Book I
Leaders or Schemers?
A Memoir
In this unflinching memoir, Olemo Gordon Brian traces twenty years of formation — from Apac, northern Uganda, to Johannesburg, South Africa — through the classrooms, dormitories, and debate halls of some of Africa's most elite institutions. Leaders or Schemers is a reckoning with what those spaces do to the people they were meant to shape — how extraordinary opportunity can breed distance, apathy, and self-serving ambition in the very generation charged with the continent's transformation. Drawing on the wisdom of mentors, the discipline of spiritual and political formation, and the hard lessons of failure, Olemo maps with uncommon clarity the precise moment when principled leadership gives way to scheming — and what it costs a generation when it does. Written with the warmth of a love letter and the precision of a political diagnosis, Leaders or Schemers is ultimately an argument that the answer to Africa's crisis of leadership is simpler and more demanding than talent, ambition, or opportunity.