Ubuntu: Many Voices of a History

Abstract

Attempt at “creative historicism” will be the core method for the remaining chapters of this book. In this chapter specifically, I shall begin to interrogate one of such intellectual movements, “ubuntu.” Although a reconstructed memory, ubuntu is a discourse that is partly dependent on the attempt to configure a theory of political succession through cultural nationalism. Ubuntu will become a representation that attempts to tell a story within a story, constituted in part by historical paradox, ambivalence, and ambiguities—features that add to its credibility on the one hand, but mask its authenticity on the other hand. If indeed an authentic movement within history how does its orthodoxy, confront or challenge the contradictory implications emanating from its narratives? Do its verbal pronouncements gauge its actual programs in dealing with the contemporary socioeconomic and political situation in South Africa? Relatedly, following the writing of Mudimbe (1994:149), to what extent is ubuntu as a discourse able to project a formidable function, “one of producing a reflection of a reality that is not out there in the name of a memory that it invents by positing it as reflected by an absolute origin and the pragmaticality of contemporary circumstances.”