It is against this background that the research question arises: what kind of leadership is required to lead a community from violent conflict to peaceful coexistence? The aim of the article is to propose some principles for leadership in situations characterised by violent conflict. Alternatively, is there another way, as professed by many such as Mahatma Ghandi or Nelson Mandela, who learned and believed that peaceful relations are a better alternative to combat? Maybe we should accept the warning of Hannah Arendt (1970:118) that every decrease in power is an open invitation to violence because those who hold power have always found it difficult to resist the temptation to defend the loss of power by means of violence. The student of leadership will ask: what kind of leadership was involved in all these cases? What kind of person was leading these big and small ventures, and why were they followed by so many? Maybe it is, as Tolstoy (2008:85) put it, that the accepted method for people to decide disputes is not by discussion but by killing one another. A different kind of feeling crawls up the spine of the observer when looking at the well-preserved skeletons of thousands of people killed during the genocide in Rwanda. One gets the same kind of feeling when driving into Lesotho from South Africa, remembering the resistance the Basotho nation put up against invading colonialists, or when talking to the South African soldier who escaped execution by child soldiers in the Central African Republic when he was there on a peace mission. When a person stands on the beaches of Normandy in France, overlooking what were the main battlegrounds of World War II, one can only be awed when thinking about the courage and other virtues that were required from thousands of people who had to storm and defend these beaches. This argument is applied to the challenge of leading people towards lasting peace in Africa, offering the specific case of a San community in South Africa to illustrate Great Heart Leadership. The author argues that a leader with a ‘great heart’ is a leader who is able to apply analytical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual/normative leadership to activate peaceful change. By departing from a conceptual framework to explain holistic leadership, conflict leadership and peace leadership, the author explains what Great Heart Leadership is, citing several examples to illustrate these concepts. The aim of the article is to propose some principles for leadership in situations characterised by violent conflict. Inspired by the never-ending quest for the end of violence in some African communities, the author asks what kind of leadership is required to lead a community from violent conflict to peaceful coexistence. His current focus is community-based participatory research with San communities in Southern Africa. Dr Andreas Velthuizen is a Senior Researcher in the Institute for Dispute Resolution in Africa, College of Law, Unisa, where he is doing trans-disciplinary research in endogenous knowledge management for dispute resolution, prevention of violent conflict and restorative justice in Africa.

Where the heart leads ending