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James Ogude on Ubuntu's Ethical Framework - Personhood, Co-Agency & Justice (Global Origins of Humanism Series)

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Ubuntu: I am because we are. 🌍✨

In this bonus episode of Humanism Now, we’re sharing the live recording of Professor James Ogude’s talk from the online event Understanding Ubuntu Traditions part of the Global Origins of Humanism series (co-hosted by Central London Humanists and the Association of Black Humanists). 

Prof. Ogude is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, University of Pretoria, and a leading authority on Ubuntu—the African ethical tradition of community, compassion and shared humanity.

About the series

The Global Origins of Humanism series is a new programme of online talks and discussions exploring philosophical traditions from around the world that have influenced modern humanist thought. At each event CLH & ABH welcome a leading scholar to introduce their area of expertise, followed by audience discussion.

These events are free to attend online and open to everyone. 

Upcoming events (RSVP on Meetup to join live)

Prof. Ogude covers;

  • How personhood is earned through relationships and community
  • How Ubuntu differs from Western individualism
  • Co-agency: interconnectedness of human and non-human life
  • Ubuntu as an ecological ethic for climate and sustainability challenges
  • The material dimension of dignity: why justice must include economic needs
  • Archbishop Tutu’s role in elevating Ubuntu to a universal framework for reconciliation
  • Ubuntu as a process of becoming, not a fixed identity

Selected Books by James Ogude

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Music: Blossom by Light Prism

Podcast transcripts are AI-generated and may contain errors or omissions. They are provided to make our content more accessible, but should not be considered a fully accurate record of the conversation.

James Hodgson:

Hello everyone, james here just popping into your feed to share something a little different with you this week, alongside Central London Humanists and with the support of the Association of Black Humanists, I've been hosting a new online series of events exploring the global roots of humanism. In each talk with a guest speaker, we explore a different philosophical tradition from around the world and across time and examine how it shaped modern humanist thinking. We explore a different philosophical tradition from around the world and across time and examine how it shaped modern humanist thinking. In our first event in the series, we were delighted to welcome Professor James of the University of Pretoria and one of the world's leading authorities on Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a powerful African ethical tradition rooted in community compassion and shared humanity. Ubuntu emphasises the interconnectedness of individuals with their compassion and shared humanity. Ubuntu emphasizes the interconnectedness of individuals with their surrounding societal and physical world and, with Professor Agude's permission, I'm delighted to share the recording of his talk as a bonus episode with you today. If you enjoyed this talk. We'll be hosting more of these events online in the coming months. Our next talk will be on Wednesday, the 17th of September 2025, coming months. Our next talk will be on Wednesday, the 17th of September 2025, exploring the roots of rationalism in India with a very special guest speaker and former Humanism Now guest Alavari Jeevathol, or AJ as you may know him, who is also a vice president of Humanist International. I'll include links to that event in the show notes.

James Hodgson:

For now, I'd like to introduce the guest speaker at the first Global Origins of Humanism event, professor James Agude. Professor Agude is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre of Advancement of Scholarship at the University of Pretoria and, as mentioned, one of the world's leading scholars on Ubuntu. Professor Agude served as the Director of the Centre until December 2024, and during this time he also led a five-year Ubuntu project. December 2024, and during this time he also led a five-year Ubuntu project. He heads a pan-African research network and directs the African Observatory for Environmental Humanities. He has published and edited more than a dozen books on the topics of relational ethics and African history, including Ubuntu and Personhood, ubuntu and the Everyday and the Reconstitution of Community. We were delighted to hear from Professor James Agude on Ubuntu's philosophy of personhood, co-agency and justice and its links to the modern world. And now over to Professor James Agude.

Prof. James Ogude:

Thank you, james. Let me start by expressing my gratitude for hosting me tonight.

