q4play:caribbeanfrea-king:tontonmichel2:blackandbrownlove:I AM BECAUSE WE ARE Ubuntu (/ʊˈbuːntʊ/ uu
q4play:caribbeanfrea-king:tontonmichel2:blackandbrownlove:I AM BECAUSE WE ARE Ubuntu (/ʊˈbuːntʊ/ uu-BOON-tuu; Zulu pronunciation: [ùɓúntʼú]) is a Nguni Bantu. It is an idea from the Southern African region which means literally “human-ness”, and is often translated as “humanity towards others”.Indeed!The term ubuntu appears in South African sources from as early as the mid-19th century. Reported translations covered the semantic field of “human nature, humanness, humanity; virtue, goodness, kindness”. Grammatically, the word combines the root -ntʊ̀ “person, human being” with the class 14 ubu- prefix forming abstract nouns, so that the term is exactly parallel in formation to the abstract noun humanity.The concept was popularised in terms of a “philosophy” or “world view” (as opposed to a quality attributed to an individual) beginning in the 1950s, notably in the writings of Jordan Kush Ngubane published in the African Drum magazine. From the 1970s, the ubuntu began to be described as a specific kind of “African humanism”. Based on the context of Africanisation propagated by the political thinkers in the 1960s period of decolonisation, ubuntu was used as a term for a specifically African (or Southern African) kind of socialism or humanism found in blacks, but lacking in whites, in the context of the transition to black majority rule in Zimbabwe and South Africa. There are many different, and not always compatible, definitions of what ubuntu is. Ubuntu asserts that society, not a transcendent being, gives human beings their humanity. An example is a Zulu-speaking person who when commanding to speak in Zulu would say “khuluma isintu,” which means “speak the language of people”. When someone behaves according to custom, a Sotho-speaking person would say “ke motho,” which means “he/she is a human”. The exclusionary and abhorrent aspect of this would be exemplified by a tale told (often, in private quarters) in Nguni “kushone abantu ababili ne Shangaan”, in Sepedi “go tlhokofetje batho ba babedi le leShangane”, in English (two people died and one Shangaan). In each of these examples, humanity comes from conforming to or being part of the tribe. According to Michael Onyebuchi Eze, the core of ubuntu can best be summarised as follows:“ ‘A person is a person through other people’ strikes an affirmation of one’s humanity through recognition of an ‘other’ in his or her uniqueness and difference. It is a demand for a creative intersubjective formation in which the ‘other’ becomes a mirror (but only a mirror) for my subjectivity. This idealism suggests to us that humanity is not embedded in my person solely as an individual; my humanity is co-substantively bestowed upon the other and me. Humanity is a quality we owe to each other. We create each other and need to sustain this otherness creation. And if we belong to each other, we participate in our creations: we are because you are, and since you are, definitely I am. The ‘I am’ is not a rigid subject, but a dynamic self-constitution dependent on this otherness creation of relation and distance” -- source link