Genealogies of Philosophy: Michael O. Eze

“I am because you are”

Ubuntu is a concept in African philosophy according to which our humanity is fundamentally interlinked. As Kenyan philosopher and theologian John Mbiti puts it, “I am, because we are; and since we are, therefore I am.” From an ontological standpoint, my very existence — the kind of being I am — depends on others. From an ethical perspective, being a moral person is not something I can achieve on my own. According to ubuntu thought, I need others to help me choose wisely.

When I first taught ubuntu philosophy in my Ethics class last year, I was confronted with a number of challenges. I’m no expert in African philosophy. How should I approach ubuntu without treating it as a mere supplement to the established canon about which I know more? How do I know I’m characterising ubuntu in the right way when my whole framework of thinking about self and other is deeply informed by Western philosophy?

I wanted to talk to Michael O. Eze to understand how he, an expert in African philosophy and one of the most prominent thinkers of ubuntu, approaches the concept. How did he arrive at his thoughts on ubuntu, and what does the concept mean to him in the broader context of his life?

Sidra: Let’s get started with the concept of ubuntu, which is one of the sustained concerns of your work. How did you first come to ubuntu philosophy? 

Michael: As a Masters student I was interested in the idea of ubuntu as a communitarian response to liberal individualism. I carried on with this idea in my PhD, and then, my supervisor Jörn Rüsen, who is a historian of ideas [Universität Witten/Herdecke, Germany], suggested that I historicize the idea of ubuntu rather than taking it for granted. From my conviction that I knew what ubuntu was all about, I moved to skepticism, to the conviction that perhaps I don’t know what ubuntu is [after all]!

Eventually, I finished my PhD in Germany with a degree in history and cultural reflection. My thesis examined ubuntu as a form of African humanism in contemporary South African socio-political discourse. A few years later I did another doctorate in political science and international studies at the University of Cambridge, this time on decolonization and transitional justice. And, again, I ended up with ubuntu! I now conceived of ubuntu as a way of thinking about transitional justice and beyond that as offering a critical resource for new debates on decolonization and its continued impact and reproduction in Western and non-Western epistemologies.

Sidra: Tell me more about that first intuition you had – seeing ubuntu thought in relation to liberal individualism. 

Michael: Let me start by saying that I come from a society in which the individual is always a part of the community. This way of looking at the world is central to ubuntu. So, to understand ubuntu, I first wanted to deconstruct notions of the individual and the community. 

Of course, my first assumption was to follow Western philosophical dichotomies – the differences between communitarianism and liberal individualism (more complicated than what I can describe here). I’m thinking of Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel, on the one hand, and then John Rawls, going back to Kant, Locke, etc. on the other.

In African philosophy people also took these dichotomies for granted. There are African philosophers such as Kwasi Wiredu, Ifeanyi Menkiti, and John Mbiti for whom the community is prior to the individual in the sense, for instance, that common good is prior to individual rights. If there’s a conflict between individual rights and common good, common good triumphs. We sometimes accept these dichotomies in Western debates hook, line, and sinker!

In my own work, and also in my childhood, especially thinking of my encounters with elders, I recognized that the relationship between the individual and the community is completely different in African communities than in the Western context. Ubuntu does not begin with a dichotomy between the individual and the community. 

Sidra: How does ubuntu see the relationship between individual and community?

Michael: Ubuntu suggests that the relationship between the individual and the community is contemporaneous. There are individual rights, but these rights are in a contemporaneous relationship with community – none is prior. The community is not just the people you see, your own kind of people; you also think about animals and plants, gods and goddesses, the environment… There are all kinds of beings – none more important than the other. They work in a dialogical relationship. They have to work together to constitute a community. 

From the perspective of ubuntu, the community should respect and enhance the dignity of the individual, and the individual is necessarily a being within community. “A person is a person through other people” – through the differences and uniqueness of the self and the other. This is different from a language restricted to rights.

Sidra: Tell me more about how you understand the relationship between rights and dignity. 

Michael: I’m actually taking a swipe at the idea of rationality, the idea from the Enlightenment that only rational beings are human beings and, on this basis, we have human rights. Rationality was one of the ways in which the Enlightenment thinkers debunked the authority and terms of the church. It was a reactionary discourse against the rigidity of the scholastic era. Humanity according to the Enlightenment is not determined by God, or by the Church, or kings. Appealing to rationality was a way to triumph over these powers. 

However, the problem is that rationality is provincial; it is shaped by culture, traditions, or historical specificities. We can understand this in the context of colonialism. Rationality was central to secular missionary projects – the idea that we are going to go to Africa or India to civilize or modernize them, by teaching them how to behave rationally.  But whose rationality are we talking about? In the colonial context, you become human through our the colonizer’s vision of what is rational. Those who are assimilated become rational human beings. Now you may have “rights” perhaps, but that’s not dignity. 