Prof. James Ogude:

James has been chasing me for a while now and it's a pity that my schedule never allowed me to meet with you as soon as I would have wanted, but nevertheless I'm quite excited that today I'm able to make it and also to know that there are humanists out there. I am a humanist scholar, so we share and have a lot in common. Let me just give you a brief background to how I got into Ubuntu research and how I developed interest in Ubuntu. In 2014, the Templeton World Charity Foundation, which is an American foundation, gave the Archbishop Emeritus the late Archbishop Emeritus Tutu an award for the work that he did as the chair of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, famously known as the TRC. So they put up funds. Over and above their words, they wanted us to deepen our understanding of Ubuntu, a concept that the Archbishop Emeritus Tutu used as a tool of reconciliation and as a tool of bringing about healing and bridging the divide between South Africans, for those of you who know the history of South Africa will understand what I am talking about. And so that is how we were invited to compete for some funding. And so that is how we were invited to compete for some funding, and eventually our center emerged as the winner and we got funding to explore the concepts of Ubuntu. As a result, we produced a total of four books a dramatic play and my journey with Ubuntu started at that time. We produced a book called Ubuntu and Personhood, ubuntu and the Reconstitutional Community, and Ubuntu and the Everyday and, as I said, there was also a play to go with it. So that's how my interest in Ubuntu started, and I've now extended it in trying to understand African ways of thinking about the totality of our universe.

Prof. James Ogude:

I think the world is going through a very difficult period and we're all groping for answers. We're all groping for alternative ways of understanding, alternative ways of meaning-making as a result of the challenges that confront humanities challenges around climate change and global warming, issues around sustainability of our planetary universe. We are all looking for ways of dealing with this and I found through my journey, I found that there's a way in which what the French philosopher, environmental scholar, michel Serres calls banished knowledges and I'm using that deliberately banished knowledges of the world may well offer us ways of thinking through some of these challenges, through some of these challenges. They may not be the only ones, but they offer us alternative ways of looking at the world afresh, and that's how I come into the project of Ubuntu as a philosophical tool for understanding our world, alternative way of understanding our world today.

Prof. James Ogude:

My lecture today revolves around Ubuntu and the principle of co-agency that we'll talk about. I want just to flag a few things which I will touch on so that during my rambling, if you don't get anything, at least you can remember the points that I'm trying to make. The first point that I want to make is that Ubuntu revolves around the idea of personhood. Those of you who are familiar with the German Immanuel Kant. Immanuel Kant suggested that the notion of the person is the ultimate question of anthropology which is an attempt to understand ways that human beings live in relation to their environment.

Prof. James Ogude:

So it is not. Personhood is not peculiar to Africa. I want to make that qualification.

Prof. James Ogude:

Okay.

Prof. James Ogude:

But I want to argue that Africa's understanding, especially Ubuntu's understanding, of personhood differs from the European idea of personhood, which is premised on autonomous, self-determining individual. In a number of African communities, and from the perspective of Ubuntu, personhood I want to argue here is realized in a network of complex relations, interdependence and communication between humans to human, between humans and non-humans. I also wish to draw attention to areas of convergence between second European traditions, namely conceptions of individualism and human rights, vis-Ă -vis Ubuntu's understanding of our common humanity, for lack of a better word. I also want to move our understanding of personhood beyond the human-centeredness that is, the anthropogenic roots of personhood. I want to move beyond that and point to the fact that Ubuntu opens up new ways of seeing human and non-human relations. That is what I call the principle of co-agency that Ubuntu entails. I will conclude by seeking or trying to argue that in order to make Ubuntu relevant, we need to rescue Ubuntu from its ethnic category or baggage that it has tended to be associated with. In fact, that is precisely what the Archbishop did in pushing Ubuntu into a universal category for understanding our relations as human beings, but also our relations to other non-humans.

