Africanity and Ubuntu as Decolonizing Discourse

By Otrude Nontobeko Moyo

This book explores and discusses emerging perspectives of Ubuntu from the vantage point of “ordinary” people and connects it to human rights and decolonizing discourses. It engages a decolonizing perspective in writing about Ubuntu as an indigenous concept. The fore grounding argument is that one’s positionality speaks to particular interests that may continue to sustain oppressions instead of confronting and dismantling them. Therefore, a decolonial approach to writing indigenous experiences begins with transparency about the researcher’s own positionality. The emerging perspectives of this volume are contextual, highlighting the need for a critical reading for emerging, transformative and alternative visions in human relations and social structures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Feb 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9783030597856

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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

O. N. MoyoAfricanity and Ubuntu as Decolonizing DiscourseHuman Rights Interventionshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59785-6_1

1. Introduction: Situating Ubuntu Outside the Power of Coloniality

Otrude Nontobeko Moyo¹  

(1)

School of Social Work - IUSB, Indiana University South Bend, South Bend, IN, USA

Otrude Nontobeko Moyo

Email: [e-mail]

Situating the Study of Ubuntu within Lived Experiences of Africa

This book endeavors to value Ubuntu as an indigenous concept—roughly translated to describe the very essence of being human, affirming dignity of self and others in a shared humanity—while critically engaging with it in the sociopolitical and contextual landscapes that ground many of its evocations. In this regard, rather than define Ubuntu, I am interested in the discourses of Ubuntu. This book is about unpacking varied perspectives on Ubuntu in light of the power discrepancies regarding knowledges that influence how we define well-being and how we live together on this planet. From the modernistic written texts, embedded in the historical experiences of racialization, the power asymmetries in knowledge production have resulted in varied contextual definitions of Ubuntu. Some of these definitions and evocations attempt to maintain narratives of oppressions, while others are resisting and chart alternative discourses to a sense of universal responsibility outlined by the H.H. the Dalai Lama, Earth Summit, Rio de Janeiro (1992) speech, I believe that to meet the challenge of our times, human beings will have to develop a greater sense of universal responsibility. Each of us must learn to work not for [themselves], [their] family or nation, but for the benefit of all [humanity]. Universal responsibility is the real key to human survival. It is the best foundation for the world peace, equitable use of natural resources through conversn for the future generations, the proper care of the environment... (see Dalai Lama 1992) 

In response to the challenge of our time, I believe that human beings need to develop a greater sense of universal responsibility. Each one of us must learn to no longer work only for the benefit of [themselves], [their] family, or [their] nation, but for the benefit of humanity. Universal responsibility will be the key to human survival. It is the best ground on which to build world peace, an equitable sharing of the world’s resources and the development of true respect for the environment on behalf of future generations…

On another level, this book renders to unpack racialization and the interlocking use of othering as oppression in narratives of Ubuntu. Racialization has rendered as Other anything and everything African—racialized as Black—and in the process has denigrated ethical customs, ideas, and concepts through the universalization of the Eurocentric and, more specifically, the hierarchization of human value by means of a system of Whiteness that is inextricably associated with the contradictory and deviant accumulation of wealth through capitalism (Fox 2012). As Magubane (2004) notes, to engage in a decolonializing project is to unmask, unveil, and expose the pretensions and hypocrisies of colonialism (p. 130). As a decolonializing project, this book presents and interrogates the varied perspectives currently evoked by and about Ubuntu, be they in public discourse or through text and images, while paying particular attention to differences between the ways the concept is employed by ordinary people and its articulation by political elites and academics.

