Ubuntu Strategies

Constructing Spaces of Belonging in Contemporary South African Culture

Hanneke Stuit

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137580092
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Hanneke Stuit delves into Ubuntu's relevance both in South Africa and in Western contexts, analyzing the political and ethical ramifications of the term's uses in different media including literature, cartoons, journalistic fiction, commercials, commodities, photography, and political manifestos in contemporary South African culture.

© The Author(s) 2016

Hanneke StuitUbuntu Strategies10.1057/978-1-137-58009-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Ubuntu¹ Unchained—A Travelling Concept

Hanneke Stuit¹

(1)

University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

End Abstract

This cartoon by Zapiro (pseudonym of Jonathan Shapiro) was first published on the 25th of May 2008, in the South African newspaper The Sunday Times in response to the eruption of xenophobia-inspired violence that swept through South African townships that year. According to the media, the violence was directed at immigrants from other African countries (particularly Somali refugees), because these foreigners were perceived to be moving in on resources and job opportunities supposedly designated for “real” South Africans (Gumede). Although xenophobia aimed at people from other African countries has been a distinct problem in South African society since at least 1998 (Neocosmos 588), and violent attacks resurfaced in January and April 2015, the course of events in May 2008 was particularly violent. ² “Foreign” property was destroyed and burned, hundreds of people were attacked, more than 60 people died, and thousands were dislocated (Fig. 1.1). ³

Fig. 1.1

Xenophobia and the Meaning of Ubuntu. Cartoon by Zapiro

The relevance of Zapiro’s cartoon resides in its double critique of the disconcerting surfacing of xenophobia and the historical–moral circumstances under which it erupted. The cartoon condemns the pogroms by criticise what Michael Neocosmos has called the “discourse of exceptionalism,” which is based on the idea that South Africa is more industrialised and democratic than other countries in Africa. According to this logic, South Africa should be celebrated as “the world’s envy” because of its relatively peaceful transition from apartheid to democracy (590). Over the past few years, it has become increasingly clear that the ill will borne towards foreign nationals has a lot to do with a sense of entitlement amongst disenfranchised citizens, a feeling forged in the dire conditions of squatter camps, where people fruitlessly await government services like housing for years on end. ⁴ Under these circumstances, the reconciliatory and inclusive discourse initiated after the end of apartheid—a discourse commonly associated with the increasingly popular term “ubuntu”—seems long forgotten.

On the one hand, the cartoon indeed suggests that this discourse is past its prime. After all, people who have experienced both division and reconciliation relatively recently (i.e. during apartheid, at its end and in the campaign for reconciliation that followed in its wake) would surely not allow the ostracising of one group by another? On the other hand, one could say that an ubuntu-inspired discourse is alive and well, but is represented as having transformed over the course of time. In general, ubuntu is an interpersonal dynamic often described by the proverb “a person is a person through other people” that emphasises qualities like generosity, hospitality, friendliness, compassion, a willingness to share, and an interest in the common good. In this cartoon, however, ubuntu’s reconciliatory and peaceful tone, as well as its association with a common humanity, is turned into a tool for exclusion that can be used to determine who belongs to the “new South Africa” and who does not. Here, ubuntu is ironically represented as a strategy for those who claim to understand its repercussions to condemn, violate, and exclude people who supposedly do not.

In a very literal way, Zapiro’s use of ubuntu also refers to the fact that, during the xenophobic attacks of May 2008, people were asked to name certain Zulu words that were slightly archaic as a way to distinguish between foreign and South African Zulu speakers (Ndlovu; see also Gibson 703). The irony resides in the fact that ubuntu, which is also an Zulu word, is thus automatically staged as an anachronism, as something that is conspicuously old-fashioned. As such, the very term used to emphasise the primary importance of an inclusive community in post-apartheid South Africa is rendered archaic, but also turned into a shibboleth that supposedly protects this community from “outsiders.” The cartoon presents ubuntu as a boundary marker for belonging and national identity, a yardstick against which to measure others, while simultaneously pointing out the irony of this use. In addition, there is a distinct sense that the joke is also on the newspaper reader, who, by interpreting the cartoon, appropriates the meaning of ubuntu. In this way, it meticulously and concisely brings to light the fundamental ambiguity that marks ubuntu, which focuses on inclusive and harmonious relations with others, but also runs the risk of becoming a tool for exclusion.