Prof. James Ogude:

Let me start by saying what distinguishes Ubuntu from other value systems is the fact that it is premised on a very specific understanding of personhood, and that is that the full development of personhood comes with a shared identity and the idea that an individual's humanity is fostered in a network of relationships. I am because you are, we are because you are, we are because you are, and I think Audrey evoked that throughout her libation the fact that I am because you are, we are because you are. That is a fundamental principle that underpins Ubuntu. So to talk meaningfully about Ubuntu, we have to grapple with the notion of personhood, specifically a relational idea of personhood. So relationality is fundamental to our understanding of Ubuntu. But I also want to qualify this by suggesting that it is not something new, because over the years, a number of African philosophers and political thinkers have argued that the African idea of self or the person is not only more attractive but also stands in sharp contrast to the view of the individual sound in European thought.

Prof. James Ogude:

That's something that we can come back to. If you read the works of, you know, the Ghanaian philosopher Veredu, the Kenyan philosopher Masolo, the works of Nyerere, the works of Nikrumah, the works of Senghor, they all draw our attention to the contrast between Western notions of personhood and African notions of personhood. It is for this reason that Masolo has argued, and I quote by articulating the pre-metaphysical social genesis of the individual and his or her dependence on others for self-actualization, african philosophers have contributed significantly to the establishment of an alternative normative standpoint for viewing the world from a communalistic rather than individualistic perspective. I think that is an important distinction. The understanding of personhood contradicts the understanding of the individual dominant in European thought. That sees the individual as a free and intentional agent and therefore social relations between people and society stems from the fact that individuals are autonomous and rational and the principle of individual freedom is the source, or the only source, of all rights and responsibility in contemporary society.

Prof. James Ogude:

To the contrary, african philosophers insist that, even at the most basic level, human beings are always in communication, that it is in this act of interactive engagement that transforms them from human beings to person. So I'm making a distinction between being a human being and being a person, and I'll clarify that as the lecture goes on. We read you One of our leading philosophers argues, and I quote without communication there's not even a human person. So it centers interaction, it centers engagement, and that process of engagement is really what makes us human. Masolo, and I quote you again, says this process of depending on others for the tools that enable us to associate with them on a growing scale of competence is the process that makes us into persons. In other words, we become persons through the acquiring and participating. In other words, we become persons through the acquiring and participating in the socially generated knowledge of norms. And that sought sometimes to posit African identities in racial terms and in so doing grounded the distinctiveness of the African person in an essentialized racial category, while pointing to how different it is from the Western person.

Prof. James Ogude:

And I can understand why these foundational thinkers were coming from.

Prof. James Ogude:

And I say that if, in their reaction to the schism created by colonial modernity, these foundational thinkers found it prudent to respond to a generalized African person in essentialized terms and that's what colonialism did it is important to draw a distinction here, and that is that a conception of personhood gleaned from a range of cultural practices in Africa cannot be reduced to a racial category.

Prof. James Ogude:

I want that to be clear. In the same way, even if tempting, we cannot reduce European idea of a person to a racial concept just because it is a bugger of the ascendance of a certain dominant philosophical thought in European history, namely the Enlightenment period and the Age of Reason, even though some of those Western notions of individualism and discourses on individual agency, rationality and autonomy have been used to support a range of racial stereotypes directed at blacks and, similarly, some communities in Asia. It is also fair to argue that Africa's foundational thinkers were responding to a specifically coded colonial discourse which sought to deny the colonized people any form of rationality, often reducing them to the traditional category or a thoughtless herd. The dominant assumption was that urgency only resides in individualistic, self-determining and autonomous bodies. Any attempt to forge a communitarian self-determination and collective expression of agency or relational forms of personhood was and continues to be seen as undermining human independence and individual personhood, often detached from the whole that is the community.

