UBUNTU, GLUE THAT ONCE BOUND ALL HUMANKIND
AS A keen student of world cultures and human development, I have noted that all pre-materialistic societies had the caring trait, which in my part of the world is called ubuntu or botho.
Materialistic societies consider material possessions and physical comfort as more important than spiritual values.
Different peoples in traditional settings – from England to Japan, from Aborigines to the Apache possessed this attribute of humanity, which some strongly believe to be the preserve of Africans.
Ubuntu (Nguni) or botho (Sotho) or vhuthu (Venda) or unhu (Shona) are merely
– southern Africa words describing something that exists in all human societies before the pressures of survival through cashbased economies changed the way we see one another as human beings. This is how I understand the concept of ubuntu.
The book Ubuntu: Curating the Archive, edited by Leonhard Praeg and Siphokazi Magadla, endorses my understanding in many instances.
Praeg points out that industrialisation and urbanisation uprooted people and forced individuals to fend for themselves in difficult environments, mostly among unfamiliar people.
This recently released UKZN Press-published vol- ume is compiled from contributions by an African studies project team from Rhodes University ’ s political and international studies department in 2011. It keenly demonstrates that colonialism planted the seed for the erosion of ubuntu in Africa.
It must also be noted that in Europe, ordinary people also suffered internal colonialism at the hands of the ruling class, mainly through the feudal systems.
Both colonialism and feudalism led to the uprooting of people off the lands, forcing people to lose the spiritual glue which had kept them together in interdependent societies.
Interdependence as a way of life was replaced by survivalist habits and lifestyles that were, and are still, being driven by individualism.
Apart from political manifestations which changed the world ’ s approach to ubuntu or humanity, the book shows how ubuntu inspired political systems, in Ghana under Africa ’ s first president Kwame Nkrumah, and more so in case of the ujamaa system that was initiated by former Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere.
In chapter 6, Issa G Shivji writes “… Nyerere explicitly argued that his variant of socialism, or ujamaa, derived from traditional African society.”
Nyerere strongly argued that through ujamaa he was not importing socialism, but that he sought to prove that his people had thrived on a socialist system that was based on utu, or dignity or humanity, that had existed long before the arrival of colonialism and Western culture.
Two other contributors, Magadla and Ezra Chitando, point to the need for African men today to desist from abusing ubuntu and culture and forge safer, happier communities.
Overall, this finex book gives hope that these negative trends can be reversed, perhaps with a bit more ubuntu from governments.
Already, in places where governments are more caring, such as in the Scandinavian countries, citizens are happier and therefore able to care for other people, as exemplified by this Venda proverb: Muthu u bebelwa munwe (a person is born for another or others).