It does not need a deep understanding in Southern African epistemologies to realize that the term “Ubuntu” has been strongly diluted from its powerful political and historic meanings. However, having a text that not only reasserts its radical metaphysics and its transgenerational dimension, but also uses it to build a political advocacy for reparations in post-apartheid South Africa required someone of the talent of Panashe Chigumadzi who shares her words with us here.
Akukho zinyane lemvubu ladliwa zingwenya kwaceba iziziba. It never happens that the hippo’s calf is eaten by crocodiles and the pool remains clear.
///
And yet, “the great crocodile,” PW Botha, the former apartheid-era prime minister of South Africa, defied three subpoenas to testify at the post-apartheid Truth Reconciliation Commission (TRC). On the opening day of his contempt trial, Botha—who refused to give any information about the State Security Council his presidency set up to kill, torture, and detain of thousands—told reporters, “I only apologize for my sins before God.”
Apartheid’s victims wanted the truth. One million black viewers made the weekly “TRC: Special Report” the highest-rated public affairs broadcast at the time.
Apartheid’s beneficiaries wouldn’t confront the truth. Few white South Africans watched “TRC: Special Report.” They didn’t want to hear anything of it either. By February 1997, white radio listeners who objected to hearing TRC-related stories caused a broadcast rescheduling to non-prime-time hours, after 8 PM, “when most of the farmers are no longer listening.”
Apartheid’s architects wouldn’t confess the truth. FW De Klerk, the last president of apartheid, apologized for apartheid, but pleaded his innocence to the “the authorization of assassination, murder, torture, rape, and assault.” Like many other architects of apartheid, De Klerk’s predecessor P.W. Botha refused to give testimony in exchange for amnesty. Twelve years later, the crocodile “died at home, peacefully.”
Describing the rationale for amnesty at the TRC as based in Ubuntu, its chair, the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, “African jurisprudence is restorative rather than retributive.”
And yet, the very same African restorative justice declares, “akukho zinyane lemvubu ladliwa zingwenya kwacweba isiziba.” This is to say, Ubuntu’s radical ethical demand for reparations refuses amnesty as accountability.
Among Southern, Eastern, and Central Africa’s Bantu language speakers, Ubuntu is the African philosophy of ethical collective personhood embodied in the dictum, “umuntu ngumuntu ngabanye bantu.” With dangerous consequences, “Umuntu ngumuntu ngabanye bantu” is often mistranslated as an analogue of Western enlightenment humanisms as “I am because we are.”
Although it’s not possible to translate the fullness of African metaphysical worlds into English without losing and distorting meaning, “umuntu ngumuntu ngabanye bantu” is most correctly translated into English as “a person is a person through other people.”
Ubuntu, umuntu and abantu (the plural of umuntu) are in fact untranslatable and without equivalent within the limited bounds of the English language and the anti-black, anthropocentric, and androcentric Western metaphysical world that it structures. Given these limitations, the terms “person” and “personhood” offer the best possible English language placeholders that mark a distinction from Euro-American modernity’s historically anti-black conception of “the human.” Taking seriously Frantz Fanon’s declaration that “centuries ago, I was lost to humanity; I was a slave forever,” the rejection of “African humanism” as the “equivalent” of Ubuntu is informed by Black Study’s long-standing critique of the Euro-American modernity’s parasitic relationship to the enslaved black, as well as African philosophy’s emergent critique of the humanistic interpretation of African moral traditions which falsely imports an anthropocentrism that erases the holistic metaphysics that hold abantu are formed of and with our ecological and ancestral worlds. When we take African metaphysical worlds on their own terms seriously, it becomes evident that “the human” and umuntu are not interchangeable historically or metaphysically. “The human” arises and exists through the conquest of umuntu. Umuntu arises and exists through communion.
Ubuntu’s dynamic conception of umuntu, is of a social being who is always becoming through their community of people, abantu. This is why abantu say, “ningenze umuntu ebantwini,” you [second person plural] have made me a person among people. Ubuntu, therefore, holds that in constantly becoming ”umuntu ebantwini,” a person among people, one must continually uphold the personhood of others. Failure to uphold the personhood of another results in social death, so that we might declare awuyena muntu, you are not a person.
