Prior to 1994, the education system of South Africa was characterized by a hierarchical and bureaucratic style of management as well as a situation where white schools were the key beneficiaries of resources and black schools massively disadvantaged. In 1996 a national task team made strategic proposals for education management capacity, including a self-management approach to schools and implicitly supporting the notion of teacher leadership for the new dispensation (Department of Education, 1996). Despite this enabling framework, however, few teachers appear to be embracing a teacher leader role and it is an unexplored area of research in South Africa. This article reports on the experiences of 11 university tutors, many of whom are also classroom-based teachers, around the concept of teacher leader, during a professional development initiative which ran parallel with their teaching on a postgraduate module. The article identifies how tutors develop their understanding of the concept of teacher leader during the initiative, explores the factors which may support or impede the take-up of this concept by teachers and argues that, without teacher leadership, the transformation of South African schools into professional learning communities is unlikely to occur. (Contains 1 figure, 1 table and 4 notes.)