How the Crisis of Ubuntu in South Africa Exposes Black Nakedness and Homelessness

You might be forgiven if you cringe at the title of this essay, but that is really what this piece is about: to expose the nakedness of the black race and our homelessness shamefully displayed in the recent attacks of black South Africans against fellow Africans living in South Africa. John Bowlby once said that all of life, from the cradle to the grave, is a daring excursion from a secure base.

It seems to me that many black people throughout the world have internalized the racist logic and violence, falling into the febrile pit of learned helplessness. Rather than tell our stories as redemptive, pushing towards a new social imaginary, some would rather wallow in self-pity and swim in the mud of contaminating narratives.

The nakedness and homelessness of black people reflect this loss of a secure base. What has continued in South Africa since the post-apartheid era, in black-on-black violence, first among black South Africans, painfully displayed in the clashes between the Inkatha Freedom Party and ANC youth immediately after the release of Nelson Mandela, and subsequently since 2008 in the attacks of South Africans against fellow black Africans, is a symptom of that loss.

Our secure base as people of African descent was articulated by the late Desmond Tutu as ubuntu. This organizing virtue shapes love, community, solidarity, participation, and friendship in our communities.

The land that popularized Ubuntu is showing us, as blacks, much to our collective pain, that Ubuntu, like our other deeply held and celebrated cultural values and ethics of community, is in crisis. Indeed, contemporary Africa faces a crisis of history, identity, and community, resulting from many years of gradual erosion of our collective consciousness of our shared history and our intimate, inseparable destiny.

When blacks fight against each other or see each other as enemies, they recirculate the destructive techniques of the oppressors among the victims of history. 

Frantz Fanon warned the black people about this possibility over 60 years ago, arguing that colonialism reproduces itself in the colonized. Racism, like colonialism, also reproduces its worst forms through hatred, violence, mistrust, killings, dehumanization, barbarism, lies, prejudice, and atrocities within black bodies and minds whose inner human recesses it has poisoned. Thus, in ways not fully controlled or contained within black communities, these pathologies are reproduced in black-on-black violence.

Breaking this cycle of violence in black communities, from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to the Khayelitsha slums in Cape Town, from the “microbes” unleashing criminality in Abobo, Abidjan, to the marauding killing squads of Jama’at Nasr al Islam wal Muslimin in the Sahel, requires more than moral outrage. It requires what may be called a social autopsy and a liberation historiography of black suffering and black violence.

We must ask difficult questions about the social conditions, historical humiliations, economic exclusions, political betrayals, and psychological wounds that make the oppressed turn against one another. A liberation historiography refuses shallow explanations and recovers the buried histories of dispossession, colonial fragmentation, racial humiliation, and failed postcolonial and post-apartheid promises that continue to shape black consciousness today.

A social autopsy helps us diagnose not simply the symptoms of violence and attacks on fellow Africans by black South Africans, but the deeper moral, historical, and structural diseases that sustain it. Without such a critical diagnosis, black communities risk merely condemning violence episodically in Harlem, New York, or the South Side of Chicago, while failing to dismantle the forces that continually reproduce it.

The Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar (SECAM), in its statement condemning the attacks, rightly noted that the crisis in South Africa today is not simply a political or economic problem, but a profound moral and spiritual crisis, marked by the loss of the communal ethic of Ubuntu expressed in the conviction, “I am because we are.” Violence against fellow Africans is therefore a denial of African identity and the interconnectedness, dignity, and shared humanity of all people, where we affirm the humanity and dignity of others and see ourselves in them.

The call by the African bishops captures the spiritual path to repair from the moral and spiritual rupture that has stripped black South Africans of the Ubuntu spirit. But to understand the deeper rupture and crisis of Ubuntu in South Africa, and by extension in many black communities in Africa and the Diaspora, we must reflect more critically on the roots of the loss of historical consciousness among blacks, the failures of black liberation. This is what I have framed with the omnibus term ‘homelessness.’

Homelessness, Pan-Africanism, and the Future of the Black Race

In the first half of the twentieth century, Pan-Africanists like W. E. B. Du Bois, George Padmore, Marcus Garvey, Mamadou Dia, Modibo Keita, Ahmed Sékou Touré, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Kwame Nkrumah, Alioune Diop, and Nnamdi Azikiwe advocated the return of Africans to their African motherland, the political emancipation of colonial Africa, and the restoration of the dignity and rights of Africans in the United States, South Africa, and other parts of the world where they suffered racism, violence, and denial of basic human rights. As a movement, Pan-Africanism had different trajectories and concerns, expressed in various slogans by different advocates. The Back to Africa Movement sought the return of formerly enslaved Africans to their homeland to build a great nation. The Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities Imperial League proclaimed, “Africa for Africans at home and abroad,” a slogan popularized by Marcus Garvey.

