Ubuntu - A few thoughts in process

It was a weird moment. It began with profound discomfort and ended with profound insight. I was in the District Six Museum in Cape Town for the first time. I was simply enjoying the silence of the space. It is in an old Church building and exudes solitude and respect. I was there with many of my students but off we all went into the same space in the search for reflection and understanding of the days we were spending in the vortex of South Africa’s history, being daily exposed to its many wounds and scars. District Six is such a gaping wound. In the sixties the White government designated these bohemian, arty eclectic and energetic streets to be white and threw the people from their land out to the sandy barrenness of the Cape Flats. International opinion was so intense that no one ever rebuilt there, so there is this grassy sore, not a leafy park but haunted wilderness on the landscape of the city.

So I am reading poetry, gazing at old photographs, mesmerized by the story of people’s injustice as they were sent from their homes and lost not only houses but generations of place and belonging. It was a cruel rape of social order; barbaric and in my life time. So why did I feel so joyous within, so uplifted. Can even evil inspired nostalgia be something to enjoy? No, I suddenly realised that like Robben Island this was a place of redemption, where evil had not had its way but now had had its day and was being bulldozed over in restoration, transformation and mending. So the next question had to be how?

Ubuntu was a word that kept cropping up here, there and everywhere. Whenever we asked how South Africa had moved as far as it has down the road from Democracy we would be given Ubuntu as the secret. White and black alike, political or religious, all seemed to see this word as crucial to the entire miracle that we always somehow feel a part of. It would get a different definition every time but in essence this Xhosa philosophy for life was “a person becomes a person through other people,” “I can only be me through you,” or the U2 phrase that is not limited to this concept but includes it, “All because of you I am.” I took hold of the phrase and began to ponder it not simply because it was a key concept in South Africa’s transformation but because it resonated within me as true.

Yet, it was a Xhosa saying. It was not rooted in the Bible that I make my life’s authority. Can the Christian get taught from another culture that does not hold to Biblical origins? In my answer I look towards the common grace notion of Reformed theology or the secret presence theology of Catholic theologian Karl Rahner and say yes, God can and will be moving throughout the world not just exclusively in a Christian enclave. So I wrote the word on my thinking and started to caress and collide it, mostly caress, with Scripture. I attempted to put a Christian theology upon it seeing the need for me as a Christian to be in connection not only with God, but with fellow believers in the Church and then those outside of the Church also. Jesus even went as far as to say that we should love our enemies.

It soon became clear to me that Ubuntu was a phrase that would express my own Christian belief that I am who I am as a disciple of Jesus not only in relationship to God but to others. When Paul calls us the Body and describes how that works in I Corinthians or in Ephesians or Romans it shows without doubt that my identity is tied up in connection. I am who I am through others in the same body. Beyond that Jesus describes us as salt of the earth and light of the world which means that we cannot be who we are meant to be without engagement with others beyond the Church walls. I am who I am through others. Even if my vertical relationship with God is restored by God’s grace I can never hope to develop my true being as some solo believer or by cutting myself adrift from the world around me; Ubuntu!

Of course the particular application for this idea is rooted in the conflict situation of South Africa’s apartheid history and the dawning of the new democracy. Alex Boraine, the vice chair of the Truth and Reconciliation committee told us that on the day Nelson Mandela was released from prison there was some uncertainty about what he would say in his speech and what consequences there would be. If he had decided to tell the people to rise up and overthrow the enemy then there could have been a bloody civil war. What stopped Mandela was his sure belief in Ubuntu. His speech encouraged his oppressed brothers and sisters to embrace the new South Africa where their white neighbours would have to be included as they could not be who they had the potential of being without them, their traditional enemies. Others would tell us how this indeed was the secret as to how Mandela even caught the imagination of many young white South Africans who also willingly and excitedly became a part of this new order.

So, primarily Ubuntu has a place for me in the work of reconciliation. In my own Northern Irish context I cannot be who I am without my Republican neighbour, traditionally my enemy. To be fuelled by Ubuntu sees the necessity of relationship to shape and hone and bring fullness of my salvation and redemption as well as the restoration and transformation of my society.

One of the reasons I came to Regent College this summer was to theologise my ideas. These were thoughts rattling around in my head, chatted out with my friends. Were they anyway erudite or was I away with the cerebral fairies. Wonderfully I find that unbeknown to me there are those, particularly Archbishop Desmond Tutu who have thought through the theology of Ubuntu and I can now be better read and more fully thought through in my processing my summer of 04 meditations. Ubuntu is one theology I want to pursue in the days that are ahead.

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