In order to critically engage with Ubuntu, this book relies on multiple methodologies compatible with its decolonializing project. First, I use the tenets of portraiture developed by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot and Jessica Hoffman Davis (1997) to present the voices of co-collaborators regarding Ubuntu, highlighting context, relationship, emergent themes in shaping the narrative. Further, I use autobiography to explicate ideas about and performative aspects of Ubuntu. Likewise, I use discourse analysis to examine the perspectives of Ubuntu articulated by academics and political elites. Because most of the written discourse about Ubuntu has been produced by academics and political elites, I was particularly interested in what ordinary people were saying about Ubuntu; accordingly, I used collaborative ethnography to engage people in dialogues about Ubuntu. I developed interviews from the collaborative ethnography as portraits to illustrate particular themes.¹

Three basic textual portraits regarding Ubuntu emerged from the ethnographic work; each will be addressed and detailed in a subsequent chapter. Chapter 2 first considers Ubuntu within the public discourse of academic texts and images. Chapter 3 re-contextualizes Ubuntu in the private discourse of ordinary people, drawing most heavily from ethnographic interviews that I conducted in Eastern Cape, South Africa. Chapter 4 considers the perspectives of immigrants from southern Africa living in the northeastern United States. The final chapter summarizes the conclusions of this research and analysis.

I have been engaged in the research for this project since 2011. Originating as a research agenda to learn what is being said about Ubuntu by using observational data, interviews, and artifact and discourse analysis to capture varied perspectives, the project expanded to capture and explore, with examples, how ordinary people who share their voices present Ubuntu—paying particular attention to how they assert themselves and their own agency—and to contrast those applications of the concept with more abstract uses of Ubuntu prevalent in public and academic discourse.

One cannot overstate that the most frequent invocations of Ubuntu occur within the dynamics of geopolitical knowledge production in which the coloniality of power remains persistent and dominant. Here, the coloniality of power is understood to mean acts of dismantling Other knowledges and ways of life while upholding and reproducing Eurocentric cultures. Taking seriously Quijano’s (2000) position that the coloniality of power is a culmination of processes that began with colonialism, Eurocentric capitalism, and the social classification of the world’s population around the idea of race, these processes can be understood as continuing to influence the relative positions of knowledge production, including ideas about Ubuntu. Maria Lugones (2010) expanded the notion of coloniality to note how the colonial imposition of gender cuts across the questions of ecology, economics, government, relations with the spirit world, and knowledge, as well as everyday practices that either habituate us to take care of the world or to destroy it (p. 742).

One may ask: but are we living under colonialism? Are we operating in a concrete and historical social formation where the political and economic relations of one nation depend on the power and resources of another? Though political colonialism supposedly ended with the political independence of mostly African nation-states that were under colonial rule, coloniality—a basic ontological, epistemological, and cultural logic of power that emerges as part of colonialism (see Maldonado-Torres 2007)—remains and persists under present-day neoliberal configurations of capital and governance; coloniality dominates institutions that shape the day-to-day relations of our very existences. Therefore, as part of decolonialization, our liberation becomes inextricably tied to resistance and the confrontation of remnants of colonial violence. As articulated by Smith’s (1999) seminal work on decolonizing methodologies, To resist is to retrench in the margins, retrieve what we were and remake ourselves (p. 4). In this regard, decolonizing framework call for envisioning other ways of being, which entails a recalling of those people who have been marginalized, their erased traditions as a way of delinking ourselves from coloniality every day.

Arguing from a positionality of decoloniality, this project is an attempt to deconstruct, reconstruct, and articulate Ubuntu from the sensed experiences of those who have experienced oppressions; in this regard, the project may not speak to those who have enjoyed the privileges of the prevailing societal order. Recognizing, as Maldonado-Torres (2007) noted, that the history of occupation not only meant a plunder of material resources but also a continued assault on being, one realizes this ongoing assault provides the historical and moral energy for some to use concepts like Ubuntu for the maintenance and re-articulation of coloniality.

