Decolonising Knowledge: Can Ubuntu Ethics Save Us from Coloniality?

Those who resist domination by Western knowledge often refer to other knowledges as ‘non-Western’, revealing the deep bias they are trying to overcome.

Retrieved from http://​www.​dialogoglobal.​com/​barcelona/​description.​php (Accessed 19 January 2017).

The lecture was delivered in 2015, and this date is therefore used in the references.

In the same way it is an abstraction to speak about ‘a Western’ or ‘a European’ approach.

See the Chinese approach to business ethics as set out by Lu (2010).

See the classic text written already in 1899 by Inazo Nitobe (source here from 2004) on Samurai ethics in the context of Japanese culture.

Books with the title of ‘business ethics’ very rarely, if ever, explain themselves as Western business ethics, nor does one find an American business ethics journal in the same vein as the African Journal of Business Ethics. (This does not preclude American journals for sociology, bioethics. and so forth.)

That we in Africa are inevitably drawn towards the centre is, for example, evident from the very successful and good book, Business ethics, edited by colleagues Deon Rossouw and Leon van Vuuren. This book started in 1994 as Business ethics: A Southern African perspective. It became Business ethics in Africa in 2002, and as from the third edition (2004) onwards, the title has just been Business ethics. For an appreciative discussion of this development up to 2010, read Naudé (2011).

Further examples: In what way do rites of passage in Africa represent the concept of ‘tradition’ as set out by Alisdaire MacIntyre? How do African proverbs illustrate ‘choosing the mean between extremes’, as proposed by Aristotle?

See, for example, the more than 500 cases listed by the African Association of Business Schools (www.​aabschools.​com) and the sources provided by the South African Business School Association (www.​sabsa.​co.​za). See the interesting case studies listed in Chapter 23 of Rossouw and Van Vuuren (2013).

It must be noted that Mbiti himself did not use the actual word ‘ubuntu’ in this study to describe an African philosophy, but, as is evident from the quotation above, and looking at subsequent discussions of ubuntu, he does express the idea quite distinctly. The fact that someone does not explicitly presents her thinking as ‘ubuntu’ does not exclude that ideas underlying ubuntu could be overtly present.

See Ramose’s emphasis on the family (in its extended form) as social basis for an African philosophy. ‘No doubt there will be variations within this broad philosophical “family atmosphere”. But the blood circulating through the “family” members is the same in its basics’ (2002c, p. 230).

In terms of the well-known moral development theory by Lawrence Kohlberg, very few people reach this level of post-conventional ethical maturity where ‘all selves’ matter, beyond the ‘I’ and ‘kinship’ relations. (I am aware of the criticism of Kohlberg from both a gender and culture perspective.)

See discussion on empirical evidence below.

See Naudé 2013: 246 for a critique of the misuse of ubuntu: ‘When the supposedly universal boundaries of ubuntu (humaneness) are drawn along ethnic or party-political lines, they become a vicious philosophy of exclusion and dehumanisation. When life-enhancing social exchange is turned into corrupt buying of favour, public resources are wasted. When the social ideal of community enhancement is replaced by enrichment for powerful individuals or elite groups, poverty and social marginalisation increase. When a communitarian sense of happiness turns into an ideology of communitarianism where dissenting voices and contrasting opinions are seen as treacherous in principle, consultation (open debate), so famous in traditional African imbizos, dies’.

This is a problem that Metz admirably attempts to address in his ubuntu theory of right action (Metz 2007b).

See Ramose (2002c, p. 230) and elsewhere in his writing.

What would the response be if I, as a native Afrikaans speaker, refer to the fact that the grammatical structure of the verb ‘to be’ in Afrikaans has been simplified from the complexities of both German and (to a lesser extent) Dutch? The fact that all subjects (nominative case), no matter the gender or the number, use the same version of the verb to be (‘is’) demonstrates that Afrikaans-speaking people of South Africa hold egalitarian values. The transition from a linguistic feature to a moral construct is just that: a construct, the plausibility of which could obviously be questioned. Metz (2007b, p. 321) even excludes ‘Islamic Arabs in North Africa and white Afrikaners in South Africa’ (like myself) from the sphere of ubuntu!

Is this preface to the ‘fact’ perhaps an indication of doubt?

See the Metzian list of these judgements and practices in Metz (2007b, p. 324ff).

