practices meditation and once had his entire cabinet doing the same. The morning newspaper on the day of his birthday gave me insight into his greatest loss: the mysterious murder of his son. That deep loss no doubt must have made this transition more difficult. Nevertheless, he is one of the two most respected African leaders today. The other is Kofi Annan of Ghana, who made Chissano a special envoy during the time he served as Secretary-General of the United Nations.

Our students were a bit disappointed that they did not see in Chissano the fiery warrior that must have existed when he organized and headed up the African student group at his secondary school, or the emerging Frelimo leader who fled to Paris from Tanzania. No, this was the just-turned-seventy-year-old statesman speaking softly about his country’s history and his own frustration with the judgments of the West about African democracy.

He had only become animated when I bought up MDM, which is a grassroots opportunity for change. Through its young leader and many of its enthusiastic and more highly educated members, MDM had captured the excitement of university students and intellectuals. There were no hard statistics, but I felt a definite awareness of this. Perhaps the old warrior was sensing an adversary that might ultimately be the true successor to him and Frelimo. At this moment, there appeared to be in his transition a pause to statesmanship and a temporary throwback to warrior.

A new generation of Chissano supporters?

Transitions are never straight lines; they are often zigzagged or curvilinear. Many people have come out of retirement to continue the work they had left. Corporate executives have tried to return to take over their old companies from perceived heretics. Like a prizefighter, they want one more fight beyond their last glory.

I turned on the television the day after the election to catch up on the campaign, and there was Chissano in the bright yellow and green colors of Frelimo, dancing at a rally. Apparently that dance with the tribal group the night of his birthday celebration was a mere warm-up for the Chissano on the election battlefield. Bring it on Renamo, MDM, and anyone else. Is Chissano back?

Interview with Joaquim Chissano. All photos in this post courtesy of Hannah Kelley

Joachim Chissano, second president of the Republic of Mozambique, entered the conference room of the Chissano Foundation in Maputo to the nervous voices of twelve students from Wayne State University singing “happy birthday to you, Mr. President.” I felt an extraordinary sense of pride in what we had accomplished since I had visited the former president less than a year ago in his study one flight of stairs down. Here we were with the “John Adams” of Mozambique. He is also the first African recognized for his commitment to democracy by a panel of international statesmen including Kofi Annan and Mary Robinson, among others. I felt it a personal honor to be in his presence a second time.

I had actually been with him and Mrs. Chissano the night before at a special mass in the Catholic Cathedral of Maputo in honor of his seventieth birthday. Following our planning meeting, my staff members and I had been invited by Dr. Leonardo Simao, Executive Director of the Chissano Foundation and former cabinet member under Chissano, and the former president’s advisor and personal assistant, Tomas Mabuiangue. We arrived at the Cathedral to find one of the most exciting services I have ever experienced. Looking almost regal, Chissano was seated with his wife just below and to the right of the altar. We were shown to special seats, but quickly left them to ascend a small staircase to obtain a better vantage point for pictures and videos.

For the next two hours, the place rocked with what can only be described as a unique treatment of the Roman Catholic mass. The singing and dancing were followed by processions around the church with the Chissanos participating every step of the way. Then came the most dazzling moment of the evening: a delegation, apparently from Chissano’s tribe, performed for him on the opposite side of the Cathedral. The Chissanos could not resist the tribal dance and rushed over, pausing only to genuflect before the altar. This man of seventy and his bride got right in rhythm with the group, much to the delight of the entire congregation. After another hour or so we left with the clear feeling that this would be no ordinary Catholic service in form, content, or duration. It must have gone on until midnight.

Joaquim Alberto Chissano was born 22 October 1939. He served as the second president of Mozambique for nineteen years from 6 November 1986 until 2 February 2005. He was raised in the remote village of Malehice, Chibuto district, Gaza Province in the Portuguese colony of Mozambique (then called Portuguese East Africa). After leaving secondary school, he studied medicine at the University of Lisbon in Portugal. Because of Chissano’s political activism, his studies there came to an abrupt end, and he fled to Tanzania via France.

Chissano represented Frelimo, the Mozambique independence movement, in Paris during the 1960s. He was known there as a soft-spoken diplomat who worked to reconcile radical and moderate Marxist factions of the Frelimo party. He went on to fight in the Mozambican War of Independence against the Portuguese colonial government and its authoritarian Estado Novo regime, which was engaged in a multi-front colonial war. By the time Mozambique finally achieved its independence in 1975 as a result of the liberation struggle and the Carnation Revolution in Portugal, Chissano had risen to the rank of major-general.

