Wisdom of Africa Newsletter | Issue 005

"Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu." A person is a person through other people. — Zulu proverb

There is a question the modern world has forgotten to ask. Not what can I achieve? or how far can I go? — but something older, quieter, and far more demanding:

Who am I becoming, and what am I doing to the people around me while I become it?

The Zulu proverb above is more than a saying. It is a philosophy of human identity — one that locates the self not in isolation, but in relationship. Carry it with you this week. Notice where it challenges you.

There is a story — told in various forms across southern and central Africa — of an anthropologist who set a basket of fruit beneath a tree and told a group of children that whoever reached it first could have it all. He expected a race. Instead, the children joined hands and walked to the tree together, arriving at the same moment, sharing the fruit equally.

When he asked why, one child answered simply: "Ubuntu. How could one of us be happy if the others were sad?"

The word Ubuntu comes from the Nguni Bantu languages of southern Africa. Its most common translation is "I am because we are" — a rendering of the original Zulu: Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. But that translation, precise as it is, only captures the surface. Ubuntu is not merely a social ethic. It is an ontology — a claim about the nature of human existence itself.

What Ubuntu Actually Says

In Western philosophical tradition, personhood is fundamentally individual. René Descartes gave us the founding statement of modern Western identity: Cogito, ergo sum — I think, therefore I am. The self is the starting point. Community, society, relationships — these are things the individual enters into, chooses, benefits from. But the self precedes them.

Ubuntu inverts this entirely.

For Ubuntu, the self does not precede community — it emerges from it. You do not first exist as a person and then enter into relationships. You become a person through your relationships. Your humanity is not a fixed possession. It is something continuously constituted by how you treat others and how they treat you.

This is not a poetic metaphor. It is a precise philosophical claim with profound practical implications. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who brought Ubuntu to global attention, put it this way: "A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good — for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole."

Notice what Tutu is describing: a person secure enough in their belonging to celebrate others' flourishing. Not despite their confidence — because of it.

Ubuntu in Practice

Ubuntu is not passive. It is not simply warmth or generosity, though it includes both. It is a moral framework that makes specific demands.

In traditional southern African governance, Ubuntu shaped the practice of indaba — the community council in which decisions affecting the group were made through extended dialogue, not majority vote. The goal was not to win, but to reach a position every voice could live with. The process was slow. It was also extraordinarily durable. Decisions made through indaba did not fracture communities because they had been made by communities.

This tradition of consensus governance influenced the design of South Africa's post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission — an institution that chose restorative justice over retributive punishment, prioritising the healing of relationship over the satisfaction of vengeance. Ubuntu was not incidental to that choice. It was its foundation.

What the World Has Forgotten

We live in an age of radical individualism — of personal brands, optimised selves, and metrics of individual achievement. The social infrastructure that once made human life bearable — extended family, neighbourhood, religious community, mutual obligation — has been steadily eroded in the name of freedom and efficiency.

The results are visible. Loneliness has become a public health crisis across the developed world. Political life has fragmented into tribal conflict between groups who no longer share enough common ground even to disagree productively. Mental illness has risen in precise proportion to our disconnection.

Ubuntu does not offer a simple fix. It is not a slogan. But it offers something more valuable: a different starting point. What if we began not with the autonomous individual — with their rights, their freedoms, their achievements — but with the relationship? What if the question we asked of every policy, every institution, every personal decision was not what does this do for me? but what does this do to us?

That is not a retreat from individual dignity. Ubuntu affirms individual dignity fiercely. But it locates that dignity in a different place — not in separation from others, but in the quality of our connection to them.

Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu.

You are not a finished thing. You are always becoming — and who you are becoming is inseparable from who you are becoming it with.

A teaching tale, found in various forms across the African continent

A young man died and was taken by a guide to see both the place of suffering and the place of peace, so that he might understand the difference before returning to the living world.

First, they came to a great hall filled with round tables, each laden with the most extraordinary food — roasted yam, jollof rice fragrant with spice, stewed goat, fresh fruit piled high. The people seated at the tables were gaunt and hollow-eyed, wailing with hunger despite the feast before them. The young man looked more closely and saw why: each person had been given a spoon so long that, though they could reach the food, they could not bring it to their own mouth. They strained and stretched and grew more desperate by the minute, and the food grew cold.

