Ubuntu and Decolonial Ethics in Dialogue

Ubuntu is a concept rooted in the Nguni family of Bantu languages of southern Africa, most often summarized in the proverb "umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu," commonly translated as "a person is a person through other persons." As a communitarian ethical framework, Ubuntu holds that individual identity, moral standing, and even rationality are not self-standing properties of an isolated individual but are constituted relationally, through one's bonds of mutual recognition and obligation with a wider community — a starkly different starting point from the atomistic, rights-bearing individual presupposed by much modern Western liberal political and moral theory.