Umuntu Ngumuntu Ngabantu

"A person is a person through other persons." Ubuntu is the philosophy of the human person that we need, not modern, Western views centered on the individual.

(Reading time: about 10 minutes)

Note for subscribers: You may have noticed that we did not send an article last Friday. We’ve decided to publish articles only every other Friday rather than every Friday. We hope this will make room for deeper research, as well as some developments that we hope to introduce soon - stay tuned!

The Concept of Ubuntu

As an ethic or a philosophical worldview, the concept of Ubuntu first emerged in written literature in the second half of the 1900s. The usage of the term became especially prominent in 1994 when South Africa gained freedom from the apartheid regime.

In his 2011 journal article, The Historical Development of the Written Discourses on Ubuntu, Christian B. N. Gade, observes that the term became popular as a guiding ideal during the political periods of transition from white minority rule to black majority rule in both Zimbabwe and South Africa.  Gade’s research also indicated that it was during the period from 1993 to 1995 that the Nguni proverb umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu (often translated as ‘a person is a person through other persons’) was used for the first time to describe what Ubuntu is.

Among African scholars, it was Rwandan Tutsi Catholic Priest Alexis Kagame who used it in his book La Philosophie Bǎntu-Rwandaise de L’Être in 1956. In other African countries like Kenya, Tanzania, and Zambia, the concept has also been associated with regaining political freedom after colonization by colonial masters. In the case of South Africa, it was touted after dismantling apartheid. The Ubuntu term was used to restore disrupted African culture and dignity. Among the Bantu, the notion of a person as an entity constituted in and through community is extremely prevalent. The Bantu peoples are an ethnolinguistic grouping of approximately 400 distinct native African ethnic groups who speak Bantu languages. The languages are native to 24 countries spread over a vast area from Central Africa to Southeast Africa and into Southern Africa.

The idea of Ubuntu can be found in scholars who have taken the trouble to delve deeply into Bantu culture in particular, including clerics such as the Belgian Placide Tempels and the Kenyan J.S. Mbiti, as well as laymen such as Kwame Gyekye and Kwasi Wiredu (both Ghanaian). They all start with the premise that the community is the locus around which life and love are engendered. At the heart of the community lies the family – be it extended or nuclear – the place in which the child develops into an adolescent, the adolescent into an adult, the adult into an elder, the elder into an ancestor, and the ancestor into the custodian of the community at its widest transcendental level.

Such a communal view of life centered on the family has been recognized and reaffirmed by the Polish philosopher Karol Wojtyła, better known by the name John Paul II which he took up when he became Pope. Deeply steeped in his own Slavic culture, John Paul II was also one of the few 20^th-century European philosophers who saw a connection between the African’s “cult of the ancestors” and what he denominated (in so many of his writings and speeches) as, the “Cult-ure of Life”:

In African culture and tradition, the role of the family is everywhere held to be fundamental. Open to this sense of the family, of love and respect for life, the African loves children, who are joyfully welcomed as gifts of God. The sons and daughters of Africa love life. It is precisely this love for life that leads them to give such great importance to the veneration of their ancestors. They believe intuitively that the dead continue to live and remain in communion with them. Is this not in some way a preparation for belief in the Communion of the Saints? The peoples of Africa respect the life which is conceived and born. They rejoice in this life. They reject the idea that it can be destroyed, even when the so-called 'progressive civilizations' would like to lead them in this direction. Practices hostile to life are imposed on them using economic systems that serve the selfishness of the rich. (John Paul II, 1994, 3)

During one of his many trips to the African continent, John Paul II urged the people of Africa to never lose this profound and sacred sense of life:

Africans show their respect for human life until its natural end and keep elderly parents and relatives within the family. African cultures have an acute sense of solidarity and community life. In Africa, it is unthinkable to celebrate a feast without the participation of the whole village. Indeed, community life in African societies expresses the extended family. My ardent hope and prayer is that Africa will always preserve this priceless cultural heritage and never succumb to the temptation of individualism, which is alien to its best traditions. (John Paul II, 1995)

The modern concept of the person, whose “I” or sense of identity is entirely independent from that of other “I’s”, is foreign to African ears. Bantu cosmology holds that all created beings are interdependently connected in a causal and ontological manner. Within this cosmos, human beings are even more intimately interrelated amongst themselves; that is to say, as one life force to another.

[the] child, even the adult, remains always for the Bantu a man, a force, in causal dependence and ontological subordination to the forces which are his father and mother. The older force ever dominates the younger. (Tempels, 1959, 60)

In the same vein, Mbiti writes:

In traditional life, the individual does not and cannot exist alone except corporately. He owes his existence to other people, including those of past generations and his contemporaries. He is simply part of the whole. The community must therefore make, create, or produce the individual; for the individual depends on the corporate group…. Whatever happens to the individual happens to the whole group, and whatever happens to the whole group happens to the individual. The individual can only say: "I am, because we are: and since we are, therefore, I am." This is a cardinal point in the understanding of the African view of man. (Mbiti, 1969: 108-9)

The Ghanaian Kwame Gyekye (d. 2019) made various attempts at theorizing the concept of personhood based on his Akan culture and language. He argued that African thought ascribes a definite value to the individual. A person, he said, is viewed as more than just a byekye (material or physical object,) but as a child of God, and therefore is intrinsically valuable. Every person has a soul. This soul (known as Okra to the Akan), is described as divine and originating with God. In support of his argument that a person is conceived as a “theomorphic” being, having in their nature an aspect of God, he cites an Akan proverb: "All persons are children of God; no one is a child of the earth."

