Learning to Read Ubuntu: A Journey Through Perspectives

Ubuntu visualized: Not one thing but a terrain where meanings collide, overlap, and transform. Created with Midjourney

When I first encountered Ubuntu — ”I am because we are” —something resonated immediately. As someone working with ideas about human connection and community, here was a concept from Southern African philosophy that seemed to speak a familiar language. Finally, a non-Western alternative to exhausting individualism. Or so I thought in that first, romantically naive moment.

I should confess upfront: I initially fell into that familiar trap of seeing “African wisdom” as if a continent with 54 countries and over 3000 languages could offer one unified philosophy. As if Ubuntu represented all African philosophy the way pasta represents all European cuisine. This romanticism is its own form of colonialism, really. But recognizing this was part of my reading journey—one I'm still on, and one I invite you to trace with me.

The Romantic First Glance

My first reading of Ubuntu was all projection. In a world of burnout and fractured communities, here was a philosophy saying: you are not alone, you were never meant to be alone, your very being exists through others. The Nguni phrase “Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu” (found in Zulu, Xhosa, and related languages) — ”a person is a person through other persons” — seemed to offer what Western philosophy struggled to articulate: fundamental relatedness as constitutive of being human.

Coming from Adlerian psychology, with its emphasis on Gemeinschaftsgefühl (community feeling), I thought I'd found a kindred spirit. When Archbishop Tutu explained Ubuntu as opposing Descartes' “I think, therefore I am” with “I participate, therefore I am,” I was hooked. When I read how Nelson Mandela credited Ubuntu with enabling forgiveness over revenge in post-apartheid South Africa, it seemed like moral philosophy at its finest.

Looking back, I see how desperately I wanted Ubuntu to be the answer to Western individualism's failures. I wasn't really reading Ubuntu; I was reading my own hopes into it.

Learning to Actually Read

The second, slower reading revealed what my enthusiasm had obscured. Start with linguistics: Ubuntu breaks down into “ubu-” (the process of becoming) and “-ntu” (person). At least, this is how scholars like Mogobe Ramose parse it. Not an “-ism,” not a fixed ideology, but something more like a process—if this reading holds. Already more complex than the greeting-card version.

Then there's the diversity of interpretation. Ramose reads Ubuntu as an entire ontology where everything exists in relationship, constantly becoming through interaction. Other philosophers see it differently—as ethics, as politics, as psychology. There's no single authoritative version, which itself tells us something important.

Regional variations complicate things further. What's called Ubuntu in Southern Africa has cousins across the continent—Ujamaa in Tanzania, Omoluwabi among the Yoruba, Agaciro in Rwanda. Each grows from specific soil, shaped by particular histories. To flatten these into “African philosophy” is to miss everything that matters.

The historical context challenged my romanticism most. The Ubuntu being discussed today isn't unchanged ancient wisdom, but something articulated and systematized largely in response to colonialism and apartheid. When the South African government wrote Ubuntu into its constitution, when corporations put it in mission statements—was this preservation or invention? Revival or creation?

I began to realize I'd been reading Ubuntu the way colonizers have perhaps always read Africa—as a projection screen for Western anxieties and desires.

Encountering Critical Voices

My third reading came through critics, particularly Nyasha Mboti's provocative “May the Real Ubuntu Please Stand Up?” Mboti argues that since the 1990s, Ubuntu has been systematically misrepresented as a harmony ideology that serves power more than people.

His alternative is sharp: Ubuntu is just “good citizenship” based on “informed choice in context.” Not mystical wisdom, not automatic harmony, but the messy work of figuring out how to be decent in your specific situation. He proposes an “ethics of collision” where conflict is as authentic as consensus.

My deeper reading for this article revealed that the gap between Ubuntu rhetoric and practice has become immense. When I read about the 2012 Marikana massacre—police shooting 34 striking miners while the government spoke of Ubuntu—the disconnect was stark. Leonhard Praeg's response captures it: after Marikana, claims that South African democracy is founded on Ubuntu “must in future be met with derision.” Similar patterns emerge in corporate settings: companies invoking Ubuntu while conducting mass layoffs, banks speaking of unity while repossessing homes. This disconnect deserves its own exploration, which I'll return to.

Living the Tensions

A recent study from Nairobi (Ébalé & Mulemi, 2023) showed me something more complex than either romanticism or cynicism. Interviewing 56 recent graduates, researchers found young people living Ubuntu as contested reality. They simultaneously felt pride in “being communal” and shame at corruption. One young woman articulated it perfectly: “I am because we are. I am nothing without everybody else.” Yet, she identified individualism and corruption as Ubuntu's greatest threats.

These young people aren't choosing between Ubuntu and modernity. They're navigating both, creating something new in the process. They live the tension, not the resolution.

The gender critique adds another layer. Feminist scholars note how Ubuntu often reinforces patriarchal structures—the “community” you belong to through Ubuntu historically meant male-dominated hierarchies. Can Ubuntu be decolonized from its own patriarchal elements? The question remains open.

Translation Without Erasure

The challenge isn't to avoid all translation between philosophical traditions—that would make dialogue impossible. It's to translate while preserving difference, to find resonances without erasing specificity. When I notice similarities between Ubuntu and Gemeinschaftsgefühl, I'm not saying they're the same thing wearing different cultural clothes. I'm noting family resemblances while respecting that each grew from different soil to address different problems.

This kind of translation requires holding multiple perspectives simultaneously without collapsing them into one. Ubuntu speaks to certain human experiences that Adlerian psychology also addresses, but through different metaphors, with different implications, serving different communities. The conversation between them can be generative precisely because they're not the same.

Where This Leaves Me

I'm no longer looking to Ubuntu for answers. Instead, I'm learning to appreciate the questions it raises: How do we belong without losing ourselves? How do we maintain dignity within communal bonds? How do we prevent beautiful philosophies from becoming tools of oppression?

Ubuntu is simultaneously ancient and modern, specific and universal, liberating and oppressive. It's not one thing but a terrain of struggle over what it means to be human in relationship. My mistake was wanting it to be simple.

For those of us interested in philosophies of connection—whether Adler's community feeling, Levinas's ethics of the Other, Flusser's dialogical thinking, or Daoist concepts of interdependence—Ubuntu offers not a model to import but a mirror for our own assumptions. Each tradition grows from its own soil, addresses its own problems, carries its own contradictions.

My reading of Ubuntu continues, getting more complex with each iteration. In the next piece, I'll explore how people actually navigate these tensions—how Ubuntu is lived rather than preached, struggled with rather than solved.

For now, I'm learning to sit with complexity rather than rushing toward resolution. Ubuntu doesn't need my romanticism. It needs careful attention to how people actually use it, contest it, and sometimes transform it into something unexpected.

What has your own journey with concepts from other cultural contexts been? How do you read philosophies from traditions not your own? I welcome your thoughts.