Ready to start another chanllenge – I am getting bored. Thank you for your guidance. You write good stories. Like the staff of the new organisations that pursue the higher arts – and sharing that instead. Much more sensible.

Knowledge to free. Wisdom came first.
Rachel

Daniel
Japan is a small country with large cities with millions of people living in them, yet the water running through their second largest city is pure, and their environment is preserved. I don’t know that we are doing better. They are an interesting people. Their language has no indigeneous swearwords, and relates to no other language in the world.

Consulting Engineer
Got the message – and your point.

I see these problems with Ubuntu:

What if you do not want to be part of the “collective we are”. Will Ubuntu, as it is implemented, protect you and respect your right not to be part of it? Or, as happened in my experience, will you be sidelined and excluded from the community?

Re: Felas comments:
In 40 years of living in rurual KwaZulu-Natal, I never heard of white people in South Africa referred to as anything other than “umlungu”. Felas points out that white people have to prove that they have Ubuntu before they will be called “umuntu” (but all blacks are automatically “umuntu”). This accords with my experience. So to become accepted as a part of the Ubuntu community you first have to prove you have it. So as a white person I am automatically excluded from being part of Ubuntu (called an “umlungu”) until I prove that I should be part of it. That exclusion is based on my skin colour and ignorance about my beliefs.

Ubuntu has the potential for exclusion from the community, and therefore has the potential to be racist, and I have to say that in my experience in South Africa, that is how it is implemented.

I dearly love the principle and would love to see South Africans embracing Ubuntu (or Christianity) to see in each fellow African another human being “only”, and despite the good that is being done(such as on Thought Leader), I fear that that day if far, far away.

As an African now living abroad, I know that Ubuntu is real – whenever any Africans meet and sit down – they share the same values (family, work, doing their best, security) and spread brotherhood (in a non-sexist way) amongst themselves. Last year I was in Dubai on business, I rounded together my fellow Africans (two Nigerians, three South Africans and one Kenyan) – there were two whites in the mix, and we assembled an informal African Union for one lunch. We talked about our families, our social values and despite not knowing each other from a bar of soap – had Ubuntu in common.

No preaching, it just was. Sometimes I think we talk around the issues when we should step back and realise, we’ve actually achieved a helluva lot in South Africa and as African, we should stop in-fighting and rather be proud of our achievement and show the world we’re better than the CNN “dying Aids baby” myth they love perpetuating.

The continent and this country are on the verge of imploding from corruption, crime and mismanagement and since independence African leaders have been trying to give content to invented myths of recapturing African heritage.

In the 1960s and 1970s it was freedom, slavery, colonialism, redistribution of wealth and socialist co-operative measures…blah blah.

Various models of African socialism in Tanzania, Zambia, Burkina Faso etc resulted in failed states.

Later it was ‘democracy’ african style, with one party states or one party in power for life, like the ANC.

We also saw pan-Africanism, African re-awakening, Rastafarianism, Black Consciousness, people’s democracy, the African Renassance (which takes SA back to the dark ages without power), Empires (The Central African Empire), Warlords, dictators, tribalism. Its all a failure. Now we are fed uBuntu.

Africa has a capability within its cultural and intellectual traditions to clothe an invented myth in the powerful garb of an encompassing political framework in order to orientate Africans along new political lines so that their dignity could be restored.

When will the continent stop seeking to blame colonialism, neo-colonialism, Apartheid blah blah and whitey for its ills?

When will it realise we don’t need words like uBuntu, we need good governance, a stop to crime and corruption, and the removal of the idiotic that passes for government and leadership in Africa.

For all the greed, evil, racism, lack of uBuntu etc. of the white man, and whatever other BS people want to peddle, Europe, america and Australia succeeded did they not? Their was good goverance and the people prospered.

uBuntu is the latest smoke and mirrors used to cover up failure.

Seems that SA is in a bad way if it has to be explained to them what they are.

Or invent a new word for them since the old ones aren’t good enough.

Uhuru.