Ubuntu Between Worlds: When “I am because we are” meets “I need to pay rent”

Students at Université Libre des Pays des Grands Lacs (ULPGL) in Goma singing "Uzozizola” together

“I am because we are. I am nothing without everybody else – we are Africans.” The 33-year-old Kenyan woman who said this during a research interview immediately added: “But I also need to pay rent, build my career, and compete in a global job market.”

This tension – captured in a 2023 Nairobi study by Ébalé & Mulemi – is Ubuntu's reality today. Not as failed ideal or romantic solution, but as daily negotiation between worlds.

This is the third piece in my series on African philosophy and navigation between worlds. After exploring Anton Wilhelm Amo's “equipollence” and beginning to understand Ubuntu's complexity, I wanted to dig deeper into how Ubuntu actually works in practice. Before my recent trip to Rwanda to work with young IT professionals, I discovered this Nairobi study that captured exactly the tensions I expected to encounter.

The study interviewed 56 recent graduates about Ubuntu and African identity. What emerged wasn't philosophy textbook material but something more interesting: young people simultaneously proud of “being communal” and navigating neoliberal job markets, invoking Ubuntu while building individual careers, honouring family obligations while pursuing personal goals.

This is the Ubuntu that matters – not the greeting card version, but the messy, contested, lived reality.

Living the Tension Daily

The Monday morning reality for these young Kenyans is more complex than any philosophy textbook captures. The same person who sends money home to extended family also sets boundaries when relatives make unreasonable demands. The same person who values “shauri yetu not shauri yake” (our concern, not theirs) also competes for individual advancement in global job markets.

This isn't hypocrisy. It's sophisticated navigation.

Seventeen of the 56 study participants specifically mentioned “communal values” as core to their African identity. They described feeling proud of “being communal” — but they also felt frustrated when communal expectations became exploitative. As one participant put it, they could distinguish between genuine Ubuntu and its violations: “Actions of immorality can make you ashamed of being an African; but not to be ashamed because you are an African as such.”

They're not rejecting Ubuntu, they're refining it. They've developed what we might call “selective communalism”: the ability to honour genuine reciprocity while protecting themselves from manipulation.

But this navigation isn't effortless or heroic. It's the ordinary human work of adapting to circumstances you didn't choose. Some days the balance works; some days it doesn't. Occasionally, the competing demands are simply exhausting. These are normal people doing what people do: making the best of difficult situations.

The Education Dilemma

Many participants saw their university education as foreign to Ubuntu values, promoting what they called “negative competitiveness, individualism, consumerism.” Yet, they pursued this education precisely to serve their families and communities better. They wanted Ubuntu integrated into their curriculum, not because they rejected modernity, but because they sought synthesis.

This isn't the false choice between tradition and progress that dominates so much discourse about Africa. These young people want both, and they're creating practical ways to have both.

The Adler Connection: Simultaneous Movement

Alfred Adler recognized something radical about human development. His insight – what Gisela Eife calls his “double dynamic” – wasn't that people switch back and forth between individual development and community connection. It was that both movements are simultaneously and always present in every human behaviour.

As Adler put it in 1929: “In every psychological expression of movement, alongside the degree of community feeling, individual striving for superiority can be determined.” Not sometimes one, sometimes the other. Always both at once.

The young Kenyan woman demonstrates this double dynamic not as contradiction, but as lived reality. When she develops her capabilities, advances her career, competes in global job markets (compensatory movement), this happens simultaneously with her engagement for family and community (community movement). Both movements reinforce and enable each other.

This isn't navigation between two worlds. This is a single, integrated life stream.

What the Nairobi study participants practice is sophisticated psychological integration. They've learned what Adler described as mature community feeling: personal development that serves the community, and communal connection that enables individual flourishing.

Their sense of conflict doesn't arise from failed integration, but from cultural narratives that tell them they must choose. In reality, they're showing us what successful integration looks like.

Beyond the False Choice

The study participants aren't choosing between Western and African values – they're creating hybrid practices that honour both. But not in the abstract way management consultants might imagine.

Take WhatsApp family groups – thoroughly modern technology used for thoroughly traditional purposes: coordinating support for elderly relatives, organizing contributions for ceremonies, sharing job opportunities. Or consider mobile money transfers that allow precise, individual financial management while maintaining collective family support.

These aren't theoretical innovations. They're practical solutions created by people who refuse to accept that caring for community requires abandoning personal development, or that individual success means betraying Ubuntu values.

The young woman who said both “I am because we are” AND expressed frustration with “individualism and capitalism” wasn't confused. She was articulating a sophisticated position: Ubuntu yes, exploitation no. Community yes, but not at the expense of critical thinking.

The Rwanda Reality Check

During my recent workshop in Kigali, I was curious whether the tensions described in the Nairobi study would surface in different cultural contexts. As we worked through biographical exercises with young IT professionals, the challenges were similar (navigating between global tech careers and local community obligations) but Ubuntu as a concept simply wasn't part of the conversation.

This was a useful reminder that the specific language and frameworks people use to understand their lives vary significantly, even when facing comparable challenges. The Nairobi study captures something real and important within its specific context (how young Kenyans think when explicitly reflecting on Ubuntu), but that's precisely what makes it valuable: its specificity, not any claim to universal relevance.

What This Means

The woman who said, “I am because we are” AND “I need to pay rent” wasn't contradicting herself. She was navigating a real tension that many young people face — and not just in contexts where Ubuntu language is used.

During a roundtable discussion in Kigali, I met two young South Sudanese men who had come alone to Rwanda to study. Their families remained in South Sudan, facing an acute existential crisis as the country teeters on the edge of renewed armed conflict. These students navigate daily between their individual educational goals and their desperate concern for families they cannot directly help. They send money when they can, maintain constant communication despite unreliable connections, and carry the weight of family expectations while building their own futures in a foreign country.

Their navigation has nothing to do with Ubuntu philosophy, but everything to do with the fundamental human challenge the Nairobi study captures: How do you develop yourself when your community is in crisis? How do you pursue individual goals when collective survival is at stake? How do you honour relationships across distance and danger?

What strikes me most about both the Nairobi study participants and the South Sudanese students is not just their sophisticated navigation, but the creative energy that makes it possible. They don't just adapt to impossible circumstances — they actively create new possibilities from within those circumstances. This creative force seems to be the prerequisite for everything else: the capacity to acknowledge reality fully and simultaneously reshape it.

The Nairobi study shows this navigation in action within one specific cultural context. But the underlying tension — between personal development and communal responsibility under pressure — appears everywhere young people are forced to build lives away from home while their communities face threats.

That tension, and the creative responses it generates, is worth understanding.