notes from fallow

“ubuntu is suspended"

The word ubuntu is not explicitly theorized in John Mbiti’s African Religions and Philosophy, but Micere Githae Mugo, one of his former students, draws utu/ubuntu from Mbiti: “I am, because we are; and since we are, therefore I am.”¹ This statement is found in Mbiti’s chapter “Ethnic Groups, Kinship & The Individual.” That ethnic framing is often neglected by those who draw from Mbiti to discuss African concepts of personhood.² Most famously, Ifeanyi Menkiti uses Mbiti to insist that the African individual is only possible through incorporation into community (“I am, because we are”; “I am because we are”)³; unlike the Cartesian individual (cogito ergo sum), the African does not exist as a singular unit.⁴ If you’re a philosopher, please don’t get excited—I’m not doing African philosophy.

Something strange happens when Mbiti’s notion of the individual-in-community (“I am, because we are”) is taken as a general African philosophy of personhood.⁵ Ethnicity is thrown out or disavowed or mislaid or abandoned to frame Mbiti’s statement as naming the relation between the individual and the community. It’s not clear how the individual:community relation within an ethnic frame moves to the scale of pan-African relation.⁶

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I have been stuck on “ubuntu is suspended,” uttered in South Africa, but demonstrated across the continent.

When African parliamentarians gather in Ghana to claim that heterosexual, reproductive Africans are more deserving of care, respect, dignity, and freedom than queer and trans Africans, then ubuntu is suspended. When femicide is an epidemic across Kenya and South Africa and elsewhere on the continent, then we know ubuntu is suspended. When migrants are criminalized and harmed across Africa—South Africa might be the loudest place, but let us not ignore the routine xenophobic practices across the continent—then ubuntu is suspended. When top government officials continue to enrich themselves at the expense of residents, then ubuntu is suspended. It might be that ubuntu being suspended is more common than ubuntu being practiced.

And when I hear ubuntu is suspended, I think of Saidiya Hartman’s description of the afterlife of slavery: “skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment.”⁷ How is post-independent Africa so easily described as inhabiting the afterlife of slavery?

I do not mean to exceptionalize Africa. I learn from Christina Sharpe that we are all post-slavery subjects, formed from the substrate of slavery’s ongoing logics of extraction and unhumaning, caught in vicious, repetitive practices of monstrous intimacies.⁸ (How else can I think about the ongoing kidnappings and mutilations of schoolchildren in Kenya but as a form of monstrous intimacy?)

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If ubuntu names a practice of personhood in which the individual exists only through and as part of a collective, then what does suspending ubuntu do to personhood and collectivity?

In South Africa, the statement ubuntu is suspended invites South Africans to gather—it works as a tactic of incorporation—at the same time as it expels other Africans, “foreigners.” It mobilizes the ubuntu that exists at the level of the ethnic—and even ethno-national—scale to refuse the potential of a pan-African ubuntu.

Here, we might return to Mbiti to note that incorporation into a community requires that one undergo multiple rites of incorporation. One is not simply born into a community: one must be made part of the community over and over. Menkiti puts it more starkly: personhood is not a given; one might fail at personhood if one does not undergo incorporation successfully. And Mbiti tells us that failing to marry and produce children means that one has not been successfully incorporated into a community.⁹

If ubuntu/utu exists, first, at the level of an ethnic community, how do we get to a different scale, a multi-ethnic, post-national scale? How does ubuntu become African?

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For the generation of African intellectuals formed by exile within Africa—from Ezekiel Mphahlele to Micere Githae Mugo—ubuntu named the practices of hospitality they created and encountered when their own countries tried to harm them. Nationalist struggles had created an important strategy for shaping multi-ethnic and post-ethnic alliances across Africa, an ubuntu emerging from shared oppression and resistance to imperialism. However, as Julius Nyerere pointed out, those experiences were time-bound, and could not anchor Africa’s shared futures.¹⁰ Shared oppression was not enough to anchor relation and shape futurity.