The new president of Mozambique, Samora Machel, appointed him foreign minister, a position he held for the next eleven years. In 1974, Chissano participated in the Lusaka talks that paved the way for the independence of Mozambique, and subsequently became prime minister of the transitional government.

Joaquim Chissano became president in 1986 when Samora Machel’s presidential aircraft crashed in mountainous terrain in South Africa. In 1999, he defeated the former rebel leader, Afonso Dhlakama, by 52.3% to 47.7%. Chissano served as Chairperson of the African Union from July 2003 to July 2004. He chose not to run for a third term in the 2004 presidential election, although the constitution allowed him to do so. Frelimo instead selected as its candidate Armando Guebuza, who defeated Dhlakama by an even bigger margin of votes. Since stepping down as president, Chissano has become an elder statesman and is called upon by international bodies, such as the United Nations, to be an envoy or negotiator. He currently chairs the Joaquim Chissano Foundation and the Forum of Former African Heads of State and Government.

At a ceremony in London on 22 October 2007, Chissano’s sixty-eighth birthday, former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced that he had been awarded the inaugural five million dollar Prize for Achievement in African Leadership. This award is given annually by the Mo Ibrahim Foundation to a former African leader who has shown good governance. The five million dollars are distributed over the course of ten years, plus $200,000 per annum subsequently.

Several of the participating students at a pre-trip potluck

Our twelve Wayne State students are an extraordinarily diverse group comprising three students born in other countries (Korea, Liberia, and Pakistan), three African American females, one student who is part Japanese and whose American-born Japanese grandmother was interned during World War II, another part Native American, one white male, and three white females. They had previously traveled to more than 31 countries. Yet the group includes two students who had not previously traveled outside of the U.S. at all. To me, these students represent America in so many ways, but none as much as its diversity.

Chissano accepting the Ibrahim Prize (source: http://www.moibrahimfoundation.org)

While I was elated with the inaugural lecture for FOCIS by Vicente Fox, something had been missing. It bothered me that the students did not become involved with the project until the former president arrived in Detroit. I had only taken a doctoral student with me to visit Fox in Mexico, but it would have been great for a group of students to have traveled there to learn more about our southern neighbor from its former president and to explore the immigration issue in more detail outside of the U.S. I wanted students to be more involved with Chissano. I wanted them to see more, to own the project, to immerse themselves in some aspect of the former president’s life and country, and to have access to Chissano over a longer period of time.

So my thinking began to jell. What did American students know about Africa? Not very much. What is Africa’s image? Probably they thought only of war, pestilence, tribalism, autocracy, genocide, non-democracy, etc. I had heard Chissano’s acceptance speech as the first recipient of the Ibrahim Award, and decided to propose that a group of students come to visit the former president at the Chissano Foundation to learn about democracy firsthand. Then Chissano would come to Wayne State University as a speaker in the lecture series by former heads of state, spending about a week on campus in various venues with students, faculty, and others.

My assistant, Michael Hicks, contacted the Chissano Foundation in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, extending my invitation. A reply came that very afternoon welcoming such a discussion. In November of 2008, I visited Chissano at his Foundation in Maputo. We were joined by the Foundation’s executive director, Dr. Leonardo Simao, in the library. I appreciated Chissano’s graciousness in seeing me, particularly since he had just arrived home from Europe in the early morning before the meeting.

With Joaquim Chissano in Maputo

I was amazed because “first Tuesday in November every four years” stuck in my mind. I had the naïve idea that all presidential elections were held on fixed dates, and learned that the American democracy was an exception. Regardless of the date, I wanted the students to witness in person democracy in this part of the world, which was relatively unknown to most of us. It would be the opportunity of a lifetime – so different that they should have a way to document their experiences, to extend them beyond the length of the trip. If they made a documentary, it could be a part of Chissano’s visit when he arrived on campus in September 2010.

Joaquim Chissano in his office in Maputo

Two faculty colleagues and I set out to design a yearlong course called African Democracy Project Mozambique (ADPM). We enrolled a diverse group of 12 students and inaugurated the course in late August of 2009. At the end of this month we will depart on a 12-day trip to Mozambique, preceded by two days in Johannesburg, South Africa, loaded with a broader knowledge of Mozambique than they could have imagined just a few months ago. Imagine what they will experience and learn about democracy, Africa, America, each other, and themselves.