In light of these understandings, the present discussion of Ubuntu occurs within the context of contradictions presented by a racialized capitalist system that raises profound questions about the compatibility of this system with human well-being, environmental sustainability, and the collective future of the planet (see Beeson 2015). Given the exigencies of the coloniality of power, this project constitutes an attempt to shift the geopolitical implications of critical knowledge regarding Ubuntu by engaging the concept from a position of decoloniality, a process that entails recovering and reconstructing Ubuntu to heal and—borrowing from the Native American scholar G. Vizenor (2008)—for survivance. Vizenor defines survivance as the heritable right of succession or reversion of an estate and, in the course of international declarations of human rights, as a narrative estate of native [indigenous] survivance (p. 1); (bracketed text my addition). Vizenor (1999) further defines survivance as an active sense of presence, the continuance of native [indigenous] stories, not a mere reaction, or a survivable name (p. vii); bracketed text my addition). Survivance is more than mere survival: it is a way of life that nourishes indigenous ways of knowing and doing. The practice of survivance has everything to do with my interest in and efforts to engage with Ubuntu. I ask the reader to look at the dialogues regarding Ubuntu in this book—drawn from varied contexts, experiences, and vantage points—and to examine and re-examine these positionalities as part of the decolonializing project.

As a concept that originated from within, and functions as part of, indigenous discourse, Ubuntu must be explored through the lens of relational ethics in order to situate and center alternative modes of thinking about how we can live well together and address social issues. To decolonize ourselves, we must be and remain attentive to ideas that get down to the root causes so that we may confront systems and processes that are incompatible with humanity at the personal, interpersonal, institutional, and cultural levels. The uptake of Ubuntu around the world has a potential to support decolonization, however because Ubuntu is evocated within the context of coloniality of power, accordingly the agentive nature of Ubuntu may involve or is tantamount to performing Africanity. As such the effort of this book is to explore these performances and assess whether they are part of decolonialization.

Viewed through another lens, this book is about my own awakening to the forces that mitigate, obstruct, and minimize or dismiss the production of knowledge within the African continent, where manifestations of the coloniality of power continue to exist even in conversation with ostensibly indigenous ideas like Ubuntu. Examining Ubuntu through a lens of power requires a willingness to understand oppression and, in turn, an effort to center resistance. In this vein, this book constitutes an attempt to engage critical theory from Other places, particularly from those places and people who have been historically denied the category of ‘thinkers’—that is, of indigenous and racialized Blacks—including the knowledge produced collectively in the context and struggles of social movements (Walsh 2007, p. 225). Working from a position of decoloniality requires a practice of using analytical approaches that not only decenter the pillars of, White supremacist capitalist patriarchy, which bell hooks (1997) so helpfully describes as—the interlocking systems of domination that define our reality—but also work to sever the tentacles of patriarchy and neoliberal capitalism in order to, through this resistance, create in which to deconstruct, reconstruct, and create other possibilities. To engage Ubuntu in this way is to engage in a dialogue about what it means to live well together and have a good life.

Writing as a social worker, I recognize the diversity in accumulated knowledge regarding well-being and the history of unethical colonial conquest of the indigenous peoples… their subjugation, oppression, and economic exploitation including attempted epistemicide (Ramose 1999, p. 393). Writing as one who has lived at the tail end of explicit colonization, and one who straddles everyday experiences of coloniality, I see this project as part of unmasking the workings and processes of coloniality that continue to operate in the various spheres of our lives, including in our knowledge systems, political economies, psyches, and spiritual beings, sometimes in the name of Ubuntu. If we are to understand Ubuntu as encouraging alternative ways of living and being deriving from indigeneity and living well together, we need to understand how Ubuntu has come to be presented, defined, and shared within the prevailing contours of geopolitics and knowledge production. According to Fanon (1968) quoted by Ashcroft et al. (1995), Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverse logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts it, disfigures and destroys it (p. 120). This book will ask the reader to interrogate the ways in which Ubuntu has accommodated colonial efforts to produce the distortion, disfiguration, and destruction Frantz Fanon alluded to in our contemporary world.

