Ubuntu

I watched "In My Country" last night with Samul L. Jackson & Juliet Binoche about the end of apartheid & how that society dealt with it. The movie is good, it even inspired this entry.

The essential philosophy that was used to start healing in South Africa is ubuntu. A So. African jazz website describes it as:

A Zulu word, literally meaning “humanness.” Ubuntu is a social and spiritual philosophy serving as a framework for African society. Its essential meaning can be conveyed using the Zulu maxim “umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu”—meaning, in essence, “a person is a person through other persons.” The practice of ubuntu is fundamentally inclusive, involving respect and concern for one's family and one's neighbors. It also implies respect for one's ancestors, in a deeper spiritual sense. Ubuntu defines the individual as a component of a greater (inclusive) collective whole, and it stresses social consciousness and unity. (Most dramatically, ubuntu stands diametrically opposite to the concept of apartheid.)

In my most recent visceral forays, I 've just been feeling this Earth of ours, it's land masses & bodies of water. I think it's great that there's so much focus on Africa, the ignored continent with it's poverty, AIDS, malaria, genocides, and yet a huge and resilient heritage of wisdom & living arts.

Which society, governmental body, corporation, social organization, relationship or family couldn't use ubuntu?!

Desmond Tutu elaborates:

A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.

In Zimbabwe ubuntu is unhu. Stanlake J. W. T. Samkange puts it into 3 maxims:

1) To be human is to affirm one’s humanity by recognizing the humanity of others and, on that basis, establish respectful human relations with them.
2) If and when one is faced with a decisive choice between wealth and the preservation of the life of another human being, then one should opt for the preservation of life.
3) The king owed his status, including all the powers associated with it, to the will of the people under him.

Our leaders, are you listening?