The Nguni proverb makes a claim stronger than “community matters.” Before taking it, an account of what I am handling and how I came to be handling it.
Everything else in this library is an old text. This is not. Ubuntu is a live idea belonging to living peoples, in societies that exist now and have their own scholars, arguments and objections. Writing about the Stoics costs the Stoics nothing. This is a different situation and it should be said at the start rather than managed later.
Second: I am an outsider. I do not speak isiZulu or Sesotho, I have not lived in the societies this comes from, and everything here arrives through English-language sources. That is a real limit on what these essays can be, and it is not fixed by acknowledging it.
Third, and most consequential for how you should read the rest: the tidy systematic “ubuntu philosophy” that circulates in the West has a specific and fairly recent history. The word is old and the proverb is old. But the assembly of ubuntu into a stated philosophy with a doctrine and a vocabulary happened substantially in the twentieth century, and its global circulation is closely tied to one moment — South Africa’s transition out of apartheid, and the particular use made of the idea then. Christian Gade’s study of the historical development of the written discourses on ubuntu is the reference here, and his follow-up work documents how widely the definitions vary once you start asking people.
None of that makes ubuntu invented. It means the neat twelve-part system is partly a Western structuring of something looser, and I am adding to that structuring rather than reporting it.
Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu — a person is a person through other persons.
Read quickly it sounds like a warm endorsement of community. Read as philosophy it is doing something sharper: it denies that there is a complete self that then enters into relationships. Personhood is something conferred and developed through others rather than possessed in advance.
The African philosophical literature takes this seriously as a metaphysical and ethical claim — it is argued about, refined and disputed by people working inside it, which is the strongest evidence that it is a philosophy rather than a sentiment.
And it has a consequence worth stating: on this view, personhood can be more or less achieved. Someone can be said to lack ubuntu. That is a very different structure from the Western picture in which personhood is a fixed possession that everyone has equally by virtue of existing, and the difference is worth sitting with rather than smoothing over.
There is a large body of psychology finding that human beings are profoundly social — that development requires others, that isolation harms, that identity is formed in relationship.
I want to be careful about what I do with that, because the obvious move is to say the science settles the matter in ubuntu’s favour, and it does not.
The psychology describes how selves develop. Ubuntu makes a claim about what a person is, which is a philosophical position rather than an empirical one, and no amount of developmental research settles it. Using the research as a verdict flatters the tradition in a way that also diminishes it — it treats an argued philosophical position as something that needed Western validation.
So across this series the research sits alongside rather than underneath. Where it genuinely bears on a practical claim I will use it, with its limits stated. Where it is being used to certify a philosophy, I will say so.
A series like this participates in something with a poor history: extracting an idea from an African context, stripping the context, and reselling it as a productivity or wellbeing concept to Western readers. Ubuntu has been through exactly that. It appears in corporate leadership materials, in branding, in management books, usually reduced to “teamwork is good” with a foreign word attached for warmth.
African scholars have objected to this repeatedly and at length. Some of the objection is about accuracy and some is about who profits, and both are legitimate.
I do not think the answer is silence, which leaves the field to the corporate versions. But I do think the answer requires saying what these essays are: one outsider’s reading, taking ideas seriously as ideas, naming where the popular version has embellished, and pointing at the people who own this rather than standing in front of them.
Where I use a word in the essays that follow, I say which language it belongs to and whether it is a technical term or an ordinary word. Several of the terms this series was built around turn out to be the latter.
Note — the extraction problem
Corporate leadership materials, branding, management books — usually “teamwork is good” with a foreign word attached for warmth. African scholars have objected at length, about accuracy and about who profits. Silence leaves the field to those versions; the alternative is saying exactly what this is and pointing at the people who own it.
The practical residue of the first essay is narrow: notice how much of you arrived from other people.
Ubuntu is a living idea belonging to living peoples, not a closed corpus, and the terms used here come from several distinct languages — Nguni (isiZulu, isiXhosa), Sotho-Tswana and others. Where a word is an ordinary word in its language rather than a technical term, the essay says so; where a phrase’s provenance is uncertain or its popular gloss is a later Western elaboration, the essay says that too. African scholarship on ubuntu is cited in preference to Western commentary wherever it bears on the point. Links are given where a stable public page exists.
The proverb denies that there is a complete self which then enters relationships — personhood is conferred and developed through others, which means it can be more or less achieved.
And the tidy systematic version circulating in the West has a recent history tied to one political moment. The word is old; the doctrine as presented is partly a modern assembly, and this series adds to that assembly rather than reporting it.