“Umuntu ngumuntu ngabanye bantu” extends through time and space: we are through those who come before us (the ancestors), those who come with us (the living) and those who come after us (the unborn). This is to say, the nature of umuntu’s being and becoming in the world is intergenerational, or what philosopher Mogobe Ramose has called “onto-triadic,” because Ubuntu holds that one cannot become umuntu “without the intervention of the living-dead.” What anthropologists have misnamed and misunderstood as “ancestor worship” and “ancestor veneration” is what, for example, isiZulu speakers might name “ukuphahla,” a term derived from, and referring to the practice of communicating and communing with ancestors. The pervasive respect for and acknowledgement of the presence of ancestors in our lives, manifests itself, for example, in the isiZulu greeting “Sawubona” or “Sanibona” “We see you,” which is declared even both parties alone. Far from being a banal announcement of the sight of the physical person you encounter, “we,” as the first person plural, and “you,” as the second person plural, acknowledges the presence of both the persons that can be seen, the ones that came before that can no longer be seen, and the ones who will come after who are yet to be seen. In other words, to declare “sawubona” is to acknowledge the presence of all the generations that make umuntu’s becoming in the world possible. To declare “sawubona,” the poet Mazes Kunene wrote, it is to say, “I on behalf of the generations of family acknowledge you and the generations of your family.”
One of the implications of umuntu’s intergenerational being is that where Ubuntu’s restorative justice holds that “ityala aliboli,” a crime does not rot, this means that a person may be held accountable for and made to offer inhlawulo,reparations for the transgressions of their deceased relations.
In other words, ubuntu does not recognize umuntu as the atomized individual who is self-generating, self-sustaining, and unencumbered by history and the sins of their mothers and fathers. When you commit a wrong, you do not simply commit a wrong against umuntu, you commit a wrong against those who come before them, those who come with them and those who come after them. A wrong committed against umuntu is a wrong committed against their generations.
All this to say, because Ubuntu operates across time and space—a person is a person through those who have come before us, those who come with us, and those who come after us—there is no time limit for injured persons to approach the court of law for justice, redress, and reparations. Ubuntu’s demand for restorative justice therefore holds no statute of limitations.
This is why for, example, within the historic practices of restorative justice among us as Shona peoples, there exists the practice of kuripa ngozi, the practice of paying reparations, kuripa, in inter-family disputes for the appeasement of avenging spirits, ngozi. Ngozi are the restless spirits of those who died violently or in extreme anger or bitterness, usually through murder, and therefore do not find rest until full reparations have been made by the families of the wrongdoer, even if this is generations after the wrong has been committed.
Akukho zinyane lemvubu ladliwa zingwenya kwacweba isiziba.
Among the most dangerous material consequences of Ubuntu’s mistranslation as “I am because we are” is that following post-apartheid South Africa’s 1993 Interim Constitution decreeing the “need for ubuntu but not for victimization [i]n order to advance […] reconciliation and reconstruction,” an individualized, inter-personalized, and time-circumscribed Ubuntu provided the rationale for the post-apartheid TRC’s emphasis on individual testimony, individual perpetrators, individual amnesty, and individual forgiveness.
Informed by both an individualized and inter-personalized Ubuntu, and TRC Chair Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s “Christianized Ubuntu,” the TRC’s approach to restorative justice substituted structural reparations for the institutional injustice of three centuries of genocide, slavery, indenture, land dispossession, and segregation that began with the Dutch conquest of the Cape in 1652 with individual forgiveness for individual testimony about individual wrongs committed by individual “I”s during the thirty-four years beginning with the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre. Nominally rooted in Ubuntu’s restorative justice, the TRC disregarded African jurisprudence which holds that “Ityala aliboli” by limiting the period of redress to thirty-four years.