At a historical moment when trauma-bonding has become a vernacular of sociality, whether used precisely or not, it’s worth sitting with Nyerere’s claim that shared oppression is not enough to anchor relation and shape futurity. That not enough indicates that shared oppression might enable certain forms of sociality and even relation, but it might also impede the imaginative ways sociality and relation need to be forged beyond the hold of shared pain.

One might salvage something from the ruins of violence, but futures must be imagined and built on foundations that are not saturated by violation. Ghosts and screams. Restless stones and unsettled floors. I lack the ability to discuss spirit work, so I simply note its necessity here.

In the post-independence moment when, as Mphahlele put it, exiles kept increasing each year from African countries, new practices of solidarity and care were forged, and a different kind of utu/ubuntu emerged anchored not in incorporation through community rituals, but shared freedom dreams. We might say, that community rituals were reformulated into freedom-imagining, freedom-making rituals.

Perhaps the most schematic way to put it is that there are multiple practices of utu/ubuntu at work in our moment, and our task is to figure out how, if at all, they interact.

One version names the ethnic-bound version Mbiti theorizes (even if he does not name it), which then translates into an ethno-national version (a scaling up from community to ethno-nation); the second is the ubuntu forged through shared oppression under colonialism and resistance to that oppression, and this might be called resistant pan-Africanism; a third is the utu/ubuntu created in the post-independence moment by radical Africans exiled by their countries; and the fourth might be an ubuntu formed at the seam of Africa and the Black diaspora.

To invoke ubuntu is to set all of these practices into motion, each with a different intensity depending on the specific timeplace of utterance. All of these practices—practices precede concepts—are deeply entangled, so much so that it’s difficult to distinguish them.

The rhetorical-conceptual move I am making here is to say that just as “I am, because we are” creates a relation of interdependence, so invoking any one ubuntu (ethnic, ethno-national, post-national exilic, Africa and Black Diaspora) necessarily brings all the others into play.

To suspend ubuntu is not simply to elevate one practice of ubuntu over others—the ethno-national over the diasporic, for instance. It is to untether personhood from practices of incorporation, to refuse the “we” and “us” on which the “I” depends. It is to unmake oneself as a freedom-seeking, freedom-making, freedom-sharing, freedom-imagining kind of person.

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It is true, of course, that practices of ubuntu shaped by specific geohistories do not so easily align with others.

Across much of Africa, many of the anticolonial generation active from the end of the nineteenth century through the early 1970s have died. One important archive-practice of ubuntu has gone with them, or remains simply as a kind of phantom limb. At the same time, many of the African exiles that formed a radical ubuntu collective are no longer with us. Without their memories and practices to anchor us, we are less steady than we might be. If ubuntu is a 4-legged stool, then at least 2 legs are badly damaged and possibly irreparable.

Often, in place of the dynamic ways ubuntu was practiced and understood by the anticolonial and exilic generations, we are presented with an ossified “we are.” This ossification happens through strategic ethno-nationalisms, often mobilized in Kenya during election. Equally importantly, this ossification happens because of the affective orientations of urban-based and diaspora-located Africans: a blend of nostalgia, guilt, shame, and pride. We who live away from the rural want it to be sacred and inviolable, to hold the secrets of who we really are. We turn to the rural for repair and reconnection, for a sense that the capricious volatility of our urban and diasporic lives cannot touch the deep well of our essence. We ossify “we are.”

But since I insist on African imagination and creativity, I also know that the stool metaphor is not quite right. Other practices of collectivity have emerged: feminist, queer and trans, sex worker, and indigenous seed saving.

What if we understand the “we are” in “I am, because we are” not as the static formulation of ethno-national fantasies, a nostalgia-saturated authenticity mobilized to police ethno-national borders and harm those who fall outside of those borders (migrants, refugees, queer and trans* people, girls and women, gender-expansive people).