Prof. James Ogude:

Michael Lambeck, writing on urgency, has made a compelling argument against the understanding of individualistic urgency, which he thinks is both simplistic and romantic, because they posit urgency as a capacity of fully autonomous individuals rather than relationally constituted social essence, and that action occurs without respect, conversion and commitment. That is, as if agents were not specifically located, social persons operating within moral universe with respect to prior and binding commitments, to both specific liturgical orders and to specific other persons. End of quote. Lambert concludes that the existential emphasis on the freedom of the individual self is very different from the moral question facing the relationally embedded person. There is a difference between exercising one's judgment and claiming absolute freedom of choice. One's judgment and claiming absolute freedom of choice. The argument I'm advancing here is that personhood is attained through complex processes of exchange and engagement, as people interact, communicate with those around them and with the totality of their environment. It is for this reason that I argue here that Ubuntu, as a specific strand of Africa's expression of personhood, is a moral obligation. It is aspirational. The first point to make is that Ubuntu provides the idea, the ideal moral conduct towards which we must all aspire, towards which we must all aspire. True, this may be abused or distorted, as with all human values. But the ideal expression of Ubuntu must entail, and I quote, the recognition of the moral equality of all people. It must entail the recognition of the moral equality of all people. Ubuntu, let me add, is not an ideology that works to impose a program or a set of rules of insiders and outsiders. Even when it talks of our moral obligation towards those around us, no-transcript our responsibility towards others within the community of people. So it is not just irrational way of doing things. It is not surprising that even within Western societies largely driven by the principle of individualism, the principle of basic or minimum human rights as a standard for how everyone ought to be treated is highly cherished and privileged. The West, too, accepts that judgment will come into what counts as minimum principles of human rights and proper conduct within a community or people.

Prof. James Ogude:

Ubuntu provides us with grounds for moral critique of social and other forms of exclusion, and it does not matter whether the basis of these forms of exclusion or discrimination are gender-based or racially-based or class-based. It is about what Weredu calls the principle of sympathetic impartiality, and what that basically means is your ability or our ability to put ourselves in the other person's shoes. Are we prepared to put ourselves in other people's shoes. That is sympathetic impartiality. So group solidarity in the form of herd mentality or pedestrian groupism is not the defining principles of Ubuntu, as we tend to think, but rather is an awareness that our wholeness and the realization of our full humanness is achieved through our interdependence and consensus building. So interdependence becomes one of the defining principles of Ubuntu, becomes one of the defining principles of Ubuntu. That is why, as I've argued elsewhere, ubuntu is used as a vehicle for reconstituting community, often during moments of crisis. But also that is done through consensus building as opposed to group tyranny. It is not about group tyranny and that is why the Archbishop Tutu, during the moment of crisis, during the moment of transition in South Africa, he evoked the principle of Ubuntu as a way of reconstituting a new nation, as a way of reconstituting a new community of people on the basis of our humanness.

Prof. James Ogude:

And because Ubuntu is a process of becoming and aspirational, one cannot talk of it being bound together by the exclusive possession of the positive morality of Ubuntu, as many have argued. Those who argue against Ubuntu say oh, this is an exclusive philosophy, it discriminates against others. If you are not part of Ubuntu, you are outside it. That is not true, because Ubuntu is a process of becoming and it is aspirational. You cannot say that you have achieved your personhood fully. So Ubuntu is earned, but it can also be lost. Therefore, the idea of Ubuntu suggests that personhood is experienced and performed in the practical exercise of living and coming into being. Exercise of living and coming into being, the management of our own practical identity, is then what drives who we become and how we are perceived to be or to live within our society.

Prof. James Ogude:

My interest is not to revisit the tension between European and the African conceptions of the person. There's so much scholarship that has been written around this and there's now a consensus that there may be a measure of complementarity that exists between European and African ideas of personhood. That is why Gheke again the Ghanaian philosopher, what he refers to as moderate communitarianism, which calls for a dialectical view of individualism and communitarianism. In other words, there's a dialectical relationship between individualism and communitarianism that is likely to bring a common ground, if you like, between European thought and African thought. So this lecture seeks to move beyond these debates and to examine the multiple ways through which a dynamic understanding of Ubuntu extends and deepens our understanding of personhood. What does it mean to be a person. Does Ubuntu share any similarities?

