32 - Dignity in the ubuntu tradition

Summary

What the ‘ubuntu tradition’ in the title of this chapter refers to is the conception of how one ought to live that was prominent among pre-colonial societies below the Sahara desert and that continues to inform much moral reflection among black Africans in the region. ‘Ubuntu’ literally means humanness or personhood among speakers of Zulu, Xhosa and Ndebele in southern Africa, and it has cognates in many other African languages, for example ‘botho’ in Sotho-Tswana, ‘hunhu’ in Shona and ‘utu’ in Swahili (Broodryk 2002: 14, 31). The term ‘ubuntu’ is often used to concisely sum up a particular view of what is morally fundamental, roughly, to live a genuinely human way of life or to become a real person.

As one would expect of a large and diverse region such as sub-Saharan Africa, conceptions of what (genuine) humanness or (real) personhood consists of are far from uniform. Nonetheless, there are certain ideas associated with talk of ‘ubuntu’ and related terms that one encounters recurrently, and they are what I focus on here, particularly insofar as they bear on the value of dignity as the ground of human rights articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.