Embracing the Sprit of Ubuntu: The Essence of Our Humanity

Africa, the birth­place of the first human, may just hold the key to the sur­vival of human­ity. How fit­ting and appro­pri­ate that the coun­try where homo erec­tus was first iden­ti­fied is also the birth­place of the phi­los­o­phy that points the way toward a sus­tain­able future for us, its offspring.

No, I’m not talk­ing about a new tech­nol­ogy that will solve our depen­dence on non-renewable energy resources or that will stop cli­mate change. Not directly at least. But I am talk­ing about a way of see­ing the world and all its inhab­i­tants that, if adopted by a crit­i­cal mass of human beings, would have a major impact in our abil­ity to work together and ulti­mately shift the con­text of what it means to be a human being liv­ing on Planet Earth in the 21st century.

The phi­los­o­phy is sim­ple enough. It doesn’t cost any­one a sin­gle dime. But it does require a mas­sive shift in how we think about our­selves, how we see each other, and how we view every other liv­ing thing on the planet.

I’m talk­ing about the phi­los­o­phy called “Ubuntu,” which trans­lated means “I am what I am, because of who we all are.” The word “ubuntu” has its ori­gins in the Bantu lan­guages of south­ern Africa.

Arch­bishop Desmond Tutu defines it this way:

“One of the say­ings in our coun­try is Ubuntu — the essence of being human. Ubuntu speaks par­tic­u­larly about the fact that you can’t exist as a human being in iso­la­tion. It speaks about our inter­con­nect­ed­ness. You can’t be human all by your­self, and when you have this qual­ity — Ubuntu — you are known for your gen­eros­ity. We think of our­selves far too fre­quently as just indi­vid­u­als, sep­a­rated from one another, whereas you are con­nected and what you do affects the whole World. When you do well, it spreads out; it is for the whole of human­ity.“
“A per­son with Ubuntu is open and avail­able to oth­ers, affirm­ing of oth­ers, does not feel threat­ened that oth­ers are able and good, based from 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.”

Nel­son Man­dela describes it thus:

“A trav­eler through a coun­try would stop at a vil­lage and he didn’t have to ask for food or for water. Once he stops, the peo­ple give him food, enter­tain him. That is one aspect of Ubuntu, but it will have var­i­ous aspects. Ubuntu does not mean that peo­ple should not enrich them­selves. The ques­tion there­fore is: Are you going to do so in order to enable the com­mu­nity around you to be able to improve?”

Some­times the hard­est thing in the world to do is to change is one’s mind. And yet, a mas­sive chang­ing of minds is what will be required if human­ity is to weather the chal­lenges we now face.

There are those who believe, and I would be among them, that every­thing begins with con­scious­ness. Your state of con­scious­ness deter­mines your expe­ri­ence. Period. End of story. Two peo­ple can expe­ri­ence the same event, and depend­ing upon their state of con­scious­ness, can have entirely dif­fer­ent accounts of what hap­pened, what they felt, what they saw, etc.

Imag­ine that you and I are stand­ing in line at Dis­ney­land wait­ing to ride on the roller­coaster. Nei­ther of us has ever rid­den it before. Both of us feel a height­ened sense of energy in our bod­ies, antic­i­pat­ing the expe­ri­ence ahead. Our hearts are beat­ing fast, our palms are sweat­ing, our throats are feel­ing dry and tight.

So far, we’re hav­ing the exact same expe­ri­ence at the phys­i­cal level. But one of us is hav­ing an inter­nal dia­logue that says, “I’m really scared, I don’t know if I trust this. What if I fall out of the car? What if the ride is mechan­i­cally faulty? This is very scary!” And the other one of us is think­ing, “I can’t wait! How excit­ing is this? I’ve always wanted to ride on a roller­coaster! I’m going to throw up my arms and shout ‘Woohoo!’”

