Ubuntu Caring: Cultivating Moral, Compassionate, and Restorative Justice in University Education

Abstract

In the previous chapter, I referred to some pedagogical encounters with African students from the continent. I also referred to some of my latest thoughts on African teaching and learning and how rupturing could manifest in pedagogical encounters. In many ways, the human self is invariably engaged with others in encounters and, together, they shape such encounters. Yet, like most encounters, pedagogical encounters are not without a purpose – that is, encounters have some kind of worthwhile intent that is worked towards. It is my understanding that human encounters on the African continent cannot be devoid of achieving a sense of humanness and interconnectedness among people. In this way, it seems as if encounters have an ubuntu orientation on the grounds that the latter is connected to the cultivation of acts of human interdependence and dignity. My contention in this chapter is linked to the idea of ubuntu being connected to caring, as caring cannot occur with recognising the engagement of the self with others on the basis of mutual respect. In this chapter, I develop the concept of ubuntu as an instance of rhythmic caring. Consequently, I firstly, make an argument why the African ethic of ubuntu is coupled with caring. Secondly, I show how ubuntu caring emanates from a recent work on cultivating African teaching and learning to which I referred in the previous chapter (see Waghid & Davids, 2018). And, thirdly, I offer an account of ubuntu caring in order to show how teaching and learning in an African university could become educationally more defensible.