Leadership Quote by Stephen Lewis

Lewis is smuggling a corrective into what sounds like a travel takeaway. The line opens with the authority of having "travelled around a lot", a credential that matters because Africa is so often discussed at arm's length: through headlines, aid budgets, and crisis imagery. But the sentence quickly pivots from the speaker's experience to the listener's blind spot: "many people here don't recognize". "Here" is doing heavy work. It points at Western political and media centers where Africa is routinely flattened into a single problem to be managed rather than a set of societies with agency.

The key move is his refusal to locate power where outsiders usually look for it. Not in presidents, not in NGOs, not in donor conferences, but "at village level - at community level". That repetition, almost like he is re-aiming the camera, is deliberate. It challenges the default assumption that meaningful change is imported from above. The subtext is both rebuke and invitation: stop fetishizing the big solution and start noticing the infrastructures of care, governance, and resilience that already exist in local networks.

Context matters: Lewis built a reputation in diplomacy and humanitarian advocacy, especially around Africa's public-health and development crises. In that ecosystem, "power" is a controversial word because it complicates the savior narrative that fundraising and politics often depend on. Calling it "extraordinary" isn't romanticism so much as a strategic reframe: if communities have power, then outsiders have obligations - to listen, to resource, to partner without commandeering. It's a demand for respect disguised as a lesson from the road.