Ubuntu is a choice in our travels
We must each walk our own path on our journey through life, but we must respect others while doing so
Roads get travellers to their desired destination. There exist all sorts of roads, but they all serve that singular purpose. Paths, streets, boulevards and dirt roads exist because what is at the end of them, or somewhere along them, is a desired end point.
There’ll be halfway stations, fleeting encounters with people or situations, but the remainder of the journey will be awaiting conclusion. Roads are on land, on water and in the air. The sky is full of what are known as corridors – air roads if you will – and these crisscross the globe, ferrying us to loved ones, to important deal-sealing meetings or just away from the bustle of city life.
We sail to go fishing, to bridge land masses, to flee because of repression or because of unfavourable economic conditions.
It isn’t unimportant here to consider that our species became bipedal by natural selection so that we could more easily walk or flee, with the ability to use our hands to wield weapons and manipulate tools. We left tree branches and stood up to become fully bipedal apes, then migrated across the Red Sea to Arabia, inadvertently peopling, after that, the entire world with ourselves. Our footpaths were and remain both material and emotional.
As I write this, an explosion on Kerch Bridge, which links Crimea to Russia, has raised enough eyebrows to warrant talk of a possible nuclear apocalypse in response to that act: someone is in desperate need of that road for the purpose of war.
A few years ago I drove a rental car from Maseru to Johannesburg, got lost and ended up on a small “tarred” road that had more ruts and puddles than it did bitumen. But I eventually reached OR Tambo airport, checked the vehicle in and was obliged to pay a penalty for the damage that road had inflicted on the paintwork. Still, from where I sit, it was never the road’s fault but that of whoever oversees road upkeep.
Everyone has a road from birth to death, one that is distinct and adaptable, just like physical roads can be, when there’s a roadblock or when we opt for a more picturesque route. The course of life can be altered.
There are signs along each, a stop sign here, a yield one there, a speed-limit one, a right-of-way one. These must be obeyed, under pain of death, injury or a substantial fine, because if the world is to run smoothly then all are by necessity required to follow rules.
The straightest line between two points, or a shortcut, is always the best choice – unless such a line trespasses the law or someone else’s space. What’s more, there even exist roads that go nowhere but to the ends of themselves: dead-end streets.
Philip Larkin’s poem No Road says: “Since we agreed to let the road between us / Fall to disuse, / And bricked our gates up, planted trees to screen us, / And turned all time’s eroding agents loose, / Silence, and space, and strangers – our neglect / Has not had much effect. / Leaves drift unswept, perhaps; grass creeps unmown; / No other change.”
Are we letting the roads between ourselves fall to disuse, both the physical and the emotional? That road I took to the airport was rutted, like the one to the human being closest to you might be. These latter throughstreets, once paved with the spirit of ubuntu, are now pocked. It is everyone for themselves these days. It is “I got mine; get yours”.
We often refer to land routes as arteries, a main or a lesser artery in such and such a town. When these conduits are clogged, oxygen does not reach the brain in enough quantities and a stroke is a possible outcome. When there’s a bulge in the wall of an artery, an aneurysm is the predictable result.
Relationships between people depend on such arteries – depend on making sure such roads work. Else there can be no ubuntu (South Africa), botho (Lesotho), omundu (Namibia), kimuntu (Angola). A concept observed in southern and east Africa, ubuntu means “humanness”, or the fact of being a person. It is embodied in the following African equivalent of the Golden Rule: a person is a person through other people. African humanism at its best. Whatever happened to that bright idea?
In The Path of the Wind, Filipino-South African poet Jim Pascual Agustin writes: “I have seen days when the wind / weighs so heavy on trees, they bend / close to breaking.”
So the wind, too, has ways and paths it travels on to go wherever it is that winds go. Naturally, wind can be beneficial or destructive. The most obvious use we have for it is for energy, with which we generate electricity, or sail, or fly a kite, or watch a colourful set of garments billow from a clothesline, like the sails of a schooner bringing friendly or hostile explorers to one’s shores. Unfriendly wind breaks tree branches and lifts roofs off houses. Agustin says: “The trunk may have to learn a new angle / sunward.”
Sounds a hell of a lot like the fork in the road epitomised by Robert Frost in his famous poem The Road Not Taken. After all, who has never regretted not taking another road? “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, / And sorry I could not travel both / And be one traveler, long I stood / And looked down one as far as I could / To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, / And having perhaps the better claim, / Because it was grassy and wanted wear.
Frost’s whole declaration with this poem is really to subtly tell us to do our own thing by taking the road less travelled, albeit without importuning other travellers or breaking social mores, otherwise there’ll be that hefty fine we mentioned earlier.
A further hint from Agustin’s poem informs us that “Less apparent is the path / the wind must make”. Roads are wrought with pitfalls and hard places, and it is in such cases precisely that the authentic GPS system ubuntu, as we continue individual or group journeys, becomes indispensable.
While we cannot travel on more than one road and be one traveller, for we are neither gusts of wind nor rivulets, we mustn’t let our roads fall to disuse, or brick up our gates or plant trees to screen us. What we need to do is choose the finest road and walk faithfully to the end of it, because that is what will make all the difference.