Dif­fer­ent states of con­scious­ness pro­duce entirely dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ences of the same event. And so it is that the pre­dom­i­nant state of con­scious­ness in the world today, that we are sep­a­rate from one another, pro­duces the expe­ri­ence of sep­a­ra­tion, which pro­duces what we have on the planet: war, poverty, hunger, dis­ease, home­less­ness, injus­tice, greed, etc.

It does not take a rocket sci­en­tist to see that this story is not headed toward a happy end­ing. We all have dif­fer­ent ideas of how to solve the prob­lem if we even con­cern our­selves with the prob­lem at all. Mostly we deny there is a prob­lem or ignore it or think it’s some­one else’s prob­lem to solve. Or a small group of those who wield the most power among us want to solve it in a way that ben­e­fits their inter­ests alone and neglects the inter­ests of the vast majority.

In the main, we do not see our­selves as con­nected to each other. We see that there’s “me” and there’s “you.” “You’re” dif­fer­ent (and sep­a­rate) from “me.” You’re in that body over there, which is very dif­fer­ent from mine. You live in a coun­try far away from mine. You speak a dif­fer­ent lan­guage, have an entirely dif­fer­ent cul­ture, dif­fer­ent beliefs, make dif­fer­ent kinds of choices about how you want to live from the choices I make, etc. From a con­scious­ness of sep­a­ra­tion the par­a­digm is “You’re on your own.” “I’ve got mine. Get your own.”

We see this con­scious­ness demon­strated in our pol­i­tics, but it’s not lim­ited to such. A belief in sep­a­ra­tion is woven into most of the world’s reli­gions as well, which teach there is only one way to sal­va­tion and that’s the way of (name of reli­gion here). The world is divided into good and evil, those who believe accord­ing to the teach­ings and those who do not. Unbuntu tran­scends all this.

Ubuntu is not a reli­gious phi­los­o­phy. Nei­ther is it polit­i­cal. But it chal­lenges every belief of most reli­gions and polit­i­cal ide­olo­gies. It sim­ply states, “I am what I am because of who we all are.” It requires a state of con­scious­ness that under­stands and accepts the fact that at the quan­tum level, we are all made of the same star stuff. We all come from the same ori­gins. Beyond the appear­ance of sep­a­ra­tion, lies a greater truth. We are all connected.

Ubuntu is about hav­ing an impact on each other in ways that expands and deep­ens our under­stand­ing of why we’re all here on the planet and our respon­si­bil­ity to one another. Even though one would be hard pressed to find evi­dence in our cur­rent cul­tural ide­olo­gies, the truth is, none of us wins unless all of us win. Col­lab­o­ra­tion is the ulti­mate win­ning strategy.

Imag­ine that you could view Earth from outer space. Imag­ine you could wit­ness, at the same time, all of the ways in which human­ity does harm to itself. Imag­ine you could view all the rapes, mur­ders, abuse, star­va­tion, and greed that we per­pe­trate upon each other and the planet. Imag­ine that you could expe­ri­ence all the hurt and anger in our col­lec­tive hearts because of what we do to one another.

Now imag­ine that all human beings were sud­denly able to see with clar­ity their con­nec­tiv­ity. Imag­ine that instead of hat­ing or judg­ing, we opened to com­pas­sion instead. Then, imag­ine that we could all hear a lit­tle voice in our heads ask­ing “What can you do to make a dif­fer­ence?” What would you say to your­self? What would you do? What could you do?

Now think about Ubuntu: “I am what I am because of who we all are.” What if what you want to be will only come about when you ensure that oth­ers get to be that as well? And what if all of human­ity was on your team, work­ing toward your good?

What if you were to make it your mis­sion to express Unbuntu in your daily life? Do you think you’d see oth­ers dif­fer­ently? And if you did, what would be the impact in their lives? And what about your own?

Imag­ine the kind of world we’d have if the spirit of Unbuntu was the dom­i­nant par­a­digm. It can hap­pen, but only if enough peo­ple see it and claim it as their per­sonal respon­si­bil­ity. The choice is ours. The time is now.