Ubuntu: Personhood, Community, and "I Am Because We Are"

Ubuntu is a concept drawn from the Nguni Bantu languages of southern Africa (isiZulu and isiXhosa umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, "a person is a person through other persons"; the cognate concept in Sesotho/Setswana is botho), and it names both a general ethical outlook and a specific philosophical thesis about the nature of personhood. Its most influential summary formulation in English, "I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am," was popularized by the Kenyan theologian and philosopher John Mbiti in African Religions and Philosophy (1969), where Mbiti presented it as a corrective to the individualist Cartesian cogito, ergo sum, arguing that in traditional African thought the individual does not exist as an isolated metaphysical unit prior to community but only comes into being, and into full personhood, through relationships of kinship, obligation, and mutual recognition within a community. The concept became internationally prominent through its explicit invocation by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who served as chair of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1996–1998) and drew on Ubuntu in his book No Future Without Forgiveness (1999) to frame restorative, rather than purely retributive, justice as the appropriate response to the crimes of apartheid, and by Nelson Mandela, who repeatedly invoked Ubuntu in public reflections on reconciliation after his release from twenty-seven years of imprisonment in 1990.