Summary
Ubuntu is a Southern African philosophy of personhood: a human being becomes a person through relations with other people. The word belongs to the region’s Bantu languages – ubuntu in Zulu, Xhosa and Ndebele, botho in Sesotho, hunhu in Shona – and is carried in the Nguni proverb ‘umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu’, a person is a person through other persons. From the 1980s, writers including Stanlake Samkange, Desmond Tutu and Mogobe Ramose set it out as philosophy.
It is more than a saying about community. The philosopher Fainos Mangena describes its ethics as “spiritual, dialogical and consensual”, binding the living to ancestors and a creator as well as to each other.
Rationale
Our articles don’t name ubuntu. We include it among the relational understandings of life that Part 1 says have “long been cultivated”, “often despite centuries of colonial suppression”; a short entry can’t carry its fullness.