This brings us to the main point of this article. Could the African’s “umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu” (translated roughly into Latin as, Ego Sum, Quia Sumus) be, not only a possible axiological and ontological counter-argument to the Cartesian cogito, ergo sum, but also a remedy for it? Is our sense of self-hood based ultimately on our isolated thoughts (the cogito) or our communal being? This is the question.

The above-mentioned reflections could provide seminal ideas for developing a rich anthropology of the human person that could serve as an alternative to the stifling scientism and intellectualism of the modern world. The notion of a force or ‘dynamic energy’ that resides fundamentally in the heart of each man and woman and that acts as the glue that holds together a community could form the basis for a thesis on a possible synthesis between African banal and [as yet] inarticulate naturalism and a profound Christian theology. In our predominantly communal understanding of society, perhaps the closest we have come to the Christian notion of “Person” is in our linguistic term muntu or mtu.

Ubuntu and the Woman

From the moment a child is conceived in its mother’s womb, it is already connected, via the umbilical cord, to another – in a manner that is physical, psychological, and spiritual. Indeed, from the very first moment of its existence – even before it can articulate this existence via speech – the babe in the mother’s womb is accompanied by the sound of its mother’s heartbeat which, in turn, is accompanied by the rhythm of the life of the community surrounding the mother. I have always felt that the African takes naturally to the drum because its sound comes closest to that primordial echo of the mother’s heartbeat. Perhaps this is why dancing comes so naturally to us: rhythm is in our flesh and blood from the very first instance – and it penetrates to the very core of our being.

In a memorable speech given in 1995 in Beijing for the Fourth World Women's Conference, Dr. Margaret Ogola argued that the woman is the heart of the family and the family is the cornerstone of society. Following in her footsteps, I would wish to restate her claim by making the case that the woman is the heart of the family precisely because it is she who facilitates the turning of a child’s sense of self from being fundamentally I-centred to being fundamentally other-centered. I would also wish to argue that this role is quintessentially feminine. Whereas the man is normally concerned with things; the woman is fundamentally concerned with persons – i.e., the muntu, the being that contains its own life force. The woman not only nurtures the child, she also nurtures the husband to bring out of him his fullest and highest human potential: the potential for fatherhood.¹

For as long as the woman, in any culture or community continues to fulfil such a role, the men and children in that community remain humane. Women have a natural facility for forming relationships and they also have a knack for bringing complex things ‘down to earth’. They do this naturally, partly because they know how to explain things simply, and partly because they are a type of the soil from which the growing child receives sustenance. Humaneness, humility, humus, humanity and are all cognates that point towards the same realities – finitude, limitation, nothingness … death. When this unique humanizing role of women in the family is ignored, society easily falls into hubris. When men misuse their God-given strength to manipulate creation according to their proud wills instead of caring for it according to the Will of the Creator. They confuse authentic fatherhood with tyrannical patriarchy.

Conclusion

Ubuntu is African humanism. The Ubuntu philosophy is not a pantheistic doctrine. We believe in a creator God who is not part of his creation – he transcends it. This God is not always directly worshipped. He created a world full of natural and supernatural forces, of which the ancestral spirits dominate African religious and cosmic life. Many of our traditional cultic practices still entail appeasing them lest they ravage our societies with disease and disaster.

Thanks to the spirit of Ubuntu, we still nurture life in our communities despite the vagaries of history; we still love and revere life from its beginning to its natural end; we still abhor abortion and respect the elderly; we still preserve a sense of the afterlife and of transcendence; we still have more young people than old; we still till the land instead of polluting it; we still cooperate with creation instead of destroying it; we are still tethered to the earth by our women despite the strong allure to pseudo-divinity that the West has fallen for… and we can therefore, most definitely, offer the decaying modern world new ways of living that can make the world a place of true humanity.

---

References

Articles

• Gade, C. B. N. 2011. "The Historical Development of the Written Discourses on Ubuntu", South African Journal of Philosophy 30(3):303–329.

Books

• Gyekye, K. (1992), Person and Community: Ghanaian Philosophical Studies, I (Washington DC: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy).

• John Paul II, (né Wojtyła, Karol Józef); 14 September 1995, Ecclesia in Africa, On the Church in Africa and its Evangelizing Mission, Libreria Editrice Vaticana.

• Mbiti, J. (1969) African Religions and Philosophy, London: Heinemann.

• Tempels, P. (1959) Bantu Philosophy, Paris: Presence Africaine.

• Wiredu, K. (1992), Death and the Afterlife in African Culture, in Kwasi Wiredu and Kwame Gyekye (eds.), Person and Community: Ghanaian Philosophical Studies, I (Washington DC: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy).

Speeches

• John Paul II, (né Wojtyła, Karol Józef); 8 March 1994, Homily for the closing celebrations of the Special Assembly for Africa of the Synod of Bishops. AAS, 87, (1995).

• Ogola, Margaret, (1995) The Dignity of the African Woman, Fourth World Conference on Women by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), in collaboration with the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women Secretariat.

1. I offer a more extended argument for this claim in another article. Odero, R. (2022, July 2). “Who is a woman?“ The AfroDiscourse. See below.