The bond that holds a group together is the same thing that keeps people out. This essay has a harder counter-example than any other in the ring.
The claim is straightforward and the tradition states it well: if shared humanity is the ground of everything, then a circle that will not open has contradicted its own basis.
What makes this more than a pleasantry is the mechanism it identifies. The bond that makes a group cohesive is the same thing that makes it exclusive. There is no way to have the first without the risk of the second, because they are the same property viewed from inside and outside.
So welcome is not an optional warmth added to a group that already works. It is the thing that keeps the group’s own principle from collapsing.
South Africa has had repeated waves of xenophobic violence against African migrants — Mozambicans, Zimbabweans, Somalis, Nigerians — with people killed, shops destroyed and communities driven out. The attacks in 2008, 2015 and 2019 were large, lethal and widely reported.
This matters for an essay praising a philosophy of expansive shared humanity, and the point has been made forcefully by South African writers rather than by outsiders: a society that gave the world ubuntu as an export has also produced sustained violence against precisely the strangers the principle is supposed to cover.
Two things follow, and I want to be careful to say both.
The first is that this is not a refutation of the idea. No tradition is refuted by the failure of the people who hold it, or Christianity would have been finished in the fourth century. The gap between a stated principle and behaviour is the ordinary human situation.
The second is that it should end a particular way of writing about ubuntu — the version in which it is presented as the warm communal alternative to cold Western individualism, a philosophy that a whole society simply lives. That version was always a flattering fiction constructed largely for outside consumption, and it does no favours to the people it purports to describe.
Exclusion research is one of the better-established areas in social psychology. Being excluded, even trivially and even by strangers in a meaningless computer game, produces reliable and immediate distress — and the effect shows up whether or not people have any stake in the group doing the excluding.3
The belonging-intervention work is the more practically useful. Brief interventions addressing whether people feel they belong in a setting have produced durable effects on outcomes for students from groups where belonging is in doubt, with follow-ups years later.4 The effects are real, and they are specific to people who had reason to wonder whether they belonged — which is the population this essay is about.
And the distinction between bonding ties within a group and bridging ties across groups is worth borrowing: a community can be dense with the first and have almost none of the second, which produces exactly the warm, closed group this teaching warns about.8
Mostly about the first few encounters, which set everything after them.
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.
Cohesion and exclusion are the same property seen from two sides, which makes welcome structural maintenance rather than decoration.
And the society that exported ubuntu has also produced sustained violence against migrants. That does not refute the idea — no tradition is refuted by its adherents’ failures — but it should end the version where ubuntu is the warm communal alternative that a whole society simply lives.