Ubuntu

Ubuntu is a Southern African concept, carried in the Nguni proverb umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu — a person is a person through other persons. Personhood is not a starting condition but an achievement of relationship: the self is constituted by, and answerable to, the community and lineage it stands in. The scholarly articulation we point to is Mogobe B. Ramose’s African Philosophy Through Ubuntu (1999), which treats ubuntu as an ontology of be-ing as becoming-through-others rather than a moral slogan. For our list it names the “between us” that shapes the “within us” — kin to Kapwa & Bayanihan and Vā — from a tradition with deep philosophical infrastructure of its own. Where it exceeds our use, said plainly: ubuntu is probably the most commodified concept on this list — mission statements, management books, marketing — and Ramose himself objects to renderings that detach it from African philosophy and land. Citing it lightly repeats the extraction; if it works here, it works via Ramose and his colleagues, named. Also see Kapwa & Bayanihan, Vā and Wahkohtowin