ABSTRACT
In the 1990s, Ubuntu became a key concept in the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa. In building a post-apartheid country, the concept helped bring about reconciliation and construct a new community. The chapter outlines the long conceptual history of the term, beginning with the Christian missionaries in the 1820s and 1830s who were looking for words in the spoken but unwritten indigenous languages to disseminate their gospel to those with quite different religious awareness and views often in conflict with the Bible’s message. It also describes the slow process of the secularization and politicization of ubuntu that occurred throughout the twentieth century, paving the way for its strong emergence in the 1990s when it influenced not only political but also legal thought in South Africa. It demonstrates that an ambiguity and openness to interpretations exist in both ubuntu and ujamaa, making both a good illustration of the potential for conceptual history to create new global understandings and planetary perspectives. Like Chapter 2 on ujamaa, this chapter explores the potential and the limitations of ubuntu as a political concept. Finally, it shows that, again as in ujamaa, ubuntu provides examples of lessons to be learned from failure.