Then the guide took the young man to a second hall — identical in every way. The same tables, the same extraordinary food, the same impossibly long spoons. But here the people were full and laughing, the room warm with the sound of satisfaction.

The young man stared. "What is different here?" he asked.

His guide smiled. "Look at how they eat."

And he saw it: in this hall, each person was using their long spoon to feed the person sitting across from them.

The food was the same. The spoons were the same. The only difference was the direction.

This story is not about charity. It is about the discovery — which must be made fresh by each generation — that the conditions for our own flourishing are inseparable from the conditions we create for others. The long spoon is not a curse. It is an invitation.

Origin: Yoruba people, West Africa (Nigeria, Benin, Togo, and diaspora communities across the Americas and Caribbean)

What it is: The Ọ̀pẹ̀lẹ̀ is a divination chain used by Ifá priests — Babaláwo (literally, "father of secrets") — in the sacred Ifá oracle system of the Yoruba people. It consists of eight half-seed pods or discs connected by a chain, cast onto a mat to produce one of 256 possible configurations, each corresponding to a body of sacred verse, story, and guidance known as Odù Ifá.

What it means: The Ọ̀pẹ̀lẹ̀ is not a tool of superstition. It is a sophisticated knowledge system — one that UNESCO recognised in 2008 by inscribing Ifá divination on its list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The 256 Odù represent the full spectrum of human experience: every situation, crisis, transition, and question a person might face has a corresponding body of teaching. A skilled Babaláwo does not simply cast the chain and read a result — they engage in dialogue, draw on memorised oral literature of extraordinary depth, and work with the client to interpret how ancient wisdom applies to present circumstances.

Why it matters today: Ifá is one of Africa's most complete surviving intellectual systems — a philosophy, psychology, and cosmology encoded in oral literature and transmitted across generations through disciplined apprenticeship. Its core insight — that human beings are not alone, that the universe is responsive, that knowledge and relationship are the foundations of right living — resonates far beyond its origin culture. It is practised today not only in Nigeria and Benin but in Cuba (as Lucumí or Santería), Brazil (as Candomblé), and communities across the African diaspora who carried it through the Middle Passage and never let it die.

The Ọ̀pẹ̀lẹ̀ is a reminder that Africa's sacred traditions are not primitive approximations of knowledge. They are knowledge — refined over millennia, encoded with extraordinary care, and still alive.

"Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter."

Chinua Achebe (1930–2013) is one of the most important writers of the twentieth century — and one of the most important thinkers Africa has produced. His novel Things Fall Apart (1958) was among the first works of African literature to reach a global audience on its own terms, without apology or translation into Western frames of reference. It has since sold over twenty million copies in more than sixty languages.

But Achebe was more than a novelist. He was a philosopher of narrative — deeply interested in the political power of stories, and in who gets to tell them.

The quotation above is his most famous. It is deceptively simple. What Achebe understood — and spent his career demonstrating — is that literature is never neutral. The stories that circulate about a people shape how that people are perceived, how they perceive themselves, and ultimately what is done to them. For most of recorded history, the stories told about Africa were told by people who had come to take something from it. Those stories served that purpose.

Achebe's life's work was the recovery of narrative sovereignty — the insistence that Africans must tell their own stories, in their own voices, rooted in their own experience, answerable to their own standards of truth and beauty.

Ubuntu tells us that we are constituted by our relationships. The story of the long spoons shows us what that looks like when we forget it — and what becomes possible when we remember. The Ọ̀pẹ̀lẹ̀ reminds us that Africa built systems of knowledge capable of holding the full complexity of human experience. And Achebe reminds us that the first act of wisdom is insisting on the right to tell your own story.

What this issue asks of you is not grand. It is this:

This week, look at the people around you — not as the backdrop to your life, but as the condition of it. Notice where your flourishing depends on theirs. Notice where you have been feeding yourself with a long spoon, wondering why you are still hungry.

Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu.

You are because they are.

The wisdom travels further when we carry it together.