Is ambition poisonous? Rather than a yes or no answer, let’s explore it. The world’s media lit up as Meghan Markle released the first episode of her new podcast, Archetypes. Her first guest was tennis world superstar, grand slam winner, Serena Williams. The topic? Misconceptions of ambition in women.
I listened and enjoyed the range, depth and focus of the podcast where both women talked about ambition in the context of their respective positions – Serena Williams within tennis, and Meghan Markle within the British Royal family. Both talked about how they had been chastised and condemned because of ambition.
I wanted to expand this focus on ambition, and explore it further.
Ambition unchecked in a man or a woman can make that man or woman dangerous to him or herself, the communities they belong to, and the nations in which they live, love, lead and work. When it is centered solely on an individual, devoid of purpose, obsessed with power and accumulation – irrespective of gender, it is absolutely poisonous. We have seen this here on our Continent in multiple ways in multiple sectors.
Ambition is also crucial to move a nation, expand its possibility, and engage in necessary risk in order to grow. Could Ghana have become an independent nation without ambitious women and men who foresaw self-determination as their future, and rejected colonialism’s creed of dependence and inferiority? In Ghana, the independence movement was financed by women. Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, spoke specifically to the role of ambitious women, and honored that role with places in governance.
Despite a history that teaches our nation’s founding by men, our journey to independence was deeply ambitious and engaged both women and men. That is true for colonialism in Ghana, it is true of freedom from enslavement and building global social justice movements in America, the UK and across Europe.
As a global Black people who were colonized and enslaved, freedom was an ambition that led women and men to risk lives again and again, to confront a brutality that has legacy, and to reject a system that taught them bondage was their being, their natural state, their future and their totality. Freedom fighters are ambitious – they have to be otherwise there is simply no way we could be here.
Colonialism’s ambition was to conquer nations and people. It wounded both the colonialists and the colonized because it racialized ambition. That colonialist, racialized ambition created dangerous notions of ‘lazy Africans’ – an identity that carries legacy. The legacy of this deadly notion lingers across Africa, and shows up in how the West treats and engages Africa, and Africans.
Poisonous ambition manifests in the ways corporations use unjust tactics to shore up monopolies, acquire more and more power, and demonstrate levels of greed that threaten the climate and our future here on the Continent – and around the world. We too rarely point at the corporations – the tactics they employ, their rejection of co-existence, and say: their focus on more and more power is the manifestation of poisonous ambition. Or rather, we don’t chastise or condemn them with the same venom and vigor we often reserve for ambitious women.
Those corporations are mostly run by men, and from the climate crisis to the economic horrors our world faces, their ambition poisons and endangers our future. And still, they want more, they fight for more. They occupy stages and spaces declaring their right to have what they have, and tell others that if they want the same, we should look to them, and their example. Should we though? Is that prosperity? Nations don’t need monopolies – that’s not how they thrive, how people grow, nor how nations are enriched.
Ambition becomes a dirty word because we gender ambition, rather than simply explore its value or issue within us as humans. If we explored it in that context, how we assess it might change. What society does, instead, is point to individual women and fiercely, unrepentantly, and repeatedly deride them as ‘ambitious’, connecting ambition to a woman becoming less appealing, less attractive.
We attach ambition to desirability and tell women: choose. You cannot be desirable and be ambitious. We don’t tell boys the same. Ambition is attached to masculinity, and that attachment is as connected as good fufu to palm soup on a cool Sunday in Accra. Whilst one tastes good, the other does not.
Ambition interferes with a society’s idea of what a woman is, should be, can do, cannot do – and most especially should or should not be doing. I think of my former students, and the young women in my own team. I was a journalism lecturer in Accra, and a contributor to an annual event called Young African Women’s Congress (YAWC). My students were amazing – they inspired me, and regularly reminded me of the energy, drive and beauty of ambition. YAWC brought young women ages 18-25 from more than 20 nations to Ghana. As a speaker and contributor to YAWC, I was moved by their brilliance. I also remember their questions after our panels related to fear.
Their fear was that their dreams and ambitions would lose them a potential spouse, their ambition would detrimentally shape their future. That future was about marriageability in a society where women are taught to bend and dip to ensure a man’s power is unchallenged. Their fear was real. Lecturers, mentors, family – women and men – cautioned them against ambition. As I listened, my heart broke, they were being pressured to choose between dreams and drive – who wants that?
The definition of the word ambition is: a strong desire, a determination to achieve something, to be successful. The challenge in Ghana – and too many corners of this Continent – is when it comes to women, we redefine ambition. It no longer becomes about the desire to achieve, but instead tells them the only achievement is to be desired, and desirable – specifically to men.
When we gender ambition, it has little to do with humanity, and much more to do with control – of bodies, movements and futures. When we attach ambition to women and we assess it in terms of what makes her attractive to society, specifically to men, we endanger our future. When we attach ambition to men and we laud it in terms of how society defines masculinity, we endanger our future too.
The truth is simpler. Gendering ambition does not serve to strengthen our fragmented, fractured economy. We do nation building a grave disservice when we gender ambition. It makes young women scared and wary of their own drive.
Instead we should contextualize their ambition, so they harness their drive, and feed it within a history of our nation’s fight for Independence, and a future that absolutely depends on ambition to see beyond immediate surroundings.
We do masculinity a grave disservice when young men are told ambition is theirs, and theirs alone, making them wary of engaging with ambitious women. In all things, balance matters. Drive creates innovation, ambition pushes creativity, and manifestation is dependent on ambition.
The equally simple truth is we are all human and we all want to be desired. It is natural that we seek love and companionship with and from each other. So, desirability in and of itself is not wrong. Really, who aspires to not be desired?
We cannot get around the messiness of this, but we can decide to be more honest. I write this as an unapologetically ambitious woman taught by her father who expected me – and all his daughters – to be ambitious. I absolutely also want to be desired.
Ambition matters. It is human. To strive to achieve is human. Desire matters. It is human. To want to be desired is human.
Ultimately, ambition makes for nation builders and great citizens. Ambition transforms nations. Ambition in women and men, harnessed, focused, committed and connected to a nation’s progress is not poisonous, it is powerful.
So, let’s not make ambition a gendered issue. Let’s make ambition a matter of great citizenry, and future nation-building
Now that’s an ambition we can all aspire to, and desire.
