The “Fantastic Four” and the Ubuntu of womanhood

There is a word in the Yoruba tradition — Àjọ — that speaks of a gathering, a convergence of souls who belong to one another. I thought of this word often as March — International Women’s Month — unfolded around me, and as I found myself reflecting on four extraordinary women I am privileged to know. For the purposes of this article, I will call them the Fantastic Four.

Remi works on an island — quite literally — carrying the weight of her responsibilities with the quiet resilience of someone who has learned to be ‘the calm’ in the middle of the water. ’Kanyinsola works in healthcare, where every day she enters a space where human fragility is not a metaphor but a lived reality, and still she chooses to heal. Tolulope is a social entrepreneur who has decided that the measure of a business is not only its profit margin but its human dividend. And then there is Omowunmi — their mother, grandmother, and the woman behind the women — retired from a formal title, but decidedly not retired from purpose.

What strikes me most about the “Fantastic Four” is not what any one of them has done individually. It is what they are together. They are a family. They are mother and daughter. They are sister and sister. They are island and mainland, clinic and community, enterprise and elderhood. They are, in the truest sense, a we.

And here is where I must weave in a conversation that has been sitting in my heart since I closed the final leg of the Zoho CX Summit — a roadshow that began in Johannesburg and concluded last weekend in the magnificent city of Cape Town. My keynote carried a message that I believe is one of the most pressing leadership truths of our time: The stressed employee cannot serve the thriving customer.

At the heart of that message was a quote that I offer not as a clever turn of phrase but as a philosophical anchor: “I am because we are — if I am not well, the WE suffers.”

Ubuntu is not simply a cultural greeting or a philosophical curiosity. It is a blueprint for human flourishing. And nowhere is this blueprint more beautifully — and often invisibly — demonstrated than in the lives of women who hold families, communities, and institutions together.

Positive psychology, the science of what makes life worth living, has long affirmed what Ubuntu has always known: that wellbeing is not a private achievement. It is a relational one. Martin Seligman’s PERMA model — Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment — is not a checklist for individuals alone. It is a description of how families thrive. How teams flourish. How communities heal.

Remi, ‘Kanyinsola, Tolulope, and Omowunmi — and the millions of women they represent across our continent and beyond — are architects of the we. They are the ones who notice when someone has gone quiet at dinner; who call at 7am not because anything is wrong but because love is proactive; who carry grief without announcement and celebrate others’ victories louder than their own.

But here is the tension we must name with honesty this Women’s Month: you cannot pour from an empty vessel. And too many of our most extraordinary women are running on empty.

The healthcare worker who holds the hands of the dying but has no one to hold hers. The social entrepreneur who builds ecosystems of opportunity but has no ecosystem of support around her. The island worker who is everyone’s rock but whose own foundations are quietly eroding. The grandmother whose wisdom is priceless but whose own wellbeing is treated as optional.

Ubuntu leadership demands that we see this. Not as a women’s problem; but as our problem. Because if she is not well — the WE suffers.

This Women’s Month, I am not simply celebrating women. I am inviting all of us — men, institutions, leaders, families — to recommit to being part of the environment in which women can genuinely flourish. Not perform. Not endure. Flourish.

The “Fantastic Four” reminded me that greatness is rarely a solo act. Behind every thriving individual is a web of relationships that made the thriving possible. Our task — as leaders, as communities, as human beings — is to tend to that web with the same intentionality we bring to our strategies, our metrics, and our ambitions.

🔍 Four reflective questions for your journey:

1. Who is the Omowunmi in your life — the one who holds everything together quietly — and when last did you ask how she is doing, and truly wait for the answer?
2. In your workplace or organisation, are you building environments where women can flourish — not just perform — and what is one structural change you could advocate for this month?
3. When did you last check your own wellbeing as a foundation for service? If you are not well, who in your we is quietly absorbing the deficit?
4. What does Ubuntu leadership look like in your daily choices? Where are you still treating wellbeing as private when it is, in fact, profoundly collective?

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Joshua Awesome

Dr. Joshua Awesome is a Coaching Psychologist/Executive and Business Performance Coach who has supported over 100,000 professionals across Africa and the globe. He can be reached via: joshua@africainmind.org