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236 Chapter 9
large. Ubuntu is a demand for respect for persons no matter what their
circumstances may be.
In its politico-ideological sense it is a principle for all forms of social or
political relationships. It enjoins and makes for peace and social harmony by
encouraging the practice of sharing in all forms of communal existence. 22
Ubuntu as an ethical, as well as a politico-ideological concept, is always
integral to a social bond. In a profound sense, ubuntu encapsulates the
moral relations demanded by human beings who must live together. As we
have seen, it implies a fundamental moralisation of social relations, and what
never changes is that society is inherent moral. But the actual relationships
ubuntu calls us to must change since ubuntu is inseparable from a relationship
between human beings that is always present, yet it is also connected to how
we are always changing in those relation- ships and our needs are changing
with them. The aspirational aspect of ubuntu is that we must strive together
to achieve the public good and a shared world. It is ubuntu’s embeddedness
in our social reality that makes it a transformative ethic at its core. It is the
moralisation of social relationships that inevitably demands the continuous
transformation of any society. It would have been absurd 500 years ago to put
forward the argument that ubuntu demands access to electricity, but it would
not be absurd to do so now. Indeed, electricity is integral to securing a human
life in modern society.
In like manner, ubuntu has no pre-given position on the equality of
women. Certainly there is sexism in African thinking as there is in African
social and political life. Ubuntu has been used to justify sexism in the name
of tradition, and it has been deployed on the other side to fight it. That it can
be used on different sides of a struggle over what is right does not mean
that ubuntu can mean anything. It does mean that it is embedded in a
complex and changing world, so that what was believed to be right for
women hundreds of years ago has been profoundly challenged by women
on the ground. Again, to turn to Murungi’s definition that ‘law secures
human beings in their being’, law in the sense of doing justice does not
separate between civil and socio-economic rights. Both are necessary to
secure and protect our humanity in the moral sense that is echoed in
Emeritus Justice Mokgoro’s Xhosa judgment and in the writings of the
African philosophers – all of whom represent different aspects of African
humanism.
Some of the criticisms represent a misunderstanding of ubuntu, as we
have seen throughout my discussion of ubuntu. Ubuntu does not
undermine the concept of personhood; indeed, it demands the thinking of
the ethical conditions of individuation. Yet it does not embrace
individualism and rejects the notion of self-determination. We will return
22
P More ‘Philosophy in South Africa under and after apartheid’ in Wiredu (n 17 above)
149, 156 - 157.