As my reading of Zapiro’s cartoon already suggests, the role of form and representation in ubuntu’s ambiguous position in South African public discourse is a central focus of this study. I am particularly interested in how ubuntu is continuously (re)shaped in contemporary South African cultural expressions, and I will argue that an analysis of the forms in which ubuntu is culturally produced sheds critical light on what has become known as a much appropriated and misused African worldview. Many scholars in African philosophy and legal studies have poured over ways in which ubuntu could form a productive tool for South African society, ⁵ but ubuntu is also regarded with suspicion. Some consider it a problematic and vague concept that carries cultural identitarian overtones in its reference to traditional African cultures, and it is also often conflated with all-encompassing claims to a peaceful common humanity. Some say it can only be fully realized in interaction with others, in specific moments, whereas others call it an orientation towards the world, a Weltanschauung. ⁶

As Wim van Binsbergen has noted, many reiterations of ubuntu have decidedly utopian connotations, where the wish for harmony in human relations is often the father of the thought. It is crucial to recognize this utopic, even prophetic side of ubuntu for what it is. In van Binsbergen’s case, the word “prophetic” should be understood, not as spoken in the name of God, but as an attempt to address “the ills, contradictions and aporias of one’s time and age: conditions which one shares with many other members of one’s society” (59, see also 73). From this perspective, to use ubuntu in a utopian fashion has an important perlocutionary value that speaks to the political potential of ubuntu, as philosopher Leonhard Praeg also recognizes (Report 113). Another important effect of the perlocutionary for ubuntu means that each time ubuntu is, and will be, uttered, it will have a different connotation. There is no such thing as an originary, essential notion of ubuntu. To speak of ubuntu is always already an unrepeatable act that makes it difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between ubuntu as praxis and a description of this praxis, that is to say talk of ubuntu, an ubuntu discourse or philosophy.

In A Report on Ubuntu, Leonhard Praeg points out that the lack of differentiation between the praxis of ubuntu (ubuntu) and the philosophical expression of this praxis (Ubuntu) has caused much unnecessary confusion in ubuntu scholarship. Instead, Praeg argues, it is necessary to distinguish the work of ubuntu or ubuntu praxis from postcolonial ubuntu discourse. The first, according to Praeg, does not refer to how ubuntu is lived in specific villages in Southern Africa, but rather references a “willingness to translate or codify the self in terms of the language of the Other, to conceive of the Other (belonging) as a condition for the possibility of existence (being), as the originary gift of ubuntu” (40). The postcolonial variant of ubuntu, on the other hand, has come into existence as a response to the influences of colonialism and apartheid, and represents the way people have come to talk about ubuntu over time. This variant, spelled Ubuntu by Praeg, is a profound mixture of local and global influences, and a product of the ways in which Christianity and human rights discourses feed back into local traditions of ubuntu. This mixture, in turn, influences the global discourses with which it engaged in the first place. As Praeg formulates it:

Ubuntu is neither here nor there, neither simply from ‘over here’ nor reducible to what is from ‘over there.’ It is at once here and there. (37)

Praeg writes these words in relation to Ubuntu discourse as a glocal phenomenon, but they can also be applied to the distinction Praeg makes between ubuntu as a living praxis and Ubuntu discourse. Like the global and local aspects of ubuntu, the two strains of ubuntu identified by Praeg are in an inescapable dialectical relation. As suggested by Carrol Clarkson, quoting John Comaroff, ubuntu indeed exists “in an interstitial zone of ‘meaning, morality, and materiality’” (Drawing 184).

In the present study, I take this position a step further and claim that ubuntu is always necessarily located between self and other, praxis and philosophy, particular and universal, local and global, difference and sameness, violence and safety. Whether philosophical or practical, all forms of ubuntu are acts in one way or another. Some of these are speech acts, others are without words, yet others are expressions grappling for words. ⁷ On its best days, ubuntu is a passionate and/and, rather than an indecisive either/or, that seeks to make the most out of every situation. It is the will to assess a situation according to its uniqueness and to place trust in every participant to act in good faith. In this sense, ubuntu comes close to what Sarah Nuttall has termed entanglement, which focuses on the seams and complicities between people and things, while acknowledging at the same time that people are, or imagine to be, different (12). This book is based on the premise that these entanglements are indeed inevitable, but does not take the nature of these entanglements for granted. It seeks to question how various diverging interests are actively brought together under the rubric of ubuntu. I call this negotiation of the locatedness of specific interests with the need for the “utopian horizon” that entanglement pushes to the fore (Nuttall 11) ubuntu as a convergence of interests, a term on which I elaborate in Chaps. 3 and 4.

