Ubuntu — I Am Because We Are

The anthropologist had been studying competitive behaviour. He had designed the test carefully — a single prize, multiple competitors, the obvious incentive to be fastest and claim everything. It was a clean experimental setup for observing individual versus collective motivation.

The children looked at him, looked at each other, and joined hands.

They ran together and arrived together and sat down together around the basket and shared the fruit together. The experiment had produced a result the anthropologist had not included in his hypotheses.

When he asked them why, they said: Ubuntu. Then they said: how can one of us be happy if all the others are sad?

Ubuntu is a Nguni Bantu concept that runs through the cultures of southern and eastern Africa. It is sometimes translated as I am because we are. Sometimes as humanity toward others. Sometimes simply as the quality of being human in the fullest sense — which, in this philosophy, is not possible in isolation. You cannot be fully human alone because humanness is constituted in relationship. The self is not a pre-existing unit that then enters relationship. The self is constituted through relationship. The boundary between self and other is not a wall. It is a membrane.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who spent his life translating the Ubuntu philosophy into the language of South African reconciliation, described it this way: my humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together. This is not sentimentality. It is an ontological claim — a claim about the structure of what a human being actually is. The isolated individual of Western liberal philosophy — the self-sufficient unit of rational self-interest — is, in the Ubuntu framework, a philosophical abstraction that does not correspond to the actual structure of human existence. No one becomes themselves alone. No one sustains themselves alone. The language you think with was given to you. The values you hold were transmitted to you. The skills you deploy were taught to you. The self that feels so private and individual is the accumulated gift of every relationship that has ever reached you. Ubuntu is the acknowledgment of this in practice. The children who joined hands were not being naive about competition. They were being accurate about what they were.

Mandela carried Ubuntu through twenty-seven years of imprisonment and into the presidency. He described it as the philosophy that made reconciliation possible — the recognition that the perpetrators of apartheid were also diminished by what they had done, that their humanity was incomplete in the same way that their victims' humanity had been assaulted, and that restoring the victims restored the perpetrators also. Not because they deserved restoration. Because Ubuntu. Because we can only be human together.

The basket of fruit is still there under the tree. The children who joined hands still arrive at it together. The anthropologist's hypothesis is still being revised.

How much of what you are working toward is yours alone? And how much of what you have already accomplished was built on what others gave you without accounting for it? Ubuntu is not a question about sharing resources. It is a question about what a self actually is — and whether the self you have been most invested in protecting is as separate as you have been assuming.