Ubuntu and Nelson Mandela

These are some of the translations of the word Ubuntu, a word which comes from the Xhosa/Zulu culture into which Nelson Mandela, 95, who will be buried today at Qunu, was born.

At the memorial held in Mandela’s honour in South Africa on Tuesday, US President Barack Obama reminded the world about Ubuntu, which was a philosophy at the heart of Mandela’s life.

Obama said, “Mandela understood the ties that bind the human spirit. There is a word in South Africa - Ubuntu - that describes his greatest gift: his recognition that we are all bound together in ways that can be invisible to the eye; that there is a oneness to humanity; that we achieve ourselves by sharing ourselves with others, and caring for those around us.”

“He not only embodied Ubuntu; he taught millions to find that truth within themselves. It took a man like Madiba to free not just the prisoner, but the jailor as well; to show that you must trust others so that they may trust you; to teach that reconciliation is not a matter of ignoring a cruel past, but a means of confronting it with inclusion, generosity and truth. He changed laws, but also hearts,” said the US President.

Mandela’s life was dedicated to fighting racial inequality. But more than this, he understood that the trappings of power were not what really mattered.

Rather, power was a gift in service of a cause. He acted for the common good. Instead of retribution, he dared to call for reconciliation, for the sake of healing wounds which threatened the body of his true love: South Africa.

In 2006, Mandela expressed his own idea of what Ubuntu meant by giving the following anecdote:

“A traveller through a country would stop at a village and he didn’t have to ask for food or for water. Once he stops, the people give him food, entertain him. That is one aspect of Ubuntu, but it will have various aspects.

Ubuntu does not mean that people should not enrich themselves. The question therefore is: Are you going to do so in order to enable the community around you to be able to improve?”

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who headed Mandela’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, has also set out his vision of Ubuntu. For him, “A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, based from a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.” Tutu continues, “Ubuntu speaks particularly about the fact that you can’t exist as a human being in isolation. It speaks about our interconnectedness. You can’t be human all by yourself, and when you have this quality — Ubuntu — you are known for your generosity.

We think of ourselves far too frequently as just individuals, separated from one another, whereas you are connected and what you do affects the whole World. When you do well, it spreads out; it is for the whole of humanity.” In other words, as EM Forster extolled: “Only connect”.

The message that we are all inter-connected, all sharing the same journey, to some extent reflects a long stream of ancient thinking ranging, indeed, from African culture to the Greeks, Hobbes, Locke and Kant. It is somewhat differently expressed in Christianity, which places an emphasis on loving one another.

The message, however, seems more radical that Jesus’ last commandment, to the extent that it calls not necessarily for love, but for something else: something perhaps more hard-won: respect. This is the respect — for human life and dignity — that should be at the centre of our society. This is the idea we need, as a community, global and otherwise, to return to.

Today Mandela is laid to rest at last, buried at his birthplace of Qunu. Yes, his favourite poem during his dark years in prison under the apartheid regime was William Ernest Henley’s ‘Invictus’. But to mourn Mandela, I turn to WH Auden:

He disappeared in the dead of winter:

The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,

And snow disfigured the public statues;

The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.

What instruments we have agree

The day of his death was a dark cold day.