Further, this book was written to reflect the varied contradictions in our lived attempts to decolonize; some of these contradictions naturally arose in framing and conducting the research for the project itself. For example, in conducting interviews in Eastern Cape, South Africa, a young man who questioned my writing about Ubuntu in English. He asked: Does uQamatha speak English? You exploring Ubuntu in English is like ‘us’ being taught English in Xhosa! (Sifiso iXhosa LakwaZulu, personal communication). The young man not only interrogated my use of English but raised deeper questions about coloniality of power reflected in the hierarchies in languages used in the economy which tend to mirror the geopolitical power. Further, Sifiso was raising questions about identity and cultural being resulting from engaging with an indigenous concept in a borrowed language. He presumed that writing in English was already affirming a different cultural bearing away from the Nguni languages from which Ubuntu is derived. I heard the young man’s call. In Chapter 3, I give voice to a discussion of language, identity, and Ubuntu. To me writing in whatever language is part of that struggle of survivance, to find and insert a voice that has been ignored and forgotten. I am engaging a dialogue about Ubuntu with an upfront recognition and understanding of the fact that Ubuntu is situated within the changing contexts of a political economy of racialization; Ubuntu is being defined, utilized, and understood within gendered, ethnicized, regionalized, religious, and hierarchized systems of human value. The attempt here is to investigate the spaces and contexts in which Ubuntu is evoked in order to make explicit the content, implication, and intentions—both perceived and unperceived—of such evocations.

Overall, this book is marked by a hermeneutical approach, using the interpretation of human experience in memory and written, verbal, and nonverbal communication; this approach was chosen specifically to heed the African wisdom of the late H. O. Oruka, who suggested that the study of any topic within Africa needs to be approached from various philosophical vantage points (see Presbey 1999; Gichure 2015). Accordingly, throughout this book, I borrow from both the humanities and the social sciences. In engaging the concept of voice, for example, the whole project uses Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis’s (1997) qualitative inquiry into portraiture, as well as collaborative ethnography. As highlighted above, portraiture is a form of qualitative inquiry offering emancipatory possibilities for those engaged by utilizing the interpretation of critical dialogues to portray a social construct like Ubuntu. I use some of the principles of portraiture as they seem compatible with indigenous research; for example, one principle of portraiture, building relationships requires accountability to the people who are researched, beyond confidentiality, anonymity, etc. In the context of indigenous research, accountability means acknowledging the historical as an aspect of my individual positionality. In that relationship cultivation, I rely on autobiography to provide context, situate my own positions and opinions, so that these can also be interrogated.

Starting Where One Is

I write as an African woman. I grew up in rural areas surrounding Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. My experience of Ubuntu is enmeshed in the historical experience of Whiteness and the definitional power it held over every aspect of my life. I was a youth in the days of Zimbabwe’s struggle for political independence. As a child, I remember vividly being routinely referred to as Black, Bantu, African, and even, in some situations, the severely dehumanizing Arabic derived Kaffir. These words—Black, African, and Bantu—were words used by White-defined systems of dominance in all areas of my existence during the heyday of colonialism and apartheid. These systems justified exclusionary policies and dehumanizing practices whereby African people—Abantu—were seen as disposable beings, not even honored for the labor that built the wealth enjoyed by White colonizers. For me, Whiteness and Westernity are comingled as symbolic threats to Africans and those racialized as Black, particularly those who are interested in defining the cultural frames by which they and others may understand their Blackness and personhood.

I also come from the historical experience of post-independence, though that independence was built to include a backdoor for coloniality in the form of home grown economic structural adjustments. In the name of the politics necessary to cement their own positions and preserve their own interests, big men and women used the rhetoric of liberating the land from the abahuquluzi bomnotho (grabbers of public wealth). By using the same lopsided colonial institutions, however, these powerful figures often became the new abahuquluzi bomnotho.