What if we take that “we” as dynamic and provisional, in a constant dance with the “I” that relies on it and shapes it, so that ubuntu does not name a transhistorical practice and philosophy, but the improvisatory ways African relation is created through a range of freedom practices? In this sense, the freedom claims made by indigenous Africans, African feminists, trans and queer Africans, and African refugees would shift the meanings and practices of that “we are,” generating an altogether more capacious “we are” than currently exists.

What if we take “ubuntu is suspended” as a moment to think of how we might theorize and activate an ubuntu that grounds itself in freedom practices?

Of course, as we watch waves of Africans leave South Africa, it’s difficult to imagine that ubuntu might be a way to think toward hospitality and freedom. But alongside those sad departures—who can watch Zimbabweans sing the African Anthem and not be moved—there are other voices, South African voices (and not the state officials) insisting that ubuntu is as relevant and vital as ever, not as a static ethno-national principle, but as a practice of assembling collectivity, a way of practicing freedom. We would do well to listen for and to this group of people, to join with them in imagining and pursuing freedom.

1. One hears Mbiti’s theological training and inclinations: “I am that I am,” the deity proclaims. Were I more interested in philosophy, I’d say something like Mbiti refuses philosophical distinctions such as ontology and metaphysics. Who has the brainspace for that? I do think umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu is more useful conceptually, because it does not have those dangerous copulas. But I begin with Mbiti and Micere because I want to wrench ubuntu from its overdetermined status in South African discourse.

2. Bernard Matolino and Wenceslaus Kwindingwi offer, “The success of ubuntu largely depends on undifferentiated, small and tight-knit communities that are relatively underdeveloped” (“The End of Ubuntu”). They argue that as used in South African policy and politics, ubuntu served elite interests, and failed to engage with the material realities and moral concerns of most South Africans. While I am not a scholar of ubuntu, I, too, am fascinated by how the word is sprinkled through South African discourse (popular, political, academic, aesthetic), often in ways that assume a shared understanding exists, as opposed to trying to use it to build a shared understanding.

3. Some of Mbiti’s readers use the comma after “I am.” Others do not. Mbiti’s original has the comma. The comma makes a visual and conceptual difference. I leave that discussion to those with time and energy to figure it out.

4. I am being very careless and using the terms individual and person (individuality and personhood) interchangeably. I don’t have the patience to parse their distinctive uses across African philosophy.

5. Mogobe Ramose, credited as the leading philosopher of ubuntu, writes, “ubu-ntu is the fundamental ontological and epistemological category in the African thought of the Bantu people” (African Philosophy through Ubuntu). Since my standard 3 textbook told me Kenya is primarily composed of Bantu, Nilote, and Cushite people, I have to ask where 2 legs of Kenya’s 3-legged stool should be situated. Of course, I recognize that the bantu-nilote-cushite framing is colonial fuckery that foregrounds purity instead of hybridity, but since we took up and use this fuckery, I cannot simply ignore it.

6. For those who like footnotes: this is an ongoing problem in Mbiti’s African Religions and Philosophy. One way to address the issue would be to turn to Black diasporic theorizations of African life—I’m thinking specifically of E.W. Blyden and W.E.B. Du Bois, whose scholarship on Africa develops methods for how to think metonymically. Without this Black diaspora framing of Africa, it’s difficult to move from the ethnic and ethno-national to the pan-Africanness of it all. In an important way, Black diaspora thinkers model how to think Africa; in fact, the first pan-African conference was organized by Black diaspora thinkers and activists. Black diaspora intellectuals and artists have imagined an expansive Africa that we on the continent can—and must—learn from.

7. Hartman, Lose Your Mother.

8. Christina Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies.

9. Yes, people. Hetero-reproduction is at the heart of African theories of personhood. Please read your Mbiti carefully. Let’s not simply imagine that African philosophy is a welcoming home to all of us.

10. Julius Nyerere, “A United States of Africa”