Professors Drucilla Cornell and Karin van Marle in the Department of Jurisprudence write about the possible contribution of the philosophy of Ubuntu feminism to contemporary debates.
Some academic writing has questioned whether Ubuntu plays a role in the daily lives of black South Africans. Yet, from conversations with this group of young black South Africans, an understanding of Ubuntu emerged as a way of thinking about our fundamental interconnectedness and as a way of living. Ubuntu was at the heart of the way in which this group and community thought people should live. Ubuntu was conceived as an African principle encapsulating what it means to be human and how all social relationships are embedded in an ethical entanglement beginning at birth.
Another critique has been the view that Ubuntu is patriarchal in the worst sense of the word, insisting on the authority of men over women. The interviews left the authors with the sense that to view Ubuntu as either conservative or fundamentally patriarchal misses its complexity and transformative potential. This was not to deny that Ubuntu has been deployed for conservative purposes.
Turning to the philosophy of Ubuntu, the authors suggest that Ubuntu can be reduced to neither ontology nor epistemology nor an ethical value system, but encompasses all three. It is a philosophy of the way in which human beings are intertwined in a world of ethical relations from birth, born into a language, kinship group, tribe, nation and family. We come into a world obligated to others, and those others are obligated to us. We are mutually obligated to support one another to become unique and singular persons. This understanding is important not only for Ubuntu’s contribution to views on the state, politics and the possibility of challenging the status quo, but also for its engagement with Western feminism.
Ubuntu feminism, based on the notion of interconnectedness as a source of becoming, profoundly challenges Western feminist thinking on the self, family and community and has the potential to steer the divergent views on an ethics of justice and an ethics of care in alternative directions. What enhances the possibility of the impact of Ubuntu feminism on the present state of the world is its deep commitment to anti-racism and its contestation of neo-liberal capitalism. The authors further contemplate if and how Ubuntu could be understood in terms of spatiality and how, if understood in this way, it could provide new angles from which to think about spatial and distributive justice, and about deep systemic and structural inequalities and injustices, by bringing into focus African knowledge and experience.