As Allan Boesak, the Black Dutch Reformed Church minister who, alongside Tutu, helped cement black liberation theology’s centrality to the Black Consciousness Movement, has shown, Tutu’s theology of grace and forgiveness was grounded in a Christianisation of Ubuntu. In particular, as he declared that post-apartheid “Ubuntu is in need of Ubuntu,” Allan Boesak described Tutu’s Ubuntu as a Christian theology of grace and forgiveness based in, “Matthew 18:22, where we are instructed to forgive not seven, but 77 times.”
And yet, akukho zinyane lemvubu ladliwa zingwenya kwacweba isiziba directly refuses amnesty as an answer to Ubuntu’s radical ethical demands for restorative justice. If ubuntu holds that the pool cannot remain still after the crocodile eats the hippo’s calf, there must be consequences.
Despite this, nine months after Nelson Mandela’s release, Tutu set out his theological vision for forgiveness and racial reconciliation in his opening sermon at the watershed 1990 Rustenburg conference which convened churches that had been at odds under apartheid. There would be no Nuremberg, Tutu declared. Instead, there would be a three-stage confession-forgiveness-restitution model: “Let us go […] the Christian way, the way that says, yes there is a risk in offering people forgiveness […]. But that’s not […] our business, that God’s business, with that particular individual.” In response to Tutu’s reconciliation sermon, Willie Jonker, a theologian from Stellenbosch University, Afrikanerdom’s intellectual heart, offered an apology for apartheid. Tutu accepted the apology, and the white Dutch Reformed church endorsed it the next day, sending ripples throughout the religious community. From one side, a furious former apartheid president P. W. Botha telephoned the church’s moderator to protest. From the other, Black and Coloured Dutch Reformed churches questioned the sincerity of the white church and with it, Tutu’s right as an individual to accept the confession on behalf of the churches. In other words, the black churches collective indignation stemmed from the fact that reconciliation could not be a matter of “I”s forgiving over individual wrongs, as opposed to peoples reconciling over structural injustice.
And yet, akukho zinyane lemvubu ladliwa zingwenya kwacweba isiziba.
Grounded in this understanding of Ubuntu’s radical ethical demands for collective accountability, Bishop Khoza Mgojo, then South African Council of Churches president, prophetically warned that there would not be much forgiveness and racial reconciliation until the white government and white churches faced up to the historic issue of land restitution to black people, saying, “The land must be returned to the people. It cannot be owned by the few and worked by the many.”
A few years before Mgojo warned about the centrality of land to restorative justice and racial reconciliation, dispossessed farmworker Aron Mlangeni explained that “[the] white man has become umlungu because of us,” in a 1986 report titled “Ubuntu, Abantu, Abelungu.” This report, published towards the end of apartheid, examined the fact that we, as Bantu language speakers, had come to exclude white settlers from the historical ethical and social category of “abantu” (“people”) because of their historic failure to treat black people with Ubuntu, by virtue of their unjust conquest of the land and its peoples.
Indeed, on first contact with Europeans, amaXhosa people in what is today South Africa’s Eastern Cape initially regarded and welcomed them as “abantu basemzini,” which literally means “people of another house,” and is used expansively for visitors or in-laws. Black people naturally “acknowledged [biological] differences which included skin color and hair that looked like the spirogyra” of the waters from which they came, as historian Nomathamsanqa Tisani notes, their conception of personhood was social, and based on the moral actions of those they encountered, and so they deemed the white strangers from the sea to be abantu, “people,” like them. It is only after the experience of the white settlers’ unjust conquest of their land, that amaXhosa deemed them to be lacking in Ubuntu, and therefore, no longer considered them as “abantu”—that is, they were no longer considered “people.”
