A person through other persons: what ubuntu actually asks of us

In my work I sometimes stand in a courtroom and hear a lawyer for a municipality explain why three hundred people must leave the buildings they live in by the end of the month. Sometimes, a few minutes later, I hear a judge ask whether anyone has actually spoken to them. That second question has a philosophy behind it, and in South Africa the philosophy has a name.

Ubuntu is now so widely quoted that it risks meaning nothing. It appears on coffee mugs, in management books, in the names of software. I want to do the opposite of that here: to say what the idea claims, show where African philosophers disagree about it, and argue for the reading I think we should hold onto.

The phrase and its public life

The idea is usually stated through a proverb found, in slightly different forms, across the Nguni and Sotho languages: in isiZulu, umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, a person is a person through other persons. It is related to a sentence the Kenyan theologian John Mbiti made famous in African Religions and Philosophy (1969), often shortened to "I am because we are".

Desmond Tutu carried the idea to a world audience. In No Future Without Forgiveness (1999), his account of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he describes a person with ubuntu as open and available to others, affirming of them, not threatened by their goodness, because such a person knows they belong in a greater whole and are diminished when others are humiliated. The interim Constitution of 1993 ended with a passage on national unity and reconciliation that contains the line many of us learned by heart:

there is a need for understanding but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not for retaliation, a need for ubuntu but not for victimisation.

Two years later, in S v Makwanyane (1995), several judges of the new Constitutional Court invoked ubuntu in holding the death penalty unconstitutional. Later the Court drew on it in eviction cases, asking that people facing removal be treated as people with lives and claims, not as obstacles on a site. The "meaningful engagement" the Court began to require in such cases, that authorities actually talk with occupiers before evicting them, is in my view one of ubuntu's most concrete legal fruits.

Two claims hiding in one phrase

"A person is a person through other persons" can mean two different things, and much confusion comes from running them together.

The first is a descriptive claim: you become a self only in relation to others. You learn language from others, you learn who you are by being addressed, recognised, corrected and loved. This is not distinctively African. Hegel argued that self-consciousness requires recognition by another, and developmental psychology would agree. Watsuji Tetsurō, in Japan, located ethics in aidagara, the "betweenness" of persons, and held that the human being, ningen, is at once individual and social. On a relational reading of Confucius, persons are constituted by their roles and relationships rather than simply occupying them.

The second is a normative claim: personhood is something you can achieve more or less fully, and achieving it means living well with others. Here ubuntu becomes a moral theory, and here the disagreements begin.

Menkiti and Gyekye

The Nigerian philosopher Ifeanyi Menkiti, in an influential 1984 essay, "Person and Community in African Traditional Thought", gave the strongest version. In African thought as he reconstructed it, personhood is not given at birth. It is acquired over a lifetime through participation in the community's moral life, so that the elders, who have lived it longest, are persons in a fuller sense than the young. Personhood comes in degrees.

The Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Gyekye objected sharply, and I think rightly in part. Gyekye defended what he called moderate communitarianism. The community partly constitutes the person, he agreed, but persons retain the capacity for independent judgement, including the capacity to judge the community wrong. And if personhood is a status the community confers, then the community can withhold it. A theory that makes the full moral standing of a person depend on others' assessment of them has no ground from which to condemn a community that excludes some of its members.

Kwasi Wiredu's work adds another angle. His defence of consensus as the traditional basis of Akan political decision-making treats agreement reached through talk as the way a community respects every member, not as a majority's victory over a minority. Ubuntu, read through Wiredu, is less a hierarchy of persons than a procedure of inclusion. More recently Thaddeus Metz has tried to systematise ubuntu as a relational moral theory: an act is right insofar as it honours others' capacity for communal relationship, for sharing a way of life and caring for one another's good.

My view: personhood as a calling, dignity as a floor

Here is where I come down, as someone who uses these ideas in hearings rather than seminars.

Menkiti is right that ubuntu is about achievement. The point of saying that someone "has ubuntu" or "lacks ubuntu" is that personhood in the full sense is something you can grow into or fall short of: generosity, hospitality, the refusal to humiliate. That is ubuntu's real contribution, and it is more demanding than a list of rights. A landlord can respect every right of a tenant and still lack ubuntu.

But Gyekye is right that this achievement cannot be what grounds a person's basic moral standing. The South African Constitution treats human dignity as inherent in everyone. Ubuntu works best on top of that floor, not in place of it. It tells us what we owe each other beyond the minimum: that the occupiers of a building are to be spoken with, that a convicted person remains a member of the community, that reconciliation asks something of the powerful as well as the wronged.

So I read the proverb as a calling, not a ranking. Everyone is owed dignity; everyone is called to become more fully a person through how they treat others. That reading keeps what is distinctive in ubuntu without handing communities the power to decide who counts.

When the judge asks whether anyone has spoken to the occupiers, she is not adding a procedural nicety. She is asking whether the municipality has treated three hundred people as persons through whom it, too, is a person. That is a strange sentence in English. In the language it comes from, it is quite ordinary.