Ubuntu
“I am because we are.” A Nguni Bantu philosophy of relational personhood — the idea that what makes someone fully human is not their individual properties but their relationships.
The Idea
Ubuntu (from Nguni Bantu: umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu — “a person is a person through other persons”) describes personhood as something achieved through relationship rather than something possessed individually. You are not fully yourself in isolation. The community is not a constraint on individual flourishing — it is the condition of it.
This is a philosophical position as much as a cultural one, and it runs against the deepest assumptions of liberal political theory. Liberalism begins with the individual as the irreducible unit — society is an agreement among pre-formed individuals. Ubuntu begins with the relationship. The individual is a crystallization of community, not the other way around.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who did much to bring ubuntu into international discourse, described it this way: a person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, because they have a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that they belong in a greater whole.
Origins and Context
Ubuntu names a practice embedded in Nguni-speaking cultures across southern Africa — Zulu, Xhosa, Ndebele, Swati — and has parallels throughout sub-Saharan African philosophy under different names (botho in Sotho, ujamaa in Swahili). It’s not a formal doctrine but a lived orientation, expressed in hospitality, conflict resolution, communal decision-making, and mutual aid.
Julius Nyerere drew on a parallel African ideal of familyhood in developing [[ujamaa|ujamaa]] — the Tanzanian socialism of the 1960s and 70s. The Rwandan gacaca courts that managed post-genocide justice drew on ubuntu principles of community accountability. It has been invoked in constitutional debates in South Africa and Zimbabwe.
The risk in this internationalization is abstraction. Ubuntu as a bumper sticker (“I am because we are”) loses the specific practices — the obligation to feed a stranger who arrives at mealtime, the council that sits until everyone can live with the decision, the understanding that your success is your community’s success and must be shared accordingly.
Ubuntu and Personhood
The philosophical claim is that human personhood is not given but achieved — and achieved through community participation. A person who withdraws from community, who accumulates without sharing, who pursues individual success at the expense of relationships, is not, in the ubuntu framework, becoming more fully human. They are becoming less so.
This connects to Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities framework in an interesting way. Nussbaum identifies “affiliation” — being able to live with and for others, having the social bases of self-respect — as one of the central human capabilities. Ubuntu argues that affiliation isn’t one capability among many. It’s the condition that makes the others possible.
The Tension
Ubuntu has been used to justify both genuine communal practice and political authoritarianism — leaders invoking community obligation to demand compliance, suppress dissent, or keep people from individual expression that the community finds uncomfortable.
The tradition is not immune to this corruption. Any philosophy that grounds individual worth in community approval can become a lever for social control. The best ubuntu thinking holds this tension by insisting that the community itself must be held accountable — that a community that degrades its members is not practicing ubuntu but violating it.
Connections
- hospitality — the practice ubuntu grounds
- mutual-aid — the same relational logic in Kropotkin’s terms
- ujamaa — the political expression in Tanzanian context
- reciprocity-with-land — the relational logic extended to place
- Martha Nussbaum — affiliation as central capability
- commons — collective governance as ubuntu institutionalized
Further Reading
- Tutu, Desmond. No Future Without Forgiveness (1999)
- Shutte, Augustine. Ubuntu: An Ethic for a New South Africa (2001)
- Murove, Munyaradzi Felix. African Ethics: An Anthology of Comparative and Applied Ethics (2009)