There is a particular kind of joy that cannot be manufactured — the kind that rises unrehearsed when people who have spent years carrying the weight of a continent’s mental health burden finally let their shoulders drop and dance. Last weekend, that joy filled the room as the Mental Health Leadership and Advocacy Programme (MHLAP) Cohort 13 closed out its training with exactly that: elders and emerging leaders, hands raised, feet moving, decades of clinical gravitas momentarily set aside for something simpler and truer — celebration.
Among those on the dance floor was Emeritus Professor Oye Gureje, widely regarded as the father of modern mental health scholarship in West Africa and Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Research and Training in Mental Health, Neurosciences and Substance Abuse at the University of Ibadan. Beside him, Course Director Professor Bibilola Oladeji, along with delegates drawn from 22 African countries. As your columnist stood among them, one thought kept surfacing: this is what positive psychology looks like when it moves off the page and into the body.
The science of the dance floor
Positive psychology, the branch of the discipline concerned with what makes life worth living rather than only what makes it hard to bear, gives us a useful lens for that room. Martin Seligman’s PERMA framework — Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment — was, quite literally, on display. The positive emotion was unmistakable in the laughter and music. The engagement showed in a cohort that had spent weeks immersed in demanding coursework on leadership and advocacy. The relationships were visible in the ease between people from vastly different countries, cultures and health systems, brought together by a shared vocation. The meaning was written into the very purpose of the gathering — building the human capacity Africa needs to close its mental health treatment gap. And the accomplishment was the graduation itself, a milestone earned rather than given.
This is the quiet genius of what Africa CDC is building under the leadership of Dr Abdulaziz Muhammad and colleagues including Dr Adelard Kakunze and Dr Sesay: a mental health workforce development effort that does not separate rigour from humanity. Traditional communal celebration — music, dance, shared food, collective joy — is not treated as a distraction from the serious business of mental health capacity building. It is treated as part of the healing infrastructure itself.
Why this matters beyond the room
Africa carries one of the world’s widest mental health treatment gaps, with estimates suggesting the vast majority of people living with mental illness on the continent never receive formal care. Closing that gap requires more than clinics and medication; it requires leaders equipped to advocate, train others, shape policy and normalise conversations about mental wellbeing in boardrooms, clinics, classrooms and homes. Programmes like MHLAP exist precisely to multiply that leadership, cohort by cohort, country by country.
For business leaders reading this column, the lesson travels well beyond the health sector. Organisations that treat wellbeing as decoration rather than infrastructure tend to burn out their best people. Organisations that build celebration, connection and meaning into the culture — the way this cohort did — tend to build resilience that outlasts any single crisis.
Four calls to action
- Audit your workplace’s mental health literacy
Do your managers know how to recognise distress, respond with empathy, and refer appropriately? Commission a basic mental health literacy training this quarter — it costs less than one bad resignation.
- Partner with, or fund, a mental health leadership initiative
Programmes like MHLAP and the work of Africa CDC’s mental health division rely on partnership beyond government. Consider what your organisation’s corporate social responsibility budget could unlock for the next cohort of trainees.
- Build rituals of collective joy into your teams
You do not need a graduation ceremony to borrow this lesson. Deliberately engineered moments of shared celebration — however small — measurably improve morale, trust and retention. Put one on the calendar this month.
- Practise the PERMA habit yourself, starting today Name one positive emotion you felt this week, one relationship you are grateful for, one piece of work that gave you meaning, and one accomplishment, however modest. Write it down. This five-minute exercise, done consistently, is one of positive psychology’s best-evidenced tools for building resilience.
The dance floor at that closeout ceremony was not frivolous. It was a working demonstration of everything the science of flourishing teaches us — and a reminder that Africa’s mental health future is being built not only in lecture halls, but in the moments where its builders remember to celebrate each other.
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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
