Most of what is written about Indaba in English is wrong. Not maliciously — usually it is wrong because Indaba resists translation, because the concept does not match neatly onto Western categories, because the writers are working with a sentence-long summary instead of a tradition. Indaba and Performance Reviews? This essay is one attempt at a more careful answer.
What Indaba Actually Means
Let me give the canonical definition first, then try to do a little better. Indaba is a Zulu and Xhosa word for a council meeting — historically of elders, today of any group that needs to make a decision worth keeping. The form has been borrowed by international climate negotiators, corporate boards, and community organisations because of one quality: it produces decisions that hold. It does this by refusing the Western meeting model — the loudest voice, the rushed vote, the unread minutes — in favour of structured listening, ritualised speech, and visible consensus. The canonical version is correct but tame. The full version of Indaba is less polite, more demanding, and more interesting. It does not flatter the reader who has just discovered it.
The wise listen before they speak; fools speak before they listen.Akan
The Question This Post Is About
What Indaba would change about how performance is measured and discussed. The question is worth taking seriously, because Indaba is one of those concepts that loses its shape when handled carelessly — and recovers it as soon as the reader is willing to slow down and listen.
If you take Indaba seriously at work, the first thing that has to change is the meeting. Not its agenda — its shape. Western meetings are optimised for speed and for the loudest contributor. Indaba is optimised for something else: for the quality of decisions that hold. Meetings end with the convener summarising what was decided and asking each person whether they recognise the summary. The trade-off is real. Meetings under Indaba take longer. The decisions also unstick less often.
A Second Angle
In a long marriage, Indaba is the antidote to the modern romantic fantasy that each partner is supposed to be the other's everything. The Zulu / Southern African version is gentler: you are part of a wider weave, and so is your marriage, and the marriage is held in part by the people around it. Meetings end with the convener summarising what was decided and asking each person whether they recognise the summary.
Where the Concept Resists
There is a real risk in romanticising Indaba. The Zulu / Southern African traditions that produced it have always also produced internal critics — voices warning against the misuse of communal philosophy to demand conformity, to silence the young, to protect bad behaviour by elders. The honest defender of Indaba keeps those critics at the table.
What to Do With This
If you are new to Indaba, the most useful place to start is not with a study or a course but with a question, asked of yourself, at the end of an ordinary day: who held me up today, and whom did I hold? Sit with the answer. Do not improve it yet. The concept will deepen on its own, repeated, over weeks. This is how Indaba actually enters a life.
The full philosophy, as a book
How to run meetings where everyone is heard — and the decisions you make actually stick.
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