Prof. James Ogude:

with other intellectual and philosophical streams from the African continent and elsewhere. If the idea of personhood suggested by the time Ubuntu comes with moral obligation and ethical demands, as they should, how are we to understand our material obligation to those who are less privileged in society? How does material luck affect the realization? Do we ever think that in fact, among the vulnerable there's a sense in which material lack can also impede their development or their full realization of personhood? Let me link a bit on Ubuntu as a process of being and becoming. There's a broad consensus that Ubuntu, like personhood, is acquired. It is not given. What this means is that relationality, as Ueredu would have it, is the primary condition of human existence. Ueredu's philosophical anthropology and I quote Oredo's philosophical anthropology, and I quote recognizes the biological constitution of humans as unnecessary, but not I underscore that that the biological constitution of humans may be necessary but not sufficient basis for personhood, because human beings require gradual sociogenic development to become persons. This relational condition circumstantiates not only the physical existence of things and our development of persons, but also our cognitive and moral experience of the world. Herein lies the convergence between communitarian understanding of personhood and Ubuntu's idea of personhood as interdependence not simply between human beings but also with the broader world, physical and spiritual, the entire universe. Looked at this way, personhood cannot be a complete state but a process of being and becoming. The sociality of personhood and its relational quality are the basis for the understanding of the idea of Obutu. For the understanding of the idea of Obutu, it is what the South African writer and essayist Angie Crowe calls interconnectedness towards wholeness that our wholeness can only be expressed through our interconnectedness, the realization of our interconnectedness.

Prof. James Ogude:

But I want to move to talk about the need for a material dimension in Ubuntu. The need for a material dimension in Ubuntu. In order to have a complex and nuanced understanding of Ubuntu as a concept and a pain by interdependence of human beings, we need to go beyond ontological, normative and epistemological perspectives and include a material dimension to it. Indeed, the re-emergence of Ubuntu in recent intellectual discourse, especially in South Africa here, has been characterized by a singular focus on its capacity to bring about harmony in the community and to generate the kind of dialogue that would allow for restorative justice. That is important. However, in framing Ubuntu as an ethical tool for peace and harmony, the material conditions for creating a stable and harmonious community and for attaining full personhood is often ignored. I want to argue, after Henry Roroka, the Kenyan philosopher, that full personhood must come with a provision of basic economic needs, or what he calls the human minimum, which is aimed at taking care of bodily and physical needs of people that conditions of deprivation dehumanize and could easily lead to stifled growth or fall. Although Buntu has a concept called for empathy and sharing of resources as a moral and ethical principle or obligation, unless this translates into the practical level of distribution of resources among members of society, ubuntu would remain a mere ideal and a pipe dream. One of the lingering criticisms against the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission was its inability to rise above the rhetoric of forgiveness and reconciliation, because the emphasis was on restorative justice without economic redress. That is why allowing Oruka's philosophical approach to enter into dialogue with the basic tenets of Ubuntu and only enrich and extend an understanding of the concept.

Prof. James Ogude:

Ubuntu in this sense is required to become a disruptive and subversive philosophy.

Prof. James Ogude:

In contexts where the inhumane practices become the norm, it becomes both insurrectionist and a vehicle for self-determination.

Prof. James Ogude:

It has to be the exercise in self-determination that the collective desire, or to reject traditions of servitude.

Prof. James Ogude:

It is therefore very much a function of a communitarian drive and collective agency, seen here as the broader communal desire for freedom and independence. In other words, individually driven desire for freedom and autonomy, need not always be inward looking, but also an outward attempt to connect those with similar desires and goals. Attempt to connect those with similar desires and goals and in the realization that interdependence is also a source of strength and creative imagination to move forward and bring about change for all. Thus, ubuntu ethic to have relevance, it has to move from the realm of theory to the practical and it has to become the instrument for mediating relationship between people, between different races, between different classes and between professional workers and those that they serve. To my final important point, that is, ubuntu and the principle of co-agency, because I think it's very important and quite relevant to the kind of work that I'm doing at the moment. The principle of co-agency rests on the idea that there is no divide between the human and the non-human nature and culture in African thought.