See West’s examples of more authors making empirical ubuntu claims and his discussion of various cross-cultural studies on this topic with associated literature references (West 2014, pp. 50–54).

For a discussion and literature of this term coined by C.B.N Gade in 2011, read West (2014, p. 55).

The threat to a purported ubuntu lifestyle has its roots in the combined effect of Africans being swept off their feet by an ‘accelerated modernity’ (Smit 2007, p. 83) and the impact of cultural globalisation (Naudé 2007) together with the interiorisation of the colonial master’s image of Africans. The former implies an attitude of cultural diffidence (‘global is always better than local’); the latter a deep sense of inferiority: ‘If I do not look, act and talk like my former master now the centre of the global village], then I have not “made” it yet’.

For discussion and references to Gade and Van Binsbergen on these criticism of ubuntu, see West (2014, pp. 54–55).

Metz (2007c, p. 375) speaks of ‘distinctiveness’: ‘A moral theory counts as “distinctive” insofar as it differs from what is dominant in contemporary Anglo-American and Continental philosophy’. My view is that his theory of right action indeed shows potential of being distinctive; although its claim to be ‘African’ on the basis of particular ‘beliefs that are common among peoples of sub-Saharan Africa’ is not convincing. The only sense in which Metz’s work is ‘African’ is that is done from a geographical location in Africa and in dialogue with a body of literature developed predominantly by African and African-based scholars.

See Broodryk (1996, pp. 35–36) who, after comparing ubuntu with a variety of thought constellations (communism, capitalism, Marxism, etc.), concludes: ‘If unique means unusual, incomparable, extra-ordinary, Ubuntuism then seems not to be unique. Ubuntu does not exist only in one culture; people of all cultures and races can have “this magic gift or sadly lack it. In each of us some of these qualities exist”’.

See Nussbaum (2009) on a ‘common humanity’ and Lutz (2009, p. 319) who, inter alia, forges links between ubuntu and Confucianism.

Famous Egyptologist Jan Assmann describes personhood in ancient Egypt as being constituted via life-in-connectivity with others: ‘Ein Mensch entsteht nach Massgabe seiner konstellativen Entfaltung in der “Mitwelt” seiner Familie, Freunde, Vorgesetzten, Abhängigen. Ein Mensch, nach altägyptischer Vorstellung, ist ein konstellatives Phänomen’ (Assmann 2002, p. 15). Like Mbiti’s description of relations beyond life on earth, Assmann points to the extended death rituals in ancient Egypt to facilitate the relationship with persons in the ‘Nachwelt’. In short, Assmann states that the human person in ancient Egypt has his/her origin in a constellation of relationships. You are a human person insofar as you are ‘being accompanied’ by others.

Read the two types of ‘autonomy’ explained by Fishbane with regard to rabbinical thought, where there is both a personal autonomy and an autonomy that is only possible within the community of believers (Fishbane, 2002, pp. 125–126).

See the succinct analysis by Tony Hölscher (2014) of the transition in the Greek polis from trust-based, personal, gift and exchange communities to non-personal, transactional relations in a monetised economy.

See Lu’s discussion of one-on-one trust in traditional Chinese communities that are being transformed by ‘modern society’ to ‘universal trust’ as response to China’s opening up to the global economy (Lu 2010, pp. 117–127).

His book Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundbegriffe der reinen Soziologie was originally published in 1881. It is a sociological reflection on the transition from rural, peasant communal (ubuntu?) societies to associational societies based on impersonal relations. See the 4th edition published in 1922 by Karl Curtius in Berlin: https://​archive.​org/​details/​gemeinschaftundg​g00tn (Accessed 21 January 2017).

Where this false claim to uniqueness and fuzzy upholding of certain values shows itself in glaring obviousness is when ubuntu is translated into leadership and management literature. In preparation for this address, I read some of the popular books by, for example, Mbigi (2005), Broodryk (2005) and Msila (2016). I respect, and in fact support, the translation of academic knowledge into business-friendly and ‘popular’ format. This is what business schools are supposed to do. However, my general conclusion is that ubuntu has become a convenient marketing catchphrase (with all the necessary emotion and African flavour attractive to corporate customers) to say nothing new. Catchphrases such as ‘managing people as people’, ‘interdependence’, ‘service leadership’ and ‘collective decision making’ are well known in existing management literature. Depending on one’s ideological position, the rash commodification of ubuntu may in fact be viewed as an act of treachery against the decolonisation project. For a critical discussion on the marketisation of ubuntu, read McDonald (2010).

