The second workshop of the 2025 Archbishop Tutu Leadership Fellowship was held in Oxford and London from the 31st of August to the 7th of September, in partnership with the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship and Saïd Business School.  Just as with the Mont Fleur session, it was an intense and intensive experience of personal and professional growth and insights. Fortunately also interspersed with some free time to take walks to, and through, Oxford and to soak up all the beauty and history that it offers.

With the contributions of inspirational leaders, subject matter experts and facilitators, including Arunma Oteh, Stefan Dercon, Doyin Atewologun, Cynthia Rayner, Athol Williams, Peter Hanke, Marya Besharov, Moky Makura, Chris Higgins, and Tali Stein, this year’s cohort explored the paradoxes, tensions, possibilities and dilemmas of their leadership.

They reflected on courage – its limits, its costs, and its necessity.

They were reminded in beautiful and important ways of the immense power of stories.

In their group work, they grappled with the pitfalls of hitting targets but missing the point. The impact and importance of the experience of the Fellowship is probably best captured in the after dinner speech I gave at Balliol College:

Balliol College was founded in 1263, on the same site we are seated in today, by nobleman John de Balliol and it claims to be the oldest college in Oxford and the English-speaking world. That’s disputed, but then again, the college was founded in dispute, so maybe that’s to be expected. According to legend, John de Balliol had abducted the Bishop of Durham as part of a land dispute and as a penance, was publicly beaten by the bishop and had to support a group of scholars at Oxford.

Balliol College is the result.  And while I skipped over 1263 very quickly, it’s worth realising quite how long ago that actually was.

When Balliol opened its doors, Shakespeare’s first sonnet was still 330 years in the future, it was 300 years before Galileo would turn his telescope to the skies in 1609, 229 years before Columbus would set sail across the Atlantic in 1492 and almost 200 years before Gutenberg invented movable type in Europe in the 1450s.

Balliol was founded at the height of Great Zimbabwe, which existed for 400 years between the 11th and 15th centuries. In 1263, the Mali Empire was just rising. Sundiata Keita had recently unified it, and Mansa Musa – who would later become the richest man in history – was still 60 years in the future. Timbuktu was a flourishing centre of trade and learning…

Given the large number of women Associates in this year’s cohort, it’s also worth thinking about the fact that Balliol opened its doors to women only in 1979.
In other words, ten years after humanity had walked on the moon and twelve years after the world’s first heart transplant in Cape Town.

In 1979:

• Ghana had already given the world Kwame Nkrumah, Kofi Annan and the OAU
• Nigeria had survived civil war. Chinua Achebe was 47 years old and Chimamanda Adichie was already 2.
• The DRC had started supplying the minerals that still drive the technology of the 21st century and Patrice Lumumba had been assassinated 8 years before
• Tanzania had become the headquarters of liberation for the whole continent. Freddie Mercury, born in Stone Town, Tanzania was already 33 years old
• Algeria had hosted the Non-Aligned Movement in Algiers and the only international office of the Black Panther party in the process, becoming the “Mecca of Revolution”. Albert Camus, the 2nd youngest Nobel laureate in history, had been dead for 19 years.
• Uganda had seen the rise and fall of Idi Amin and John Akii Bua had won gold at the Munich Summer Olympics 7 years earlier
• Zambia, under Kenneth Kaunda, had become a frontline state in the struggle against apartheid and colonialism and had established the South Luangwa National Park 7 years before
• Guinea had stood defiant against empire and invasion, not just from one country, but two – France and Portugal.

Sadly though, like the Tutu Fellowship, you can’t predict what your Fellows are going to be, and do, when they leave. One of those women was Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of sex trafficking for Jeffrey Epstein. She graduated in 1985.

Like all Oxford Colleges, Balliol is run by the Master and the Fellows – the latter being the more or less permanent teaching staff. The current master of Balliol College is Dame Helen Ghosh, who is the former Director-General of the National Trust and Home Office Permanent Secretary. Each year, it matriculates about 260 under-graduate and post-graduate students combined, and from its Masters, Fellows and students, Balliol has produced four British prime ministers: HH Asquith, Harold Macmillan, Edward Heath and Boris Johnson. It also counts among its alums, Sir Seretse Khama – the Father of Independence and first Prime Minister of Botswana.

12 Nobel Prize winners have been Fellows or students here, including Linus Pauling, the only person to have been awarded two unshared Nobel Prizes. Other notable alumni include:

• Alduous Huxley, author of “Brave New World” among others,
• Adam Smith, the economist,
• Robert Southey, Poet Laureate chiefly remembered today for the original version of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" (!)

In closing, Balliol reminds us of Oxford’s age and Africa reminds us of humanity’s age. Oxford has been a place of learning for over 750 years and Africa has been a cradle of civilisation for millennia. 

Tonight, in this hall, the two meet – not in the past, but in the future we are building together in a world that is, in many ways, entirely unrecognisable to anyone from even a few decades ago, never mind 8 centuries ago.  

Please join me in drinking a toast to the Tutu Fellowship and the 2025 Cohort.

Below are a few pictures from the workshop.

Header image - group photo taken at the 2025 London Oxford Workshop