Ubuntu
I in You and You in MeBy Michael BattleChurch Publishing Incorporated
Copyright © 2009 Michael Battle
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-59627-111-1Contents
Chapter One
A FISH DOESN'T KNOW IT'S WET
Westerners may find Ubuntu—an African concept of personhood—a strange word with perhaps an even stranger meaning. Emphasizing the communal and spiritual dimension of human identity, the concept of Ubuntu (pronounced oo-BOON-too) of necessity poses a challenge to persons accustomed to thinking of themselves as individuals. Imagine a fish trying to understand what it means to be wet, when all it has ever known is life in the water. Or imagine the desperation of an earthling landing on Mars without an oxygen tank. Becoming conscious of what we take for granted can be a strange, difficult—even painful—experience. Yet the winds of change that greet us as we begin the twenty-first century guarantee that Westerners will encounter non-Western assumptions about what it means to be human. The interconnection of identity on the personal, communal, and global levels is inescapable.
Ubuntu is an African concept of personhood in which the identity of the self is understood to be formed interdependently through community. This is a difficult world-view for many Westerners who tend to understand self as over and against others—or as in competition with others. In a Western worldview, interdependence may be easily confused with codependence, a pathological condition in which people share a dependence on something that is not life-giving, such as alcohol or drugs. Ubuntu, however, is about symbiotic and cooperative relationships—neither the parasitic and destructive relationships of codependence nor the draining and alienating relationships of competition.
Perhaps Desmond Tutu, the celebrated archbishop from South Africa, put it best when he said:
A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.
What Is Ubuntu?
The word Ubuntu comes from a linguistic group of Sub-Saharan languages known as Bantu. Both words Ubuntu and Bantu can be recognized by the common root of -ntu (human). The prefix ba- denotes the plural form for humanity. In short, "Ubuntu" means personhood. A further etymological foundation for -ntu can be translated as being, that is, human being. In the spirituality common to SubSaharan Africa, there is a direct relationship between human being and God's being. Ubuntu, therefore, also includes a theological understanding in which all beings are known through the category of personhood.
Tutu's more specific connotation of the term derives from the expression Ubuntu ungamntu ngabanye abantu, not an easily translatable Xhosa concept. Generally, this proverbial expression means that each individual's humanity is ideally expressed in relationship with others, and, in turn, individuality is truly expressed. A person depends on other persons to be a person. This is certainly the understanding Christians have of God as Trinity in which the three persons of God are so interdependent that all three persons of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have one nature. However, relying only on a literal interpretation of the word as human being does not satisfy Ubuntu's deeper meanings. To the Bantu-speaking peoples, a phrase, such as "Mary has Ubuntu," would mean Mary is known to be a caring, concerned person who abides faithfully in all social obligations. Mary is conscious not only of her personal rights but also of her duties to her neighbor. In fact, Mary is conscious of her personal rights only in relationship with the rights of others. Mary does not know she is beautiful, or intelligent, or humorous, without Ubuntu. Mary has come to understand her own identity only in relationship to other persons.
Ubuntu is the interdependence of persons for the exercise, development, and fulfillment of their potential to be both individuals and community. This is why extended family is so important in African societies. Through extended family, an individual becomes capable of living a larger life, not only through those related by blood, kinship, or marriage but through humanity itself, conceived as a family one joins at birth and in which no one is a stranger.
On a social scale, Ubuntu implies more than just a non-racial, non-sexist, and non-exploitative society. Rather it is a touchstone by which the quality of a society has to be continually tested, no matter what ideology is reigning. Ubuntu must be incorporated not only in the society of the future but also in the process of the struggle toward that future.
Understanding Ubuntu requires both a turning away from popular Western concepts of personhood, such as the consumer, and a turning toward a qualified sense of what might be called the Bantu ontology—the Bantu understanding of the nature of being—which provides access to the concept of Ubuntu. Wilhelm Bleek is known to have coined the name "Bantu" (plural of Ubuntu) because of the similar linguistic bond among Sub-Saharan African speakers. Using this term as a name for Sub-Saharan peoples is now considered derogatory, especially through its divisive use in South Africa. However, because almost all the peoples occupying the southern third of the African continent, from the Cameroon-Nigerian seaboard in the West to the Somalia-Kenyan coastline in the east and southwards as far as Port Elizabeth, speak a closely related group of languages, it remains helpful to use the term "Bantu languages" because common linguistic elements account for the development of what might appropriately be called a "Bantu ontology"—a concept of being common to the speakers of the Bantu family of languages.
These similarities may be seen in the following Bantu linguistic terms for people:
Duala: Shona:
bato vanhu
Mongo: Tio:
banto baaru
Rwanda: Luba:
abantu bantu
Fang: bot Herero:
abandu
Bushong: Kongo:
baat bantu
In the above example, the grammatical system is governed by the prefix denoting plurality. The corresponding singular prefix, ITLμITL-, when combined with the root, -ntu, forms the Bantu word for person, most explicitly displayed by the Sotho word for human: u-mû-ntu (pl. a-bûntu). Umuntu is the category of "human being" or "force" with intelligence which includes spirits, the human dead, and the living. The corresponding term for Umuntu in Xhosa and Zulu is Ubuntu.
A further etymological foundation for -ntu is seen in the translation of being as God's being. As far as grammar concerning God in Bantu ontology, God's being is referred to both as Imana (languages of Kinyarwanda and Kirundi), and Nyamuzinda (language of Mashi). When speaking of God or gods, it must be noted that being as the concept of -ntu includes both concepts of act and being through Seriti, the concept of forces. Therefore, in an African cosmology, it becomes nonsensical to debate free will versus grace or natural versus positive theology. African conceptualizations of being might be said to be metadynamics rather than metaphysics.
Augustine Shutte, a white South African philosopher, cites a phenomenological example of Ubuntu through John Heron's research focusing on the phenomenon of mutual gazing. The following quote illustrates the Zulu greeting of Ndibona (I see you), with the Zulu response, Sawubona (Yes), a concept similar to that of Ubuntu. Shutte observes:
... me gazing at you gazing at me. In meeting your gaze it is not the physical properties of your eyes that I fix on, as, say, an eye-specialist would. The experimental work dealt with by Heron shows that in fact when I pick up your gaze my eyes actually either simply oscillate back and forth between your eyes, or else fixate on a point equidistant between them. What I pick up is the gaze, and in the gaze the presence of a person actively present to me. And the same is simultaneously true of you.
So, while Ubuntu may have an unfamiliar sound to Western ears, probing its deeper meanings promises to help the reader understand five important points:
1. Self-identity is not optimally formed through competition.
2. Community is elusive and requires skill to see it.
3. Ubuntu expands our horizons.
4. Ubuntu deepens our spirituality.
5. The development of a "communal self " requires practice.
Identity and Competition
Our planet cannot survive if we define our identity only through competition. If I know myself as strong only because someone else is weak, if I know myself as a black person only because someone else is white, then my identity depends on a perpetual competition that only leaves losers. If I know myself as a man only by dominating women, if I know myself as a Christian only because someone else is going to hell, then both my masculinity and my Christianity are devoid of content.
Rather than reinforcing competitive ways of knowing self, Ubuntu offers a way of discovering self-identity through interdependence. As such, it is possible to argue that my very salvation is dependent on yours—radical stuff for Western ears to hear, yet vital to the survival of the earth.
My colleague Martha Horne, the former dean of Virginia Theological Seminary, offers a spiritual exercise in which she invites conference participants to take a moment to think of two or three words other people might use to describe them. Then she asks them how, from the core of their being, they would describe themselves. The point is to think about the person I want to be in relation to the person others think I am. Who am I? Does my identity come from what I do? (Priest? Writer?) My affiliations? (Philadelphia Eagles fan? Episcopalian?) My values? (Pacifist? Environmentalist?) Am I known by my relationships? (Husband? Son? Father?) Or by what I hope will impress others? (Honors? Titles?)
In this book I argue that Ubuntu teaches us that the only true way to know self is in community.
When I participated in one of Martha's exercises, she was quick to point out that boundaries are needed to practice a communal self. The ability to differentiate oneself and maintain a distinct identity—Where do I end and you begin?—is essential to taking responsibility for how we relate to other people. Martha used the Woody Allen movie Zelig as an example of the problem of self-differentiation. In the movie, Allen portrayed a fictional character named Zelig who had become the object of psychological investigation in the 1930s because he always assumed the identity of the person he was with. An unhelpful chameleon, he ruined relationships by always mimicking instead of being.
To become a healthy person we must be fully human both as a person in community and as a self-differentiated person. My argument, however, is that the very act of self-differentiation is itself the beauty of Ubuntu. You cannot know you are unique or beautiful or intelligent without the reference point of a community in which such attributes become intelligible. We need to become communal selves.