The benefits or interests invested in a situation can take all shapes, although psychological well-being, positive affect, and social harmony often surface as common goals in ubuntu discourse. It is true to say, however, that ubuntu also has serious downsides. Each chapter here attests to this ambiguity and it is only, as Praeg also suggests (Report 23–25), through the acknowledgement and deconstruction of the violence in ubuntu, that realistic alternatives to this violence become possible. The questions that concern me here are therefore clustered around the attempt to make visible how ubuntu, in all its ambiguity, comes into being in South African discourses. If all expressions of ubuntu are living praxes, how is ubuntu represented, reiterated, and performed? And what knowledge about ubuntu can be fathomed through an analysis of its cultural forms? Or, to expand on this question in the form of a statement: If ubuntu is a living praxis characterised both by a great ethical potential of giving priority to relations between people and by social exclusion, then I am invested in finding out how ubuntu’s power is produced and transmitted. If the goal is to try to build on the potential of a logic of interdependence, then an analysis of its mechanics of production is of utmost importance.

In each of the following four chapters, the cultural production of ubuntu is approached from a different angle (political discourse, literature, photography, marketing strategies, and popular culture), yet with a similar aim: to explore the term’s ethical potential for thinking through problems of social inclusion and exclusion in processes of community formation, both from an African and a Western perspective. The chapters do this in two ways: first, by analysing how ubuntu is culturally expressed and actively constructed in different media, and second, by exploring how ubuntu can be thought in dialogue with Western notions of relationality as theorized (amongst others) by Judith Butler, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Case studies range from political and literary discourse to photographic work and commercial strategies, and include the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the Durban Shack Dwellers Movement, literary texts by Nadine Gordimer, Antjie Krog, Njabulo Ndebele, and J.M. Coetzee, as well as portraiture by Zanele Muholi.

Before I can describe how these objects will be approached, however, and stake out the theoretical points of departure that this study adheres to, a preliminary introduction to the concept of ubuntu is necessary. This description is intended to familiarise the reader with the vast domain of what can by now easily be termed “ubuntu discourse,” and to foreground one of the main issues in ubuntu thought. This problem does not so much lie in the fact that ubuntu is often conflated with communitarianism by its critics, but rather that the term often problematically relies on a notion of a shared common humanity that it circumscribes as morally good. In the second section, I discuss how reading ubuntu as a strategy in Michel de Certeau’s terms might be useful for pinpointing how this problem of circumscription is constructed in South African cultural expressions, but also in formulating responses to it that keep the question of the human open. At the end of the introduction, I will turn to ubuntu’s close and often misunderstood association with the notion of hospitality. From this discussion, ubuntu emerges as a continuous negotiation of the inevitable conditionality of human relations that balances the fine line between openness, inclusiveness, and uncertainty with reciprocity and safety.

Ubuntu Discourses and the Problem of Common Humanity

As is the case for all concepts, possible meanings of ubuntu are highly contextual. This has led Wim van Binsbergen to call ubuntu a semantic complex, rather than a concept (69). As such, there is no such thing as “the” meaning of ubuntu. Working with ubuntu teaches one very quickly that it can be a rather intuitive concept until one can “see” how it works in practice, for instance in the truth and reconciliation process. In addition, the concept’s wide use and mutability produces a range of possible answers to the question of what ubuntu is. Nonetheless, a short introduction to the term ubuntu, and most importantly, to the ambiguities in it, is indispensable.

Scholars have resorted to a number of approaches to provide a description of ubuntu, varying from historical to linguistic, and from philosophical to anthropological ones. There are myriad ways in which ubuntu has found application in discourses that are educational, philosophical, political, ecological, psychological, rhetorical, and theological, as well as in public policy, information technology, law, the TRC, and marketing and human resource management. This list already suggests that it is beyond the intention and scope of this project to discuss all of the above; this treatise is not meant to be exhaustive. Instead, I intend to raise the issues and trajectories at stake in using ubuntu as a concept, in what could be called a thoroughly interdisciplinary “ubuntu discourse.”

The lion’s share of writing on ubuntu reflects the view that it is a traditionally African concept focused on community and expressed as the recognition that a person “is incomplete unless he or she maintains an active connection with the society or culture of which he or she is a part” (Libin 126). As historian Christoph Marx wryly observes, “no historical evidence has been produced to substantiate this alleged community culture” and “references to ‘tradition’ are made to suffice” (52). If, indeed, the specifics of ubuntu tend to escape description, it must be remembered, as Johann Broodryk observes, that “[u]buntu cultural norms have been orally transferred from generation to generation over a long time, and have never been produced as literature or written form” (qtd. in Mnyaka and Mothlabi 216). This element of orality in ubuntu’s history may have had repercussions for the current accessibility of the concept in academic research that focuses on written sources mostly. Nonetheless, philosopher Christian Gade’s research into the written sources on ubuntu ensures us that the earliest written reference to ubuntu dates from 1846. Mark Sanders convincingly analyses the writings of A.C. Jordan, who draws on the work of Tiyo Soga fro...