Download this publication - PULP

Difference between ubuntu and dignity 229
nothing unique about ubuntu or that African humanism is not a complex
tradition differentiated both by time and space. But since this intellectual
heritage is often ignored or disparaged, it is important to remind ourselves of the
important role it has played in Afro-modernity, including its role in the struggles
for national independence and the re-emergence of an ethical view of
socialism that was deployed in economic development. Africa has a complex
history of attempts to realise an ethical ideal of socialism, and I in no way
want to ignore that history, nor do I want to simplify it. Fortunately, much
deeper work is now being undertaken to study what was and what was not
achieved, for example, in Tanzania under the leadership of Jules Nyerere. My
emphasis in this essay is on the intellectual heritage to the degree that there are
important links with ubuntu. But let us now turn again to the alliance of
Kantianism with African humanism.
To some degree this alliance should not be surprising because Kant, and
in particular Kant’s notion of dignity, has played a major role in the work of
European thinkers who also argue that socialism is an ethical ideal and
not a stage in a Marxist science of development and progress. Kwame
Nkrumah, for example, argues that his philosophy of consciencism was an
attempt to find an alternative justification for Kantian ethics, and
particularly dignity, consistent with the African conscience. To quote
Nkrumah:
If ethical principles are founded on egalitarianism, they must be objective. If
ethical principles arise from an egalitarian idea of the nature of man, they must
be generalisable, for according to such an idea man is basically one in the sense
defined. It is to this non-differential generalisation that the expression is given in
the command to treat each man as an end in himself, and not merely as a means.
That is, philosophical consciencism, though it has the same ethics as Kant, differs
from Kant in founding ethics on a philosophical idea of the nature of man. This
is what Kant describes as an ethics based on anthropology. By anthropology
Kant means any study of the nature of man, and he forbids ethics to be based in
such a study. 11
More commonly, the dignity of human beings is connected to a
phenomenology of African social life, including the struggle against
colonialism. This grounding in other African thinkers, as we will soon see,
if it is in the phenomenological sense African, is still ethically justified as
universal, even without Nkrumah’s attempt to develop a unique African
notion of materialism that is to serve as the basis for an egalitarian ethic that
would re-ground Kantian dignity.
Kenneth Kaunda, the first president of Zambia, also argues that
African humanism is a different approach to Kantian ethics, and yet one that
also insists on dignity. Let me quote Kaunda’s phenomenology of the
11 K Nkrumah Consciencism: Philosophy and the ideology for decolonisation (1970) 97.