I come from a historical experience wherein my existence—and the existence of those who look like me—has always been viewed as a challenge to whiteness; I have long experienced a global system of racialization in which those who are racialized as White have been entitled to claims of ownership regarding property and, more generally, to an unquestioned right of belonging on this planet and in all public spaces. Having been viewed as an existential threat to those unquestioned rights, I have known and experienced being viewed as representing a problematic element within Africa, in the Americas, in fortress Europe, and in related areas of financial capital concentration: my very existence as an African—my existential woundedness, the African women perceived as the beast of burden (see Kinsman 1983)—has been and continues to be construed as a threat to modernity and civilization. These experiences speak not only of racialized subjugation under patriarchy and subordination within the exigencies of the nexus of the nation-state, but of the erasure of that subjugation: that is, today, Whiteness, religion, and capital—even and perhaps especially in our embrace of Ubuntu—require that this woundedness is acknowledged and unlearnt in everyday practices.

Under these circumstances, I struggled with my role as a researcher for many years, particularly when exploring Ubuntu, a concept that is naturally perceived to emanate from indigeneity but is often presented by those with little or no claim to indigeneity. This concern necessitates that I share my own positionality through autobiography. Autobiography facilitates the reflexive examination of one’s relationship with one’s social environment and, in turn, its connection to the efficacy and function of words like Ubuntu. If we consider that identity is inextricably linked to the experiences of oppression and/or privilege, it is important to note that I write as someone who has experienced oppression. I was preoccupied, to use one of Lawrence—Lightfoot’s (1997 tenets of voice in portraiture; my preoccupation has primarily focused the historic tendency for White people to separate and distinguish their White selves from Abantu—the people—thus removing themselves from Uluntu—humanity—and thus severing White experience from any sense of that shared humanity.

By clearly distancing White people and power from Abantu, White domination did existential damage to any truly universal notion of Ubuntu by asserting, in theory and in practice, that human beings with rights to existence are and must be marked by Whiteness, relegating a non-White person to the status of non-human, marked as a thing, i-nto in my mother language, isiNdebele. In the logic of modernity, dichotomies thrive by restructuring the way we understand and name all aspects of life, through categorizations, borders, and hierarchical dichotomies. Lugones (2010) provides an excellent explanation of the power and specific features of such dichotomies in organizing the world:

Reality is organized in terms of dichotomous categories in relations of opposition: mind/body, public/private, reason/emotions, men/women, white/black. Each term on any oppositional dichotomy states an evaluative relation to the other one is superior to the other, more important, and less valuable makes the existence of the more valuable possible. The oppositional dichotomizing hides the violence of oppression as it hides the intersection of categories through rendering the social world into impermeable, homogenous, complete categories of people in relation and as it hides the power that needs to be deployed to maintain the oppositional dichotomizing. As people are conceived, classified, and treated in terms of homogenous categories, each group is rendered from inside. Those who are categorically not homogenous, are disappeared. (pp. 1–2)

Coloniality of power has worked through the hierarchical dichotomies marking the humans and non-humans. As an African, I have been disappeared. In my lived experience as Ndebele, Kalanga, the particularities of my identity were subsumed, both by being identified as African—meaning Black—and then again by being identified as Bantu, a word specifically denoting Black people under state-sanctioned racial oppression. The use of such language situates the erasure of differentiation regarding identity as an inherently African way of life (Gade 2012). Importantly, the inherently oppressed connotation of Bantu illustrates the universalized and naturalized dominance of Whiteness through which our subjectivities and differences as Africans became hidden away and obscured by the very language through which we, as Bantu, were identified; as Africans identified by language changed by colonialism, we are encouraged to understand specific differences between us as pertaining to problematic African tribes. The linguistic sublimation of individualized identities is part and parcel of a particular colonial history wherein colonized people relate to each other through matrices of colonial power (Fanon 1963).

