Dear friends, please join me bringing in the blessing, knowing of this African wisdom of Ubuntu. Ubuntu : 'because of you I am' or 'I am because we are' From Desmond Tutu, in Xhosa 'Umntu ngumtu ngabantu.'' 'A person is a person through other persons.' Ubuntu is the essence of being human. It speaks of how my humanity is caught up and bound up inextricably with yours. '
I am because I belong.' The completely self-sufficient human being is subhuman. I can be me only if you are fully you.I am because we are, for we are made for togetherness, for family. We are made for complementarity. We are created for a delicate network of relationships, of interdependence with our fellow human beings, with the rest of creation.
I have gifts that you don’t have, and you have gifts that I don’t have. We are different in order to know our need of each other. To be human is to be dependent.
In traditional African society, Ubuntu was coveted more than anything else-more than wealth as measured in cattle and the extent of one’s land. Without this quality a prosperous man, even though he might have been a chief, was regarded as someone deserving of pity and even contempt. It was seen as what ultimately distinguished people from animals-the quality of being human and so also humane.
Those who had Ubuntu were compassionate and gentle, they used their strength on behalf of the weak, and they did not take advantage of others-in short, they cared, treating others as what they were: human beings. If you lacked Ubuntu, in a sense you lacked an indispensable ingredient of being human.
For Desmond Tutu, if we are indeed interdependent to the very root of our being, this means that we have irreducible obligations to others.
(Some of this taken from www.willbuckingham.com)
Desmond Tutu’s work is a testimony to this. Later, writing about restorative justice and about the horrors of the testimonies gathered by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he claimed that, 'Ubuntu (and so restorative justice) gives up on no one. No one is a totally hopeless and irredeemable case.' Because ultimately, to give up on anyone is to give up on interdependence, and it is to give up on the possibility of community.
ubuntuwellness.com/our-story/ Unabantu Nokuphila, the sacred Ubuntu Tree