Afro-IFOS (the Afro-centered edition of the International Feminist Organising School) engages Ubuntu as a living tradition that continues to evolve through struggle, reflection, organising, and collective learning. This is particularly important in a moment marked by deepening inequality, violence, displacement, ecological crisis, authoritarianism, anti-rights organising, and the fragmentation of collective life across many parts of the world. By grounding our practices in Ubuntu, Afro-IFOS offers both a framework and a community of support for responding collectively to these urgent realities in participants’ everyday lives and in their shared work.
“We all acknowledge that we had conflicts, deep solidarity, and shared projects for collective liberation. We exchanged leanings and permitted one another to use our ancestral knowings and technologies to fight our common enemy, the colonizer.” This statement came from the US delegation of the IFOS Ubuntu Commission, when reflecting on the pre-colonial times.
Umuntu Ngumuntu Ngabantu
Ubuntu is an African belief and philosophy often introduced through the phrase “umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu“, commonly translated as “a person is a person through other people.”
Frequently invoked as a reminder that no one exists in isolation, that our humanity is deeply connected to the humanity of others. It teaches that individual success is meaningful when it contributes to the well-being of the wider community. Ubuntu emphasises that we all need one another, and that compassion and mutual care are central to human existence. The concept points to a deeper understanding of personhood, belonging, responsibility, and relational existence.
Ubuntu, therefore, understands personhood as fundamentally relational. Human beings come into being through relationships with others and through participation in community life. The self is never entirely separate from the collective. Writing on Nguni cosmology, Nokulinda Mkhize traces Ubuntu to the concept of uNtu, a foundational principle of personhood that sits at the centre of a wider understanding of humanity, community, and social life. Drawing on Nguni origin narratives, Mkhize describes uNtu as the first person and as a symbolic principle from which humanity emerges.
From this concept flows a series of related ideas. Umuntu refers to a person, while abantu refers to people. KwaNtu is the realm of humanity, the world in which people live together. IsiNtu refers to the customs, practices, knowledge systems, and social ways of being that emerge from African cultural and spiritual cosmologies. UbuNtu is the philosophical and ethical orientation that guides relationships between people and communities.
While this article engages Ubuntu through Nguni-speaking traditions found mostly in southern Africa, related understandings of relational personhood, collective humanity, mutual obligation, and interconnected existence can be found across the African continent and its diasporas. These include Utu in Kiswahili-speaking societies across East Africa; Hunhu in Shona traditions; Botho in Sesotho and Setswana traditions; Obuntu or Obuuntu among several Ugandan communities, including the Baganda; and Bumuntu and Bomoto in parts of Central and East Africa.
While not identical, these concepts are often understood as closely related expressions within a broader family of African philosophies concerned with what it means to be human in relation to others. All are commonly translated as forms of “humanness” or “humanity” and emphasise empathy, justice, mutual care, dignity, and collective responsibility. At the same time, each tradition has its own historical, cultural, and philosophical context, and may place different emphasis on values such as communal harmony, respect for elders, spiritual beliefs, or modes of decision-making. By recognising both these similarities and differences, we appreciate the unity in African thought around what it means to be fully human, while also valuing the diversity and richness of each tradition.
Related concepts such as ujamaa, popularised by Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, have similarly emphasised cooperation, collective responsibility, a sense of belonging, and the importance of building societies organised around mutual care and collective flourishing. Across West Africa, traditions such as omolúàbí in Yoruba thought and teranga in Wolof traditions of Senegal and The Gambia likewise foreground ethical relationships, hospitality, reciprocity, character, and social responsibility, albeit within distinct philosophical frameworks. In South Africa, Ubuntu played a crucial role in shaping the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as both a political and healing tool in post-apartheid South Africa.
Within African diasporic communities, related commitments have found expression through traditions of mutual aid, communal care, cooperative economics, spiritual practice, collective resistance, and liberation struggle. A related understanding can be found in Kongo cosmology, where personhood is situated within a broader relational order that connects human beings, ancestors, the natural world, place, and spiritual forces. Drawing on Kongo philosophical traditions, Fu-Kiau describes existence through a set of interconnected categories, including muntu (human beings and persons), kintu (things and material forces), hantu (space and place), and kuntu (qualities, modalities, and processes of becoming). Within this framework, the Dikenga or Kongo cosmogram represents the cyclical movement of life and the continuous relationship between visible and invisible worlds. The living and the ancestors are not understood as occupying entirely separate realms, but as participants in an ongoing cycle of mutual influence, responsibility, memory, and becoming.
