Travelling Concepts:
Ubuntu as a Particular Universal 

It is a truism that the Southern African concept of ubuntu is not a stable concept, or even, despite being typically treated as such, a cultural essence. Rather, it is a historically situated orientation that has been compelled to travel under colonial and postcolonial conditions of legibility.

Ontologically, ubuntu typically explicates being as constitutively relational: a  “being-with/through” forged by social bonds. This is clearly expressed by the famous expression “umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu” which roughly translates to “a person is a person through people.” Genealogically, the term emerges from a specific linguistic and experiential context (Nguni-speaking cultures), yet it is increasingly abstracted within global philosophical, ethical, and political discourses, often under decolonial aspirations.

I will try to show that ubuntu’s most celebrated “uses” frequently coincide with forms of misuse, and how ubuntu came to be read as an ethic of universalized harmony without conflict. Appropriations such as these tend to distort the original meanings of the term. Moreover, they reveal, and help us think through, the structural pressures under which non-Western concepts are invited to circulate. To that end, we will discuss the concept of ubuntu as it is understood by Nguni-speakers, and trace its development, paying careful attention to the linguistic and cultural horizon from which it emerges.