In the colonial episteme, you have to betray yourself to become the other [the colonizer]. Your memories, your history erased… These issues are raised by Aimé Césaire in Discourse on Colonialism and Frantz Fanon in Black Skins, White Masks.

Sidra: You give a critical account of ubuntu in your book Intellectual History of South Africa. How did you conceive of ubuntu there?

Michael: In that book among other things, I critically explored different ways of looking at ubuntu philosophy. 

What I call the essentialist strand views ubuntu simply in communitarian terms, those who think like us have humanity. Essentialist views on ubuntu suggest that ubuntu has remained original or unchanged over history. This idealizes history. But back then [ubuntu] may have included practices like witch-hunting etc. Not everything in the past is worth retaining.

The other problem is that ubuntu has been commodified. There are ubuntu spiritual societies all over the West. There’s Ubuntu Security in South Africa, Ubuntu Linux, ubuntu restaurants, and supermarkets… This commodification is scripted – “ubuntu, a nice concept from Africa.”

Sidra: Why should we be critical of these ways of looking at ubuntu and what alternative do you offer?

Michael: These are dogmatic ways of understanding ubuntu in that they leave no room for agency. They essentialize ubuntu and reduce it to an abstract practice.  But cultural ideas, like ubuntu, are not fixed. Culture is a location of tension, a location of rupture, change, ambiguity, and ambivalence. Ubuntu becomes oppressive and empty if we look at it in these essentialist or reductive ways. 

In my book, I argue for a performative conception of ubuntu, seeing it as an open-ended historical practice relying on narrative and activity and tied to human enrichment. In Western philosophy, the nearest philosopher that could mirror ubuntu in this performative sense is Aristotle, his virtue ethics. The question is: how do I become a good human being in all the competencies I possess and how to pursue happiness? This is different from the question in Kant-inspired liberal modernity: what kind of law, what kind of rules should I obey so that I become a good human being? 

As performative, ubuntu is a philosophy of dialogue. Every encounter is a recreation of the self. And differences are the gift of humanity; their acceptance is necessary for a community to flourish. The ego, in this first encounter, breaks down through the course of negotiation. You recognize that you’re a human because of other human beings. But your humanity is not just a single aspect, scripted for you, as rational etc. Dialogue is the key here. Humanity occurs at the crossroads of dialogue with the other. 

Sidra: Tell me more about the central claim in ubuntu, “I am because we are.”

Michael: I think that this way of seeing ubuntu can be problematic. John Mbiti says, “I am because we are; since we are therefore I am.” In my own work I say that we should modify this formulation. “I am because we are” emphasizes the humanity of the “we” — our own kind. I suggest rather “I am because you are; since you are therefore I am.” Who the “you” is remains open. Again, the first formulation recognizes only our own kind. In the second, there is space to recognize not only those we like, but even our enemies, as co-human beings. 

Sidra: I can see that this opens up a space for difference. The “you” can be someone who is outside my community (the “we”). Would you say that here ubuntu is universalist?

Michael: If we try to understand ubuntu in terms of universality, one thing should be clear: ubuntu rejects ontological superiority. It doesn’t say we need to intervene in certain areas of the world because we have all the answers, the truths, as well as the solutions, so, we come and colonize and civilize you. We impose our democracy. When talking about universality, we should avoid an ontological and moral superiority. 

This is why I speak about the notion of “subjective equality” in my work. It tells us how we can have dialogue without me defining the terms. The notion of subjective equality goes beyond just recognizing our own kind, people who think like us or use our notion of right or wrong. Whatever your condition, you are part of my humanity. Even if you’re immoral, ignorant, whatever the case is, you are still part of it. I am not coming to save you. I’m coming to learn from you. This is what I mean about the performativity of ubuntu. I don’t come with my own moral claims and universalize them as truth. So, the idea isn’t that we in Nigeria should go and impose ubuntu in Niger. It’s a philosophy that opens a space for moral thinking. There are no ubuntu missionaries. 

Sidra: I’d like to move on now to your personal history. What was it like doing philosophy in Zimbabwe and South Africa?

Michael: I did high school in Nigeria, where I was training to be a priest. I was inspired by Jesus of Nazareth’s Sermon on the Mount, the idea of compassion for others. The ideas there stayed with me… Your friend cannot go hungry; helping other people is more important than going to Church. 

I then moved to Zimbabwe to study [BA Honors in Philosophy and Classics] at Arrupe College [Jesuit School of Philosophy and the Humanities, now Arrupe Jesuit University] in Harare. I wanted to be a Jesuit priest. 

Lucky for me, the university was built on Ignatian spirituality and the philosophy of Wilhelm von Humboldt, his idea of education as integrative. They really taught us everything there. We learned French, world history, cultural studies, theology, African literature, Homer, Sophocles, Kant, you name it! The idea was not only to focus on the canon but also to give us a wide background. I really did start to see things differently. 