Despite their differences, these movements converged around the longing among Africans in the Diaspora for return, dignity, freedom, and the recovery of a wounded historical consciousness. This return was framed within political, economic, spiritual, and cultural visions of liberation, buoyed by Black consciousness movements such as Négritude.

This vision included Spanish-speaking Africans in Cuba, Portuguese-speaking Blacks in Brazil and Portugal, Dutch speakers in Holland, French-speaking Blacks from Haiti to Martinique and from France to Belgium, Arab speaking Africans in the Middle East, Afro Saxons in the Americas, and Black citizens of Trinidad and Tobago, Grenada, the Dominican Republic, Britain, and Canada. Driven by this idealism, the Pan-Africanists did not sufficiently appreciate the complexity of the concept of Africa, blackness, and Africanness, because being African does not necessarily mean being Black.

Africa is a continent of immense racial, cultural, linguistic, and religious diversity. It is home to thousands of ethnic groups, languages, cultures, and religious traditions. Asian and Indian communities have lived, intermarried, and flourished in Africa for centuries. Countries such as South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Angola, Mozambique, Madagascar, and Ethiopia are home to rich mixtures of African, Caucasian, Asian, and Indian populations. Significant Arab and Afro Arab populations also exist in the Maghreb, Sudan, Somalia, parts of Chad, and Nigeria.

As Jared Diamond observes, even before colonialism, Africa already contained five of the world’s six major divisions of humanity and nearly one quarter of the world’s languages. Africa’s immense diversity reflects its geography, ecological complexity, and long human history.

It was largely a geographical attempt to conquer the homelessness of Africans.

What do I mean by the homelessness of Africans? The homelessness of Africans does not merely refer to the millions of Africans living far from the African motherland, nor simply to the devastating effects of brain drain on African economies and societies.

This alienation weakens their sense of identity, unity, and connection to each other, and hampers the integral transformation of their societies both within Africa and in the Diaspora. It is the existential exile into which the historical conditioning and cultural suffocation of Africans have placed them, making impossible the full blossoming of the African personality and the emergence of truly liberated, self-regenerating, cohesive, and organic African societies. It is also the root cause of the seeming failure of Africans to work together locally, nationally, regionally, continentally, and internationally to build robust socio-political and economic structures for a new era in which the light of African existence, extinguished by historical injustice, can be rekindled through cultural rebirth.

Homelessness also reflects the loss of our epistemological roots and the gradual depletion of our indigenous fund of knowledge. As a result, we increasingly accept the orthodoxy of Northern epistemologies as the dominant and unquestioned framework for interpreting reality and solving social problems, while neglecting African epistemological pillars, cultural wisdom, and worldviews. Yet these African ways of knowing contain intellectual, moral, spiritual, and communal resources that can help shape a functional rationality capable of addressing the concrete historical, political, economic, and social challenges confronting African peoples today.

Homelessness produces a loss of faith in the future of the Black race. It leads Blacks to loathe fellow Blacks and embrace social hierarchies among us. It contributes to the repeated failure of Black leaders in Africa, the United States, and those who occupy positions of influence in international institutions to harness the positive energy and shared identity of Black peoples in reimagining Black dignity, agency, and collective efficacy. Above all, it reflects the failure of Black peoples to take a critical look at their historical condition and to discover, from within the heart of Mother Africa and through collaborative partnership, the path toward renewal. The homelessness of Africans also refers to the identity crisis of millions of Africans and their continuing search for who they are and where they belong in the world.

Cry, the Beloved Country

Nearly eighty years ago, South African novelist Alan Paton warned the world in Cry, the Beloved Country, about a society consumed by fear, division, social disintegration, and the tragic erosion of human solidarity under racial injustice. Paton mourned a country losing its moral soul through hatred, exclusion, humiliation, and violence. Today, the painful irony is that some of the wounds he described under apartheid now reappear in the violence Blacks inflict upon fellow Blacks and African foreigners in democratic South Africa. The tragedy is no longer only what white supremacy did to Black bodies and Black dignity, but the homelessness that unresolved humiliation, poverty, fear, resentment, and social despair are now causing Black people to do to one another.

Paton’s prophetic lament, therefore, acquires a new and disturbing meaning in our time. South Africans, and indeed all of us, must now cry not only for a country wounded by racism, but for a humanity in danger of losing its Ubuntu. We must cry for the migrant humiliated in the streets of Johannesburg, for the fellow African treated as an enemy rather than a brother or sister, for the poor who have inherited despair instead of hope, and for a generation of young Black people growing up in societies where fear is slowly replacing solidarity. As Paton wrote, “Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear.” That unborn child now stands before us in the townships, the slums, the refugee shelters, and the forgotten neighborhoods of our world, inheriting the bitterness, violence, fragmentation, and moral exhaustion that we have failed to heal—striking a dagger into the very soul of God in whose image and likeness we are all made.