What it is
Ubuntu is a word from the Nguni languages of Southern Africa, with related terms such as botho in Sotho-Tswana and hunhu in Shona. It literally means humanness. It is often summed up in the saying umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, “a person is a person through other persons.”
In a 1995 judgment, Justice Yvonne Mokgoro of South Africa’s Constitutional Court wrote that ubuntu generally translates as humaneness and, most fundamentally, as personhood and morality, taking in group solidarity, compassion, respect and human dignity. The philosopher Thaddeus Metz argues that the saying is not just an observation that people depend on each other. It is a call to become more fully human through relationships with others, by identifying with them and by acting in solidarity with them, which includes helping one another.
In public life
South Africa made ubuntu part of its transition to democracy. The 1993 interim constitution closed with a section on national unity and reconciliation, which spoke of “a need for ubuntu but not for victimisation.” In 1995, when the Constitutional Court struck down the death penalty in S v Makwanyane, several judges drew on ubuntu. Justice Langa wrote that its dominant theme is that the life of another person is at least as valuable as one’s own. Metz notes that the word itself does not appear in the final constitution adopted in 1996, though the court later called ubuntu the underlying motif of the Bill of Rights.
A live debate
Ubuntu’s place in public life is contested. Metz describes three common objections: that it is too vague to guide decisions, that it puts the group above individual freedom, and that ideas formed in small, pre-colonial communities don’t fit a large modern society. He also notes that there was never one single understanding of ubuntu across the region’s many peoples. Metz argues that a careful interpretation answers these objections. Whether it does is itself part of the debate.
Through the source lens
It would overclaim to call ubuntu a doctrine of giving, and Charitology does not treat it as one. Its contribution is a different starting point. Help is not a transfer from a giver to a receiver but part of what it means to live in community, and the measure is whether people’s dignity and their ties to one another are restored and sustained.