Of all the Zulu / Southern African concepts that have crossed into English usage, Indaba has had perhaps the strangest journey. Indaba and Parenting? The journey itself is part of the answer. To understand Indaba now, you have to understand both the original and the diasporic version, and the gap between them.
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.
If you want to know the end, listen to the beginning.Yoruba
The Question This Post Is About
Raising children with Indaba in a culture that doesn't share its assumptions. 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.
Parenting through Indaba is not soft parenting. The phrase 'it takes a village' has been so domesticated in English that it now means almost nothing. The Zulu / Southern African version is sharper: the child is not yours alone, and the discipline of raising them well is not yours alone either. No decision of consequence is made in a meeting under one hour, and no one speaks twice before everyone has spoken once.
A Second Angle
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. No decision of consequence is made in a meeting under one hour, and no one speaks twice before everyone has spoken once. The trade-off is real. Meetings under Indaba take longer. The decisions also unstick less often.
Where the Concept Resists
Indaba is sometimes presented as the answer to the diseases of Western individualism. It is not, exactly. It is a different answer to a different question. Pretending it is a drop-in replacement for the modern self-help bookshelf does Indaba a disservice — and the reader, too. The work of taking it seriously is harder than that.
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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