Ubuntu

Definition

The Bantu philosophical principle articulated as "I am because we are," naming the constitutive relationship between personal identity and the wider community. Ubuntu names a model of selfhood in which the individual is real only through their relations.

Literal meaning

Nguni Bantu (Zulu, Xhosa) ubuntu, abstract noun from muntu (a person). The full phrase often cited is umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, "a person is a person through other persons." The concept has cognates across the Bantu language family (Swahili utu, Shona unhu, Sotho botho).

Esoteric meaning

Ubuntu is the African articulation of what Netism teaches as the relational structure of the practitioner. The individual considered in isolation is an abstraction; the actual person is constituted by their relations to other persons, to the ancestors, to the land, to the wider community of beings. Where the western philosophical tradition has often started from the isolated thinking subject (the Cartesian cogito), the ubuntu tradition starts from the relational person and treats the isolated self as a problem to be diagnosed.

Extended meaning

Ubuntu was developed as a public-philosophical concept in the post-apartheid South African context by Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and academically by John Mbiti (African Religions and Philosophy, 1969), Mogobe Ramose (African Philosophy through Ubuntu, 1999), and Augustine Shutte (Ubuntu: An Ethic for a New South Africa, 2001). The principle informed the legal and ethical reasoning of the post-apartheid reconciliation process.

Comparative tradition

Confucian ren, the humaneness that emerges through relations. Hindu advaita, non-duality articulated through the ground-relation. The Sufi articulation of fanāʾ fī al-nās, annihilation in the people, in some teachings. The Jewish-mystical principle of tikkun olam as collective repair.