Under a 1986 newsletter headline, “Ubuntu, Abantu, Abelungu”, Black Sash, the anti-apartheid organisation founded as the vanguard of white liberal women’s opposition in SA, reported surprising findings from a white fieldworker in its programme against forced land removals — black people of the land do not consider white people to be people. That is, we do not consider them to be abantu. Instead, they are abelungu.
“Ubuntu, Abantu, Abelungu” appeared a few years before the late archbishop Mpilo Desmond Tutu thrust ubuntu — the African philosophy best understood through the proverb found in Bantu languages across the continent, “umuntu ngumuntu ngabanye bantu” (a person is a person through other people) — into the global imagination as he presided over the postapartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).
“Ubuntu is very difficult to render into a Western language,” Tutu acknowledged in his 1999 book No Future Without Forgiveness.
In his earlier classic, African Religions and Philosophy (1969), the revered Kenyan Christian theologian John Mbiti famously rendered ubuntu’s philosophy of mutual personhood as an African humanist analogue to Enlightenment humanism’s “I think, therefore I am” by translating “umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu” as “I am because we are”.
Mbiti’s classic humanist translation of ubuntu obscures the fact that, in contrast to the Western conception of the human, the African conception of the person is of a social being who is always becoming.
Personhood is never taken for granted, thus ubuntu holds that to be a person, umuntu, among people, abantu, one must continually uphold the personhood of others.
It is for this reason that when I misbehaved, especially to the injury of others, my mother, like many other elders, reprimanded me in our mother tongue, Shona: “Ita munhu!” (Be a person.)
The African conception of the person is of a social being who is always becoming
“The white man has become umlungu because of us,” dispossessed farmworker Aron Mlangeni stated in “Ubuntu, Abantu, Abelungu”. Mlangeni articulated what philosopher Ndumiso Dladla describes as “Ubuntu as an African critical philosophy of race” rooted not in biology, but in ethical historical and social relations.
After centuries of conquest, the settler state formalised land dispossession through the devastating 1913 Native Land Act, which seized 87% of land for the white minority, leaving 13% to the black majority, who were press-ganged into cheap mining and farming labour.
Given white SA’s unjust historic land conquest and continuing relations of dispossession, it is unsurprising that black people of the land, that is, we, do not consider white people to be abantu. Instead, they are abelungu.
On the eve of black majority rule, global whiteness held its breath in anticipation of a night of long knives for white SA. Instead, SA gave a world at the end of history a “miracle” — colourful teleological release, a moral arc, a rainbow, bending towards justice.
After the negotiated settlement secured black political rights with the protection of white property rights, the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act of 1995 mandated the creation of the TRC.
Dutch conquest of the Cape in 1652 is the genesis of genocide, slavery, indenture and land dispossession, yet the TRC had the limited mandate to hear allegations of human rights abuses between March 1 1960, the month of the Sharpeville massacre, and May 10 1994, the date of Nelson Mandela’s inauguration.
Without the mandate to right the historic conquest of land and people, Tutu’s impossible task was to wield ubuntu to reconcile the conflicting worlds of abantu and abelungu into a nation of what he called the “rainbow people of God”.
As Allan Boesak, the anti-apartheid leader and Black Dutch Reformed Church minister who, alongside Tutu, helped cement black liberation theology’s centrality to the Black Consciousness Movement, has shown, Tutu’s theology of grace and forgiveness was grounded in a Christianised ubuntu.
“African jurisprudence is restorative rather than retributive,” Tutu said, describing the rationale for amnesty at the TRC.
In some incredible way God has sown the seeds of a gracious attitude, of the spirit of ubuntu, in the hearts and minds of the whole African community
— Beyers Naudé
If white SA did not repent (apartheid president PW Botha declared “I only apologise for my sins before God”) or make itself humble (white radio listeners’ objection to TRC stories caused a broadcast rescheduling to hours “when most of the farmers are no longer listening”), it was surprised by and grateful for black SA’s lack of “bitterness” and “vengeance”.
“In some incredible way God has sown the seeds of a gracious attitude, of the spirit of ubuntu, in the hearts and minds of the whole African community,” proclaimed Beyers Naudé, the former Dutch Reformed Church minister who was one of the few Afrikaner leaders to publicly oppose apartheid.
Naudé’s awe at the seeming miraculousness of the transition revealed some of the ways in which even the more sincere, committed part of white SA had failed to truly reckon with what the ethical demands of ubuntu requires of them to have meaningful reconciliation with black people and become abantu.
Ngesintu, according to the culture of abantu, we black people ask “Uxolisa ngani?” (What are you atoning with?), because ubuntu demands that ukuhlawula — paying reparations for injuries caused to others — is indivisible from ukubuyisa, the restoration of injured relations.
Far from cheap forgiveness, ubuntu demands costly forgiveness — you cannot receive forgiveness without giving something up as an act of your contrition. To be sure, Tutu’s TRC recommended reparations to victims and families who testified. Later, Tutu called for a wealth tax on all white South Africans.
The government ignored both recommendations. Too often, calls for national reparation and restoration are conflated with retribution, but ubuntu among abantu requires the righting of relations through inhlawulo yokubuyisa, reparations for restoration.
Today, we black people, 79% of SA’s population, own 4% of agricultural land, while white South Africans, 9% of the population, own 72% of agricultural land. In 2014, Oxfam reported, two white men — Johann Rupert and Nicky Oppenheimer — owned as much wealth as the bottom half of the population.
Our 74% youth unemployment rate — concentrated among black “born frees” — is the world’s highest. It is unsurprising then, that in their statement to the South African Human Rights Commission’s 2015 hearings, Abahlali baseMjondolo, the Durban shack dwellers’ movement whose members have faced arrest, assault and assassination in their struggle for postapartheid liberation, cried out that poor black people “are not counted as human beings”.
In other words, despite ubuntu proliferating in postapartheid discourse, lending its name to software, businesses, books and philanthropic organisations, SA is a country in which we have, as Dladla argues, ubuntu without abantu.
Just as black people have been dispossessed of their land, ubuntu has been dispossessed of its deeply radical demands for ethical historical and social relations among people.
In a land left bereft by the loss of Tutu, it’s still common to hear black people answer the question “Ngumuntu na?” (Are they a person?) with the reply “Cha, ngumlungu.” (No, they are white.)
For white South Africans to no longer be abelungu, settlers in Africa, and to become abantu, people of Africa, they would have to restore that which made them settlers in the first place — the land.
Restoration of the land would begin the national process of ukubuyisa ngokuhlawula, restoring relations through reparations, among abantu and abelungu into a common world of people bound by ubuntu.
Until there is a true reckoning with the reparations that ubuntu demands, black and white SA will continue to live worlds apart as abantu and abelungu.
White SA, nixolisa ngani?
• Chigumadzi is the author of ‘These Bones Will Rise Again’ (2018) and a doctoral candidate at Harvard University’s department of African and African-American studies. This is an extended version of an article originally published by The Guardian.
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