While these concepts and traditions should not be understood as direct equivalents of Ubuntu, they point towards a rich and diverse body of African and diasporic thought concerned with the relationship between self and community, rights and responsibilities, individual dignity and collective wellbeing, and the conditions necessary for human flourishing.
A question of power
Ubuntu is often spoken about as though its meaning is self-evident. Yet there are multiple, sometimes competing, understandings of what Ubuntu is, where it comes from, and how it should be understood.
Like all philosophies, visions, traditions, political proposals, and ways of understanding the world, Ubuntu is shaped by questions of power: who defines it, who mobilises it, for what purposes, and within what historical and political contexts. This dynamism produces diversity, debate, and contestation. Rather than viewing these tensions as weaknesses, Afro-IFOS approaches them as opportunities for political education, collective inquiry, and deeper understanding.
For some scholars, Ubuntu is primarily understood as a philosophy of relational humanity. Such understandings emphasise interconnectedness, mutual respect, dignity, compassion, and the ways in which personhood is realised through relationships with others. Other scholars have sought to understand Ubuntu as a set of values embedded within particular societies and institutions. In this view, Ubuntu informs social norms, governance systems, ethical frameworks, conflict resolution processes, and restorative approaches to justice. Contemporary debates have also explored whether Ubuntu remains widely practised and influential across contemporary African societies, particularly in contexts shaped by colonialism, urbanisation, migration, globalisation, and neoliberal economic restructuring.
The relationship between Ubuntu and colonialism has been the subject of significant debate. Some scholars argue that colonial rule actively marginalised indigenous philosophies and ways of knowing, elevating Western epistemologies while diminishing African intellectual traditions. From this perspective, contemporary engagements with Ubuntu may be understood as projects of recovery, reclamation, renewal, or revitalisation.
A further area of contestation concerns the relationship between Ubuntu, power, justice, and liberation. Some have argued that dominant understandings of Ubuntu have become detached from broader questions of political power, historical injustice, sovereignty, and material conditions. Ndumiso Dladla, for example, argues that influential post-apartheid interpretations of Ubuntu have often reduced it to a language of reconciliation, forgiveness, and social cohesion, while obscuring its political and liberatory dimensions. Rather than understanding Ubuntu solely as an ethical injunction towards harmony, such critiques insist that Ubuntu must also be read in relation to histories of conquest, colonialism, dispossession, governance, resistance, and struggles for justice.
Debates also continue regarding the scope, location, and meaning of Ubuntu. Scholars differ on whether Ubuntu should be understood primarily as a philosophy, a cosmology, an ethical framework, a political project, a set of social values, a worldview, a lived practice, or some combination of these.
“In South Africa, Zulu language speakers use the greeting sawubona, which literally translates to ‘I see you’. The response is sikhona, meaning ‘I am here’. Maybe to them it is just a greeting, but it’s loaded with meaning. In Shona, spoken in Zimbabwe, the greeting is makadini, which means ‘what is your state of being?’ And the response is ndiripo, which means ‘I am present/I am here’. Seeing and presence are key elements of being human in African cultures. Seeing is a sign of acknowledgement that you matter. It signals that I know your name, I respect you and not just as an object but as a person that I see with both physical and spiritual eyes. Presence is equally important, not just as being physically present but being present with heart, mind and body. It means that you are conscious of what is going on within you and around you. You are able to know what your subconscious is doing in a conscious way.”
— From Strategies for Building an Organisation with a Soul, Hope Chigudu and Rudo Chigudu (2015).
This is a short version of the article written by Kwezilomso Mbandazayo, a member of JASS (Just Associates) Southern Africa, and part of the methodology team of the African edition of the International Feminist Organizing School Berta Cáceres (Afro-IFOS).
