I want to begin with a memory that is not mine but has been told to me many times. A dispute between two families has dragged on for a year. The elders call an indaba. They sit in a circle from morning until dusk. The elders speak last. By nightfall, the dispute is resolved — not because anyone won, but because everyone has been heard. Whether or not it ever happened, the memory teaches what Indaba is — better than any definition does. Indaba and the Job You Don't Want to Take? The story is the answer.
What Indaba Actually Means
Translators usually settle on something like: 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. It is a defensible translation. But translation is the surface. Indaba carries underneath it a set of assumptions — about what a person is, what owes what to whom, and what success even means — that the English sentence cannot deliver.
When elders speak, children grow.Zulu
The Question This Post Is About
Walking through a real career choice using Indaba as the question. 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.
Take a small, ordinary case. A team of nine. A project that was supposed to take a quarter is now in its second. The manager has the option to find a single person to assign blame to and to move on. The Indaba reading offers a different question: what did we, as a team, fail to make possible for the person carrying this work? Meetings end with the convener summarising what was decided and asking each person whether they recognise the summary. The case is not unusual. The reading of it, in the spirit of Indaba, is.
A Second Angle
Notice what the case is not asking. It is not asking who is to blame. It is not asking how to make the situation more efficient. It is asking what Indaba would have us do here, with these particular people, in this particular knot. Meetings end with the convener summarising what was decided and asking each person whether they recognise the summary. The discipline of asking the Indaba question — instead of the efficiency question, or the blame question — is what changes a working life over years.
Where the Concept Resists
It would be dishonest to pretend Indaba is uncomplicated. The concept can be — and has been — used to suppress dissent in the name of harmony, to extract unpaid labour from women in the name of community, and to soften criticism that should have been sharper. Any serious reading of Indaba has to hold these uses in view. The concept survives the criticism. But it is not innocent.
What to Do With This
The reading you have just done is one entry into Indaba. There are many others. Zulu / Xhosa elders, Southern Africa writers, and the daily life of communities that have lived this concept for centuries are richer sources than any essay. Treat this as a doorway, not a destination.
The full philosophy, as a book
How to run meetings where everyone is heard — and the decisions you make actually stick.
Read on Amazon