Ubuntu

Roger Grasas
UBUNTU
[2024]

Like other forms of thought that lead to social norms of behavior, ubuntu escapes rigid and watertight definitions. Ubuntu is a philosophy, a way of being and existing in the world, a compendium of ethical rules, a traditional concept, or an orientation to understand and build the relationship of the person with society. Related to ancient concepts such as the Ma’at of ancient Egypt and similar to other systems, such as the good living of the Andean peoples or Eastern Taoism, ubuntu is based on the relationship between the actions of a person and the consequences they have, as well as the constant search for the essence of the human being. Ubuntu has survived thousands of years in sub-Saharan Africa, shaping the lives of its inhabitants and providing an atavistic wisdom to populations accustomed to living in hostile contexts. By always putting the community at the center above the individual, it has managed to transmit itself orally, permeating fables and proverbs, resisting invasions, colonizations, discriminations, and dictatorial regimes, both foreign and local, past and present.

In the 21st century, immersed in an accelerated planetary rhythm in which the human being has broken its balance with nature and embedded in a “technomythification” of individual success, ubuntu is reborn and expands through educational systems, its community values are studied to project universal health models, and one of its basic principles, interconnectivity, would allow promoting harmonious societies with the environment. The latest research indicates that the first modern humans come from populations of more than two hundred thousand years ago in what is now Botswana. In a unique time, in which for the first time we are aware that the current way of life brings us closer to our own extinction, could ubuntu become a collective knowledge that guides humanity? Could our origin and the answer that allows us to have a future be in Africa?

Ivan Zahinos