I HAVE written ceaselessly on the identity crisis Africans face as a race especially in the face of westernisation.
The subject has been debated by several writers, philosophers, thinkers and scholars who all have tried to come up with what defines African identity aptly.
The indescribable African identity pervades all blacks including African Americans who were forcibly removed from their motherland many years ago.
Though a focus of research for over a half century, confusion about the identity of an African still remains.
Each generation of Africans is noticeably divorced from the indescribable true African identity that keeps on receding like sea waves becoming foggier with each era.
Prominent among thinkers who have tried to define African identity is the former South African president Thabo Mbeki who re-visited the ubuntu philosophy in the recovery of the African identity.
Usually attempting to define who an African is is done to gain self respect for a race that is a laughing stock of the Caucasians.
It is important to note that there were many African thinkers before Mbeki who tried to come up with a neat definition of who we are as a people.
From the 1970s, the ubuntu began to be described as a specific kind of “African humanism” based on the context of Africanisation propagated by the political thinkers in the 1960s period of decolonisation.
The debate largely emanated from the segregation Africans suffered from whites both home and abroad.
The first publication dedicated to ubuntu as a philosophical concept appeared in 1980, Hunhuism or Ubuntuism: A Zimbabwe Indigenous Political Philosophy (hunhu being the Shona equivalent of Nguni ubuntu) by Stanlake J. W. T. Samkange.
There are, however, varying definitions of what ubuntu is though the commonest explanation is that society, not a transcendent being, gives human beings their humanity.
The name given to the underlying philosophy is ubuntu a si-Zulu word inspired by the Zulu maxim, “umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu (a person is a person through other persons).
An example is a Zulu-speaking person who when telling you to speak in si-Zulu would say “khuluma isintu,” which means “speak the language of people”.
When someone behaves according to custom, a Sotho-speaking person would say “ke motho,” which means “he/she is a human”.
In Zambia among the Bembas, when someone says ulya muntu (that one is a human being) there are not referring to his physical being but the inner self of how he relates with other human beings.
According to Michael Onyebuchi Eze, the core of ubuntu can best be summarised as follows:
” ‘A person is a person through other people’ strikes an affirmation of one’s humanity through recognition of an ‘other’ in his or her uniqueness and difference. It is a demand for a creative intersubjective formation in which the ‘other’ becomes a mirror (but only a mirror) for my subjectivity. This idealism suggests to us that humanity is not embedded in my person solely as an individual; my humanity is co-substantively bestowed upon the other and me. Humanity is a quality we owe to each other. We create each other and need to sustain this otherness creation. And if we belong to each other, we participate in our creations: we are because you are, and since you are, definitely I am. The ‘I am’ is not a rigid subject, but a dynamic self-constitution dependent on this otherness creation of relation and distance”
However, the beautiful philosophy of ubuntu which is hinged on communalism was greatly eroded by colonisation of Africa that promoted individualism.
In ancient Africa, communalism was rooted in the African’s cosmic vision and helped to keep societies together.
Colonisation whose effects we are still grappling with is largely responsible with Africa’s loss of identity and disintegration of societal hierarchies that had developed over centuries.
Some critics who include both Africans are Europeans have viewed ubuntu as a post colonial prophetic illusion or utopian dream while others have depicted it as a purely Bantu philosophy not applicable to other tribes.
Scholars like Dirk, J. Louw writing in “Ubuntu: An African Assessment of the Religious Other” points that the Ubuntu emphasizes that consensus in both the social and political spheres can all too often be sidetracked into an oppressive form of collectivism or communalism.
Another scholar Timothy J Schutte on the other hand, raises a philosophical point concerning the Ubuntu conception of individuality.
He argues that Ubuntu philosophy, the self is defined in terms of relationships with others causing him to pose the question, “Can persons and personal relations really be equally primordial?”
However, what these scholars whose analysis is steeped in Eurocentricism fail to grasp is that African thought addresses this contradiction by means of an energy force thought of as making both us and our relationships aspects of the same force field.
In ancient Africa, the self is defined in relation to a larger social or ethnic group which encompasses not only the living but also the dead, the spirits, and the unborn.
This is radically different from western societies which worships celebrities, millionaires and other public figures whose success and wealth is rarely shared.
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