I was quite a nerd, a book worm, when I was an undergraduate. I didn’t just stay at the Jesuit School of Philosophy in Zimbabwe, I enrolled at the University of South Africa concurrently and worked on another degree in psychology and anthropology.  I was always reading, so I did probably miss out on other things. What else do you do as a Jesuit?! I don’t regret it. Arrupe College was my intellectual furnace – everything I am and did, my Masters, my two PhDs, goes back to those four years. 

Sidra: Which of your lectures or mentors have stayed with you in your thinking?

Michael: Mr. Brown, professor of African literature at Arrupe College had a big impact on me. His reading of Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka together with his reading of Sophocles and other classics shaped my thinking and created a space for dialogue between Africa and Europe. Like history, literature does not just describe society; it interprets and anticipates modalities of the future. 

A second person is the Jesuit Father John Stacer. He taught me the virtue of compassion and epistemic empathy. He is probably the most influential professor in my life. The first paper I submitted for his class was covered in red ink! He was everything to me. He taught me how to write and think philosophically. As a teacher I try to imitate what I learned from him and my students always speak of compassion in their evaluations.

Sidra: What were some of the major events in your life — historical, political or personal — that shaped your thinking?

Michael: It was cumulative. 

I recall the assassination of Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso in which the French were complicit when I was in elementary school. My school teacher who was always talking about Sankara seemed very sad one day and told us “Sankara has been killed.” And as a child, I just wondered and wondered — why would they kill someone who wants to stop Africa from begging for food, who champions the rights of women? As a child, I knew the name brought pride to Africa and his assassination had a lasting influence on my vision of global politics.

Then when I was older I read about Patrice Lumumba, how the Belgian government, equally complicit in his murder, dragged him through the streets of the Congo [in Kinshasa], and subjected him to other very inhumane treatment; how his wife Pauline Opango Lumumba mourned in the streets. It made me very angry. The more I read, the more I got disillusioned. Of course, it was obvious that human rights were not for Africans as far as the colonialists were concerned. 

African history had a great impact on me — the history of colonialism, trying to understand it. I read Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa in my first year as an undergraduate, and I thought I was going to be a radical and start a revolution! I just couldn’t understand why they are doing the same things they did under colonialism. I knew it wasn’t right. 

But also, the racism you experience…it was something you couldn’t understand. Suddenly you’re in a place where other people think they are better than you for no reason, just the color of your skin. You started hating yourself, disliking people who looked like you, because you are made to feel inferior. You normalize and internalize these things. Revolt can come through violence of the self or violence of the other, because you’re revolting against what has been imposed upon and within you. You want to break out of those chains of entrapment. 

Sidra: Returning to the present, in our classrooms and institutions there’s increasing talk about decolonization. What are your thoughts on decoloniality?

Michael: I think we need to articulate a coherent understanding of decolonization. My current work aims to redefine decoloniality. 

There is an emphasis these days on decolonizing structures. But what about the agents inhabiting these structures? You can’t decolonize structures and leave out the agents. The question is how do we keep agents from building and re-building unjust structures. There are principally two agents: the victims and the villains. We start with the villains or oppressors, they are the ones that need to decolonize…

Debates are not sufficient. We need something like a conversion, what may be termed “subjective conversion.” Racism can be like a religion. It’s like a faith. It’s not rational, though it has internal coherence. We need to get people to see the world differently. 

The answer is not to bring one black person and put them in your faculty and say: “we decolonized” — and besides, even that hardly ever happens! You cannot tokenize scholars — you’re a black person and now you have to represent, so every question about Africa comes to you, and the idea is that the institution has now decolonized. That is not sufficient. It is agents of the system, not just the system, that need to be decolonized. 

Decolonization is constant dialogue. You never arrive at understanding. You’re always trying to understand. I think here ubuntu can play an important role. 

Sidra: What would philosophy look like if it were decolonized?

Michael: I am not suggesting that decolonialization become a displacement narrative, that here in Europe people stop reading European philosophy or [get rid of] Kant — that would be antithetical to ubuntu philosophy. But let us also have African philosophy. Decolonizing does not mean that we have to undermine or neutralize existing sources of knowledge, but that we have to open spaces where new forms of knowledge can exist in their own right. I think the University of Leiden where I work is on the right track, where we do global comparative philosophy. The program is growing. Students see that we don’t just have to look out from one window, but that we can have different perspectives. 

Let me say something about hybridity, where you bring in a few non-Western aspects and infuse them in a course and then say we’ve decolonized the syllabus. This way you graft these aspects on existing philosophical frameworks. Instead of hybridity, the medium of epistemic relations should be confluence, a confluence of narratives. Philosophy can and should have multiple centers. Only then does it become philosophy proper. 

Sidra: Thanks for your time, Michael!

~

This is an installment of Into Philosophy.