Prof. James Ogude:

It argues that a number of African philosophical concepts, such as karma, ubuntu, utu and math, have insisted on interdependence and basic relations of mutuality between humans and non-humans. I also wish to argue that the ideal personhood that Ubuntu philosophy encapsulates is more than simply about person-to-person relationship. In a fundamental sense, ubuntu's idea of co-agency signals a pre-metaphysical, post-humanist, ecological thinking which dissenters the human, not as a marker of the end of the human, but as a critique of anthropogenic humanism which opens its inquiry to non-human life. I see post-humanist turn as a more engaged mode of the symbiotic and co-evolutionary relationship between the organic and the inorganic forms of life, suggesting the need for sustainability and acting responsibly. Whole agency that Ubuntu entails implies living together for the mutual benefit of all and the formation of the interconnectedness between life and all living things. We call it the web of life. Like symbiosis, co-agency is a nexus of companionship of the human and the non-human that most African cultures celebrate. I wish to argue that the call for de-centering the humans has always been an integral part of Africa's view of ecology.

Prof. James Ogude:

I am embodied in a number of their belief systems and philosophical concepts that I have talked about Ubuntu, ukama and MUT.

Prof. James Ogude:

All these are found across the continent. Indeed, africa's communitarian ethos has always been associated with these concepts. Ubuntu, that refers to shared humanity and interrelatedness within the totality of our environment. Ukama, that places emphasis on the interconnectivity of humans and the environment, ancestors and gods. Mat, which emphasizes harmony, righteousness and the need to locate and understand oneself and one's actions, in the context of Elijah Hood. Thus, contrary to the anthropogenic ideas, there is a strong emphasis on the interrelatedness or interconnectedness of human beings and the rest of nature across the continent, of nature across the continent. So the principle of co-agency places emphasis on the dialectical relationship between humans and other species, and not just nature, but the totality of our planetary universe. The point is that when we talk about interrelatedness, we require a corresponding philosophical approach that looks at nature in its totality, and Ubuntu would seem to offer us that vision.

Prof. James Ogude:

Nogobe Ramos, one of the leading scholars of Ubuntu, argues that Ubuntu, in its essence, is the capacity to perceive, and I quote to perceive being or the universe as a complex wholeness involving the multi-layered and incessant interaction of all entities. End of quote. The non-human is not excluded from this wholeness and that caring for one another is the fulfillment of the natural duty to care for the physical nature as well, especially because Ubuntu is the constant strive to strike and maintain a balance between human beings and physical nature. In a fundamental way, ramos' position echoes back to a pre-colonial metaphysics of nature in which the emphasis was always on achieving a balance, striving for harmony and a productive coexistence between species. The traditional African metaphysical outlook implies recognition and acceptance of interdependence and peaceful coexistence between earth, plants, animals, humans and land, including non-animate objects. Whenever this balance was upset, there was always a form of restitution, an attempt to reconcile the human back to the environment, either through ritual and sacrifice or penalty. Sacrifice or penalty. That is why the libation that Audrey was doing at the beginning is always in recognition of the greater universe that we find ourselves in. It was always poured on the land to respect the land itself and that which the land offers around us. That has always been the connectedness that is created symbolically through the kind of libation that we were doing at the beginning of this lecture. So humans have, mistakenly and over the years, replaced their responsibility over the earth as co-creators and have instead sought to impose its authority over all species and objects on earth. It is this artificial hierarchy that traditional concepts such as Ubuntu allows us to disrupt.

Prof. James Ogude:

Benazit Bujo, a Central African theologian, asserts that, and I quote the African is convinced that all things in the cosmos are interconnected, all natural forces depend on each other, so that human beings can live in harmony only in and with the whole nature. End of quote. This view of Ubuntu is supported by yet another scholar of Ubuntu who argues that Ubuntu, and I quote, is an existential reality that permits everything that exists. Norove points out that African beliefs, that in African beliefs there is there inheres a conviction that umuntu, that is, person, was not only related to the other abantu, kipo, she's also related to the natural environment. We tend to think when we talk about utukamutukibat I am because you are we tend to think that the broader natural environment that we find ourselves in. It is therefore not surprising that the concept of Ubuntu extends beyond interpersonal interactions into a range of relations between humans and nature that are fundamental in Nguni cosmology.

