Ubuntu Philosophy

The claim

Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu — a person is a person through other persons. Being human is a relational accomplishment rather than a natural fact, and can be more or less fully realised.

What it held

Ubuntu begins from a claim that European ethics almost never makes: that personhood is not given at birth but built through relationship, and that a person can therefore have more or less of it. To say of someone that they have no ubuntu is not to say they behaved badly but that they have failed at being human.

What follows is an ethics of harmony rather than of rules or consequences. The right action is the one that builds and repairs relationship; the wrong one is the one that damages it. This is why restorative approaches to wrongdoing come naturally to it and retributive ones do not. The question after a harm is what will restore the community, and punishment is a means to that end rather than a good in itself.

As written philosophy it is recent. Its systematic articulation belongs to the twentieth century, and its most public application was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which Desmond Tutu explicitly grounded in it — a decision that made ubuntu famous and, some of its philosophers argue, badly narrowed it.

How it argued

Reflection on proverbs, kinship practice and the moral vocabulary of Bantu languages, developed into systematic argument by professional philosophers from the mid-twentieth century.

What it was arguing against

The atomistic individual of European liberalism, and the assumption that a person is complete before entering society. Also, in its academic form, the claim that Africa produced worldview rather than philosophy.

Where it disagreed with itself

Whether ubuntu is a genuine philosophy or an anthropologist's construction — Wiredu and Ramose disagree sharply. Whether communal harmony can protect dissent and individual rights. And whether its use in the reconciliation process was a vindication or a political co-option.

Common misconceptions

That it means simple kindness or generosity, which is how it is usually translated in management literature. It is a claim about what a person is. And it is not a doctrine of conformity: the harmony it seeks is the kind that includes disagreement, not the kind that suppresses it.

How it began

The word appears in print in a Xhosa-English dictionary in 1846 and in Sotho writing through the century, but the practice it names is far older. Its development as philosophy came with African academic philosophy after independence.

What became of it

Living, contested, and now studied worldwide. Its position inside African philosophy is argued over more sharply than its position outside it.

Lasting influence

The South African constitutional court has cited it. It underwrote the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In philosophy it is the most widely discussed sub-Saharan contribution to ethics.

Why it still matters

It is a serious rival to individualist ethics rather than a supplement to it, and the strongest available philosophical case for restorative rather than retributive justice.

Put another way

A word that only means anything in a sentence.

Where to start

Tutu for what it can do, then Ramose for what it actually claims, then Wiredu for why that claim is contested.

The surprising bit

Its best-known philosophical critics are African. Wiredu has argued that the version exported abroad is flattened almost past recognition, and that presenting it as the African philosophy erases how much Africans disagree.

In their own words

Connections

Opposed by

Objectivism

Parallel to

Communitarianism

The verdict

A genuinely different starting point for ethics, and the one most damaged by being quoted approvingly.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy