According to various sources, "Ubuntu" is a South African term, either Zulu or Xhosa, which can freely be translated as "I am human because you are human." But what does this mean, and why should you, I, or anyone care?
We can begin to understand why, when we read Desmond Tutu's definition of "Ubuntu":
"…It is the essence of being human. It speaks of the fact that my humanity is caught up and is inextricably bound up in yours. I am human because I belong. It speaks about wholeness, it speaks about compassion. A person with ubuntu is welcoming, hospitable, warm and generous, willing to share. Such people are open and available to others, willing to be vulnerable, affirming of others, do not feel threatened that others are able and good, for they have a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that they belong in a greater whole. They know that they are diminished when others are humiliated, diminished when others are oppressed, diminished when others are treated as if they were less than who they are. The quality of ubuntu gives people resilience, enabling them to survive and emerge still human despite all efforts to dehumanise them. "
- Archbishop Desmond Tutu
“God Has A Dream” © 2004 Published by Doubleda
So "Ubuntu" is a new way--for most of us--of understanding our humanity as a shared condition, of realizing, at whatever level we are able, that we are all in this "humanity" thing together, and not even the greatest among us is capable of being human alone.
I became an instant convert to the Ubuntu philosophy while watching a movie called "Red Dust", a dramatization of some of the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in post-Apartheid South Africa, when an old black African man, confronting the white Afrikaaner who had harmed him years before, said, "Tell me why you did this to me, so that I can forgive you!"
It was in that moment that I realized that I, as a Christian, had lived all of my life by precepts which I had never understood, because the culture within which I had been raised and had lived had not given me the conceptual tools to understand them.
You see, how can you hate someone, or wish to work vengeance against him or her, if you are a part of him or her, and he or she is a part of you?
"Tell me why you did this to me, so that I can forgive you!"
How many of us truly understand that genuine justice has nothing whatsoever to do with vengeance, or with punishing others for what they have done? I had never understood that, until that moment. Suddenly, I did.
Desmond Tutu also said,
" You know when ubuntu is there, and it is obvious when it is absent. It has to do with what it means to be truly human, to know that you are bound up with others in the bundle of life."
- Archbishop Desmond Tutu
“God Has A Dream” © 2004 Published by Doubleday
Genuine justice, for us humans, simply cannot ever exist, unless and until it has become blended with mercy and compassion. Otherwise, we are left with the horror Tommy Sands sang about, in "There Were Roses":
" An eye for an eye, it was all that filled their minds
And another eye for another eye till everyone is blind"
We all know that the rage and the hatred have to end, because vengeance begets vengeance in an endless cycle of bloody murder, mahem and brutal dehumanization. But saying that the rage and the hatred have to end doesn't make that happen. Replacing it with Ubuntu--the gut-level understanding that there is no "us" and no "them", but all of us are human together--that will make the rage and the hatred end, because there is no longer a "them" to hate, only an "us" to try to live with, forgive, and understand.
And that is what Ubuntu is all about.
God's Blessings to all who read these words.