See the 1984 essay by Menkiti with the title ‘Person and community in traditional African thought’, in which he (in my view, wrongly) interprets Mbiti as putting forward a view that personhood is completely determined by communal relations.

Read the recent impressive history of scientific thought and the prominence of Descartes in the scientific revolution in Wootton (2015, pp. 361–367; 433ff). There is no space to engage in the interesting intellectual dependency of Descartes on physic-mathematician Isaac Beeckman.

See also Meditations III: ‘I am a thing that thinks, that is to say, that doubts, affirms, denies, that knows a few things’ (Descartes 1952, p. 82).

For a more detailed discussion of this richer view of personhood in Descartes, read Perler (2002), especially pp. 160–161.

I retain the sexist spirit of Kant’s language.

‘Unmundigkeit ist das Unvermὃgen, sich seines Verstandes ohne Leitung eines anderen zu bedienen’ (immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding/mind without guidance from another). See Kant (1784, p. 481).

In her recent doctoral dissertation with the interesting title Einander nὃtig sein, Sarah Bianchi (2016) demonstrates that intersubjective, existential recognition (‘intersubjektive existentielle Anerkennung’) is a recurring theme in Fichte, Hegel and, the focus of her dissertation, Friedrich Nietzsche. Literally translated, she explores the notion that ‘we need one another’ from a philosophical perspective.

This translation of Thesis VI was retrieved on 26 January 2017 from https://​www.​marxists.​org/​archive/​marx/​works/​1845/​theses/​theses.​htm.

The ‘centre’ of knowledge is not geographically fixed: There were times that Africa—via the Egyptian empire for example—was at the epicentre of architecture, mathematics and art. It is the process of globalisation in modern times that currently gives Western science its universal hold.

This is no easy task: ‘Given the imbalance of world power, as reflected in its knowledge assumptions, those who choose to occupy this creative, suggestive third space, struggle to enlarge its archives, its case histories, and its theoretical concepts’ (Cooper and Morrell 2014, p. 7).

See Metz, who clearly aims at designing ‘a competitive African moral theory’, which may be ‘compared to dominant Western theories such as Hobbesian egoism or Kantian respect for persons’ (Metz 2007b, pp. 321, 341).

See Augustine Shutte’s attempt (2001) to develop a complementary model synthesised from ‘African’ and ‘Western’ thinking.

Ramose (2002b, p. 330) uses, for example, The Catholic Encyclopaedia (1909) for his definition of ethics. There is nothing ‘wrong’ with this referencing. I am merely positing that, in the context of a decolonisation project, this reliance on ‘colonial’ sources is common, if not unavoidable.

The reference here is to the transition from implicit to explicit knowledge. For example, oral histories may be important sources for historical knowledge, but they will not simply be accepted on face value or on the basis of traditional authority figures. No, they will be subjected to triangulation, for example by being compared with competing oral accounts and other non-oral sources stemming from the same period. In this sense, history is a science, albeit different from physics, but also different from tacit indigenous perceptions of the past.

The first successful heart transplant was done in Cape Town. No one considers medical transplant techniques as either ‘African’ or ‘Western’. They are simply transplant techniques. The new galaxies found by the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope (SKA) in the Northern Cape (South Africa) or a new human species found in the Cradle of Humanity in Gauteng (South Africa) is not ‘Western’ discoveries. They are simply discoveries by scientists who happen to work in Africa.

The most forceful and challenging text I have read in this vein is Rethinking thinking: Modernity’s ‘other’ and the transformation of the university (Hoppers and Richards 2011) from which a quotation is cited above.

If there are indeed indigenous knowledges that are constructed along alternative epistemic lines, they should develop their own criteria for validity, unless anything that anybody says or believes is ‘true’ and the very notion of ‘validity’, even internally, is rejected.

These margins need not be geographical. The issue of women and minorities in science, the presence of the South in the North and so forth must be taken into account for a richer version of ‘marginality’.

See Popper’s notion of falsification in his Logic of scientific discovery (1959) and Kuhn’s idea of normal and revolutionary science in his The structure of scientific revolutions (1962).

In this vein, it would, for example, be advisable to include a discussion of ubuntu, to make explicit the work of Africans in an ethics curriculum, and to use ubuntu as the prism through which dominant Western theories are viewed. This is an act of decentring that could have a significant decolonising effect.