Toward the ‘Ubuntu-isation’ of a fractured world

The “world” – or more precisely, those who have appointed themselves as its spokespersons – rarely pauses to ask Mother Africa what she sees, what she knows, or what she remembers about the crises that consume our shared humanity. Decisions are made. Narratives are crafted. Interventions are justified. And somewhere in the background, an entire civilisational archive is politely ignored.
    Centuries of domination have not only extracted resources; they have extracted legitimacy. They have trained the global imagination to look everywhere for solutions – except toward the continent that first taught the world how to be human. As Jacques Depelchin once warned, the “syndrome of the discoverer” still lingers: the illusion that truth only exists once it has been found, named, and stamped elsewhere.
    Yet Africa does not shout. It remembers.
    The Ethiopian thinker and poet Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin captured this paradox with clarity: one cannot begin knowing oneself halfway. Civilisations do not start in the middle of the story. They begin where memory begins – and much of that memory runs through Africa. The irony is almost architectural: monuments of power in the West echo forms born along the Nile, obelisks transplanted without the humility that once accompanied them. A borrowed symbol, stripped of its origin, yet still silently pointing back.
    But this is not a call for nostalgia. Nor is it a plea for recognition. It is something more urgent: a transmission.
    As a student of Humanity – of Ubuntu – it becomes a responsibility to carry forward what has too often been left unheard. Especially now, when the descendants of shared lineages fracture themselves across deserts and borders, when conflicts labeled “complex” are in fact painfully simple: human beings failing to recognize themselves in one another.
    We are told these crises are ancient, inevitable, intractable. We are told they belong to history. Yet what unfolds – from the Middle East to Central Africa – is not history. It is repetition. And repetition is not complexity; it is refusal.
    Refusal to see.
    Refusal to listen.
    Refusal to recognise.
    Even institutions built in the name of peace – like United Nations – often arrive too late, too distant, too abstracted from the ground where reality bleeds. Not out of malice, perhaps, but out of structural detachment. Meanwhile, those who calculate power continue their games, while ordinary people bury their dead.
    So what does Africa – what does Khemetic thought – offer here?
    Not a blueprint. Not a doctrine.
    A lens.
    Ubuntu is often translated simply: “I am because we are.” But this is not a slogan. It is an ontology. A way of understanding existence itself.
    I = f(We)¹
    The self is not an isolated unit. It is a function of relationships. Identity is not owned – it is co-created.
    From this follow principles that are both simple and radical:

• A person becomes a person through others.
• Your child is my child. Their suffering is not distant – it is shared.
• Land is not property; it is origin. A mother, not a commodity.
• Humanity is not divisible along borders drawn by fear or ambition.

If such principles were not merely quoted but internalised, the language of “sides” would begin to collapse. The child in Gaza, the child in Tel Aviv, the child in Goma – they would cease to be statistics belonging to opposing narratives. They would simply be children. Ours.
    And that realisation changes everything.
    African philosophical traditions have long articulated this interconnectedness through the concept of Ntu – the vital force binding all existence: human (Mu-ntu), nature (Ki-ntu), and the unseen continuity of life. It is a worldview in which separation is illusion, and harmony is not idealism but necessity.
    From this same lineage emerges the ethical architecture later articulated in Maulana Karenga’s framework of Kwanzaa – seven principles not as ritual, but as a social grammar for survival:

• Umoja (Unity): beyond “me versus you,” there is only us.
• Kujichagulia (Self-determination): to define ourselves without denying others theirs.
• Ujima (Collective responsibility): peace as shared labor, not passive hope.
• Nia (Purpose): a horizon larger than grievance.
• (Familyhood): resolving conflict without spectacle or humiliation.
• Kuumba (Creativity): imagining solutions beyond violence.

– Imani (Faith): not blind belief, but commitment to life over death.
These are not abstract virtues. They are survival technologies – refined over generations that understood one fundamental truth: fragmentation destroys, connection sustains.
    And yet, here we are. A world hyper-connected digitally, and catastrophically disconnected humanly.
    The danger today is not ignorance. It is selective listening.
    Ubuntu cannot be exported like a product, nor adopted as a fashionable concept detached from its roots. It demands something far more uncomfortable: humility. The willingness to unlearn. To listen to knowledge systems that were never lost – only ignored.
    Africa does not claim to have all the answers. But it refuses the idea that it has nothing to say.
    To humanise the world is not to invent new principles. It is to remember old ones – and to live them. To recognise that dignity is indivisible. That suffering anywhere reshapes humanity everywhere. That no one becomes fully human alone.
    “I am because you are.”
    Not poetry.
    Not philosophy.
    A condition for survival.
    And perhaps, at this stage of history, the only one left. •

¹ I = f (WE) is a shorthand way of saying that the “I” (I) is a function of the “We” (We): “I am because we are.” (Editor’s note)

* Raïs Neza Boneza (born 1979, Zaire – now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) is a writer, poet, and peace researcher based in Norway. His life traces the fault lines he writes about: from eastern and western Congo to the Africans Great Lakes, across borders where history rarely stays still. Multilingual and transnational, he works across African and European languages, carrying oral memory into written form. He has collaborated with Johan Galtung, one of the founders of modern peace research, and continues to operate at the intersection of scholarship, activism, and artistic expression. Beyond his roles as consultant and lecturer for international NGOs and institutions, he is co-convener of Transcend Global Network, a global platform dedicated to peace, development, and environmental justice. His work moves between poetry and political analysis, exile and return, memory and resistance. Selected publications include Peace by African’s Peaceful Means (2005), Nomad: Sounds of Exile (2006), Nomad: A Refugee Poet (2019), White Eldorado, Black Fever (2019), Black Emeralds (2020), and Formless (2024).