We need to think long and hard about how our students learn about the rest of the world, and how that learning can affect their places in the world. For most of us, Africa is remote – but it is not irrelevant. We are better persons over time because we relate to each other: family, friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens of our country and of the world. This is the lesson about our own democracy that I want our students to learn from the democracies of others.

Okay, I was not getting far with them. When you are making a change in your life, you soon realize that you are also making a change in other people’s lives – and most of your close acquaintances would rather see you not screw around with a great thing by changing it! I ended conversations with all family members except my wife. I simply told the others, “Plan on coming and getting all of this stuff out of the house that your mother and I have been carrying around for the last 20 years!” My son, the packrat, realized I was serious, and showed up to collect his belongings shortly after I moved into a nearby condo. Little by little I realized that in order to move forward, I had to define this transition, at least temporarily, as being about “me.”

Then it dawned on me: I am going from being an executive to being a non-executive. Others have done the same. I thought how great it would be to meet and discuss a variety of issues with others who had transitioned to another kind of life when their executive roles ended. I had been observing Bill Clinton with considerable awe and admiration at how he had moved on from the greatest executive position of all. I admired his international role in health, poverty, conflict, and world affairs with the cooperation of seemingly incompatible forces. He had inspired those who have money to give and share and make future commitments. What about all the other former heads of state around the world?

In 2008 we were in the middle of a national presidential election and several topics were being hotly debated: war, crime, health care, and immigration. Heads of states of other countries try to stay out of their neighbors’ politics, but that is not necessarily true of former heads of state. The thought of former executives like myself led to an “aha!” phenomenon. What about Vicente Fox, the very articulate former president of Mexico? Surely he would have some ideas about what was going on in the U.S., particularly with regard to immigration. I decided that one of the things I wanted to do in my new life was to provide a venue in which students, faculty, and the community could hear from these former leaders.

With Vicente Fox at his ranch in San Francisco del Rincón

Vicente Fox in Detroit

From university president back to classroom professor

About three years ago, as I was approaching my 16th year as a university president, I started to think about stepping down from the helm. It had been a pretty good run, and I pondered what might lie ahead: higher tuitions, external intrusions into academic affairs by politicians and overseers, deferred maintenance, recalcitrant faculty… Although none of this was critical in my thinking, it looked like it might be my time to move on. But there was one problem: I loved being in the business of higher education.

I had been a professor of business before heading a department of business law, which was followed by service as dean of a school of business and two university presidencies. I especially loved being around students with their learning, thinking, challenging, annoying, and goading. But did I want to return to teaching? I certainly did not yearn for the good old days of the classroom as I left it. My PhD, from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, is in business and applied economics with a specialty in marketing. Did I want to teach marketing? No. Management or leadership? Maybe.

Finally, I decided that what I truly wanted was to take advantage of an opportunity I had loved throughout my university life – traveling and learning, and enabling others to do the same. I enjoy working with people of various cultures and seeing students learn about people, societies, and nations different from their own. (I was happy years ago to learn that our son had been admitted to an Ivy League university, but ecstatic to learn that he was going into the Peace Corps.) I also loved putting together forums and lecture series wherein people could offer and discuss provocative thoughts

FOCIS: Forum on Contemporary Issues in Society

I started with this last idea first. Two years before announcing that I would step down as president, I asked a group of faculty to help me think through two lecture series. One would involve world leaders discussing issues with people from all walks of life and the other would involve experts on the challenges faced by global societies. From this was born FOCIS, the Forum on Contemporary Issues in Society. Our first three experts were Robert Kennedy Jr. talking about the environment, Bob Woodward on the press and the presidency, and Vicente Fox on immigration.

All of this was great, but I still sensed the need to find a missing piece before taking the big step of announcing my departure from the presidency – although not from university life. It came in the spring of 2007, when I learned that a new award had been established to recognize emerging democracies in Africa. The first recipient of the award was Mozambique’s former president, Joachim Chissano. When asked by his party to run for a third term as president, he responded that he had fought the Portuguese colonists to establish not a dictatorship, but a democracy.

I knew what to do. I booked a flight to Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, to discuss my idea with Chissano.

Mozambique here I come