Prof. James Ogude:

The Ngunis are the Southern African groups, which consists of the Khalsars, the Zulus, the Suatis, among others, the Zulus, the Swatis, among others. Now Harriet Gubane argues that among the Zulu, the Zulu believe that there is a special relationship between a person and his environment, that plant and animal life somehow affect the environment. Besides, a Zulu conceives of good health not only as something of a healthy body, but as a healthy situation of everything that concerns him. Good health means the harmonious working and coordination of his universe. That's what the Zulus believe. Gubane continues to argue that when balance is lost, order is restored through a ritual which brings about Orient states what they call a moral order, a kind of symmetry which denotes that things are coming together.

Prof. James Ogude:

Therefore, the critique of Western ontological dualism stems precisely from this ecological, complex ontological architecture that disrupts the nature-culture dichotomy, and one which Ubuntu, at its very best, entails. I'm aware that these debates are not confined to Africa, and I'm by no means suggesting that Ubuntu ontology is exceptional. There has been, over the years, an increase in scholarly interventions which seek to disrupt this dualism. Those of you who are familiar with Braidotti's work, those of you who are familiar with Braidotti's work Post-Humanism, she talks. She includes Ubuntu alongside the works of Eduardo Glissantz, that Caribbean scholar. What Eduardo Glissantz calls Poetics of Relations, or Paul Gilroy's Planetary Cosmopolitanism, or Brahe's Diasporic Ethics or Homi Bhabha's subaltern secularism.

Prof. James Ogude:

What Braidotti is signaling here is the idea that, in its multifarious strands, ubuntu speaks to the shared experiences of various marginalized groups in ways that empowers humans as well as non-humans. That's marking a post-human ethics that sees the world as having a complexity beyond anthropocentric interests. But I also want to say in conclusion and this will be my last point that I will be making that Ubuntu has to be dynamic. Ubuntu has to be seen as evolving. Ubuntu has to be seen as evolutionary in character. But recasting Ubuntu in these radical terms means that we must be prepared to change what are often presented as immutable values for all time, while insisting on epistemic justice that takes due cognizance of repressed religious amongst post-colonial subjects, and by having a conversation between European modernity on the one hand, and indigenous religious on the other, and indigenous knowledges on the other, thus challenging the social inequality and existential inequality or epistemic violence that has characterized it. It is for these reasons that an exploration of how productive Ubuntu can be creatively understood without reducing it to the category of the traditional becomes important. Seen this way, ubuntu is likely to offer alternative and radical ways of approaching debates around communitarian forms of personhood, especially when evacuated of its racial or ethnic baggage, as Archbishop Tutu tried to do in South Africa.

Prof. James Ogude:

Tutu tried to do in South Africa by appropriating Ubuntu to mediate the racially charged process of truth and reconciliation commission in South Africa.

Prof. James Ogude:

Tutu was in fact rescuing Ubuntu from the prison house of tradition and ethnicity and elevating it to a universal ethical and moral category. To a universal ethical and moral category, he was transforming the concept into an implement for clearing and thus destabilizing apathic racial hierarchies. He was also questioning the racial prism as the only metric through which we could glean South Africa's ugly past. He was pointing to the rediscovery of a relational value system among the marginalized and the possibilities that it offered for the reimagining of a new South Africa. It was also about how local idioms continue to offer the potential for generating or articulating insight and revising dominant Western views of autonomous health, food and agency. It was about exploring the capacity for communal forgiveness and reconciliation in contexts of conflict or in societies that have undergone traumatic experiences of violence. In such societies, modern conventional forms of justice may not offer redress and only a recuperation of indigenous forms of redress, such as Ubuntu, a chance for justice and restoration. Thank you.

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