What is a communal self? In this book I want us to answer this question through the concept of Ubuntu which shapes the vision for how the relationship between persons creates a third entity. In other words, Ubuntu helps us see the complementarity between the individual and community—that one is unintelligible without the other. Ubuntu helps us guard against the unfortunate tendency of approaching relationships as what one person can get out of the other, thereby killing the opportunity for the third life to be born—the life of community.
Ubuntu recognizes that our need to be seen for who we really are is an existential reality in which we need to be part of something larger than ourselves. Ubuntu also helps us see that we need to be part of a community with a measure of mutuality and like-mindedness. Our best thinkers on these matters (social psychologists, theologians, sociologists, economists) teach us that we discover our true identities in these ways. They teach us that without such relationality we cannot be healthy. They teach us that happiness is where you can be fully yourself.
Americans are a fraction of the world's population, but we have competed so well against others that we now control a majority of the world's resources. This is a logical by-product of a Western worldview that prizes competition, but perpetual competition is dangerous for our relationships with other people as well as the planet.
Before there was such a thing as the "economically developed world," Jesus taught his disciples how to negotiate a competitive world—basically as sheep sent to the wolves.
The disciples huddle around Jesus to learn. As the disciples engaged a competitive world, they came back to Jesus telling him all that they had done and taught (Mark 6:30 –34). Jesus offered an interesting response to their self-reporting.
The response is more like a coach who tells the team to huddle back up together, to call a time out. Often, Jesus' encounter with his disciples seems a bit humorous to me because when scripture says that "the Apostles gathered around Jesus," we are often led to imagine "Apostles" as a bunch of people wearing vestments, looking austere and holy—but as any of you who have read the Bible know, this is certainly not the case. Apostle literally means "One who is sent." Jesus says elsewhere that he is sending these people out like sheep among wolves. They are not looking austere and holy. They are gathering around Jesus, afraid for their lives.
Jesus' response to those like you and me whom he sends into the world is not to require fancy vestments or place us on pedestals, but to have compassion on us and call us away to a peaceful place in which to teach us to see the world differently. This, too, is the beauty of Ubuntu—to get us to see each other differently.
Jesus wants us to take a deep breath, to gather enough courage to truly see what we really look like in this world—sheep in the midst of wolves. And unfortunately, the sheep would be just as destructive among themselves if given the chance to live without a shepherd. St. Paul tells us as much (Eph. 2:11–22)—that we need to see ourselves as we really are—not as the heroes that we all want to look like—but as the real human beings who get it right sometimes and who get it wrong sometimes. On one hand, we are a people who sacrifice our lives for our friends, yet if you flip the TV channel, you see people sending Scud missiles to bomb primary schools in session. St. Paul says, "... Remember that you were at that time without Christ, ... having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is the hostility between us." This is the gravity needed to understand Ubuntu.
It is also helpful to consider what Ubuntu is not. Even though I'm from the United States, I watched the 2006 World Cup Finals between France and Italy. You really don't have to be a sports fanatic to know what happened in this match. The French Captain Zinedine Zidane, ten minutes from the climatic end, with his country's hopes, the championship, and his place in history at stake, violently and intentionally crashed heads with the Italian defender, Marco Materazzi, knocking him to the ground and getting himself ejected from the field.
Zidane, the great hero, the one held in such high esteem around the world, Zidane, master of the penalty kick, knew the match was seconds away from being decided. He knew he was their best chance to be the hero once again, but he was kicked out of the game. France lost by one goal, a goal Zidane could have easily scored. "What was he thinking?" a reporter from the Washington Post asked.
The Washington Post reporter was obsessed with knowing why Zidane was so hostile, especially with so much at stake. So he did some cultural work. Zidane said Materazzi had insulted him with crude references to his mother and sister. Zidane implied that if he had to do it over again, he would. "I am a man, after all," he declared. "I would have rather received a punch in my face."
The reporter concluded that for many people this is sufficient explanation. With the World Cup in the balance and a billion people watching, someone says something about your mother and, from that point onwards, you cannot be responsible for your actions. But the reporter, interestingly, added, "Social scientists have long been interested in insults, not with the view to winning matches but with the view to understanding culture and behavior. You don't need science to know that men are more inclined to use insults than women, and more inclined to violent reactions. Turns out the more macho the society, the more likely it is that men will trade insults."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Ubuntuby Michael Battle Copyright © 2009 by Michael Battle. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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