As a child, I understood that the word Bantu referred only to us Africans. Whites spoke of themselves mostly as Europeans, essentially separating themselves from the notion of Ubuntu and distancing themselves from a shared humanity—uluntu. Those who had set themselves apart, as Whites, universalized and naturalized White domination and, in turn, advanced, maintained, and championed their sense of humanity as distinct from Abantu. The word humanity, by implication and in practice, often refers exclusively to the shared humanity experienced by White people, including instances where specific efforts are made to erase the experiences of Africans from the picturesque colonial lifestyle (Fox 2012). Perceived as non-human, the African is subjected to civilizing missions.

In this context, I became preoccupied with how those who are White and had separated themselves from Abantu—from the people and from any sense of their humanity—are currently attempting to reinsert themselves into a truly expansive and inclusive understanding of a shared humanity by using Ubuntu. Having understood Whiteness and Westernity as constructions designed specifically to perpetuate an exclusively White rights to the pursuit of happiness, one built on the premise that certain people were things and that nothing was as sacrosanct as property rights won during colonization, it shocked me to see many who enjoy such privilege today using Ubuntu to include those of us on the margins. Ubuntu: brought to Africans by Whiteness!

Again, as the ones whose lives have been disappeared and made invisible, our intersectionalities mark our erasure from the presumed universal. As such, African and Ubuntu function as coalitional terms meant for those of us who share the experience of oppression to claim our humanity without relinquishing our oppression—a function that runs contrary to the notion of sharing Ubuntu as a universal responsibility and humanity. My Africanity interlocks with other categorizations, including ethnicity, class, religion, gender, sexuality, ability, language, and immigration status, to create oppositional lived experiences, affirming Ubuntu as deriving from umntu a person—their individuality emanating from the community of people—abantu, practicing isintu, within a shared humanity—uluntu.

Living a life sculpted by White domination as an African, as Umntu, as a person—like many others before me, means that I also grew up with counter-discourses necessary to define and maintain my sense of shared humanity, primarily through Ubuntu. In that counter-narrative, all people, as human beings, are a-bantu: people are human. However, those who maintain Whiteness and/or have separated themselves from a shared humanity have rendered themselves into izinto: things. The world of things maintains relationships through other things: property, people as property, contracts to maintain property, and so on. Thus, beginning where I am, the pressing ethical issue regarding Ubuntu has been how to embrace those who have separated themselves from humanity by attempting to, historically and now, sever others from their own humanity. Similarly, is it possible for them to begin to bring themselves back to humanity—Uluntu—through the use of Ubuntu? Finally, how do I unlearn the psychology and political economy of colonialism and coloniality while referring to an Ubuntu inflected by both?

As a student of society, this project has also required an engagement with ethics, not only in scholarship but also in my relations with the people that I am writing with as our knowledge projects move beyond the individual nation-state to consider global justice. This means engaging with scholarship that is unmasking the dominance of Whiteness, Westernity, and even postcoloniality while reaffirming indigeneity as a site of uncertainty, but also a practice of living differently.

Writing from the margins, I have been troubled by how often information about the researcher’s own positionality and their relationship to cultural frames is missing from conversations about Ubuntu. If the reader were to pick a contemporary article on Ubuntu, they would rarely find scholars, particularly those writing from cultures of Whiteness, who disclose where they are coming from as they engage with and use an indigenous cultural concept like Ubuntu. Within positivist research and within the cultures of Whiteness, a presumption is often made of the necessity of distancing oneself from the research and from one’s subject. My approach to research, by contrast, is to challenge the claims of the researcher regarding their approach to the presumed subject because, often, the subject’s knowledge system is expropriated as property of the researcher. This is frequently the case with research and theoretical work regarding Ubuntu. Often, those of us writing from a position within cultures of Whiteness claim rights to investigate those who have been historically Othered. Because of disciplinary habits shaped by colonialism, we treat historically Othered people as the subjects of our research. Our claims are presumed as truth. Here I