This is why it is that by 1862, when German philologist W.H.I. Bleek became the first European to call attention to the existence of the Bantu-language group after he noted linguistic similarities in the word for “people,” “abantu, and the corresponding words in the related languages,” he had to clarify that “abantu” is used “in the restricted sense” to specifically to refer to “black inhabitants.” By the time the settler state formalized land dispossession through the devastating 1913 Natives Land Act—which seized 87% of land for the white settler minority, leaving 13% to the black majority, who were press-ganged into cheap mining and farming labor—Bantu language speakers, used the term “abantu” (“people”) to distinguish Africans from white settlers to whom the term “abantu” only applied in the wider biological sense. Given white South Africa’s unjust land conquest and continuing relations of dispossession, black people have come not to regard white settlers as a collective as abantu in the social sense, because they have historically failed to treat us with Ubuntu. Mlangeni therefore articulated what has come to be called “Ubuntu as an African critical philosophy of race” rooted “not in biology, but on ethical, historical and social relations.”
Far from being time-bound, as the colonial notion of a prehistoric, pre-colonial, and primordial “African traditional philosophy” suggests, the emergence of Ubuntu as a critical philosophy of race rooted in ethical historical and social relations as opposed to biology demonstrates African metaphysics’ ability to move with, and ahead of time to not only offer a critique of settler-colonial modernity from within our own metaphysical terms, but to offer a cosmos of society beyond the social, spiritual and ecological crisis wrought by Euro-American modernity.
And yet, despite Ubuntu’s historic critique of white settler conquest, the post-apartheid need to reconcile abantu and abelungu into a nation of what Tutu famously called, the “Rainbow Nation of God,” a deracialized, individualized, and neoliberalized notion of Ubuntu came to dominate the discourse on racial reconciliation. As Antjie Krog, prominent white South African author and TRC observer, declared, “The ubuntu forgiveness says: I forgive you so that you can change/heal.”
Krog embodied the failures of even the most sincere and committed part of white South Africa to reckon with what the radical ethical demands of Ubuntu requires of white South Africa as a collective, who continue to benefit from the unjust conquest of black people and their land, to have meaningful reconciliation with Black people and become abantu.
Akukho zinyane lemvubu ladliwa zingwenya kwacweba isiziba.
As Black people we ask “uxolisa ngani?,” with what are you apologizing? Because Ubuntu holds that you cannot say sorry with your mouth. Ubuntu holds that Ukuhlawula, paying reparations for injuries caused to others, is indivisible from ukubuyisa, the restoration of injured relations. Ubuntu demands costly forgiveness: you cannot receive forgiveness without giving something up as an act of your contrition.
Reckoning with Ubuntu as the basis for African jurisprudence and restorative justice is to take seriously the centrality of ihlawulo yokubuyisa, reparations for the restitution of relations.
To be sure, while it did not have the mandate to address the historic conquest of the land, the TRC recommended reparations to victims and families who testified. Later, Tutu called for a wealth tax on all white South Africans. Government ignored both recommendations. Unsurprisingly, white South Africa dismissed Tutu’s calls. Too often, calls for national reparation and restoration are conflated with retribution, but Ubuntu among abantu requires the righting of relations through inhlawulo yokubuyisa, reparations for restoration.
Ultimately, the (neo)liberal constitutionalism of the post-apartheid era conscripted umuntu as the quintessential liberal individual—a rational rights-bearing economic subject dressed in African garb. If liberalism holds that “I,” the autonomous rational subject is the fundamental unit of civil society, the “I” of the individualized and interpersonalized Ubuntu generated by the Mbitian mistranslation as “I am because we are” rationalizes both the aspirations of the architects of post-apartheid South Africa’s liberal constitutional order and the actualities of the disastrous “non-racial” neoliberalism that has birthed a rate of inequality so spectacular that two individual white men—Nicky Oppenheimer and Johann Rupert, the scions of old apartheid wealth—own as much wealth as the bottom half of the majority black population. The pool remains still as the children of the crocodiles continue to amass wealth, while the hippo’s calves bleed in hunger.
It is then unsurprising that many black South Africans have become disillusioned with the neoliberal Ubuntu that suffuses and structures the post-apartheid order. For black South Africans, there has been “neither truth nor reconciliation.”
Akukho zinyane lemvubu ladliwa zingwenya kwacweba isiziba. For abantu to have ubuntu, the pool can no longer remain still. ■