Ubuntu for Warriors 9781569027011

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UBUNTU FOR

WARRIORS

UBUNTU FOR

WARRIORS Colin Chasi

Copyright © 2021 Colin Chasi All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher. Book design: Dawid Kahts Cover image: Blessing Ngobeni, Black Rubber, 2020, linocut, 100 x 70cm, 1/5. Image courtesy of Blessing Ngobeni & University of the Free State Art Gallery. © Blessing Ngobeni. Cover design: Ashraful Haque Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data may be obtained from the Library of Congress. ISBNs: 978-1-56902-701-1 (HB) 978-1-56902-702-8 (PB)

Contents Ubuntu as a Living Spirit of LiberationForeword xi Ubuntu for Warriors: Introduction

1

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors

25

Ubuntu for Nelson Mandela and War

47

Ubuntu for Archbishop Tutu and Just War

71

Ubuntu for Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Honour

95

Ubuntu for Kenneth Kaunda, Pacifism and War

143

Ubuntu for Steve Biko and the Envisioned Warrior: Conclusion

169

Bibliography

193

Index

213

v

This book is dedicated to my late father, Ruvimbo Godfrey Chasi. Baba, tinokutendai mune zvose. Rarai zvakanaka.

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Acknowledgements

I

have drawn on the insights of many colleagues I have met along the way, many of whom I was unable to acknowledge in the text. In particular, I think of Stefan Sonderling, whose work on the violence of communication I have found very interesting. I am grateful to my friends and colleagues Nyasha Mboti, viola milton, Winston Mano, and Cuthbert Tagwirei for their insights and contributions to this project. In particular, Nyasha Mboti took time, even after a writing retreat that discussed the book, to continue to engage me with ideas that I have found very useful. There are many others whose contributions I do not forget. Failure to mention them by name is no slight to them. Not that I am a cat, but in my mother tongue, when we speak of the deepest thankfulness we say that a cat’s appreciation is in its heart! The comments I received from the anonymous review process were mightily generous and useful. It is an honor to have been driven to improve the manuscript so warmly and yet so critically. I truly appreciate the generosity of the University of the Free State’s Research Development Division which provided incentive funds for this project.

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Ubuntu for Warriors Ābati Kassahun, only heaven knows how you have been patient with this project. What a gentleman and what a publisher you are! The chapter “Ubuntu for Archbishop Tutu and Just War” was previously published as: Colin Tinei Chasi. 2018. “Tutuist Ubuntu and Just War.” Politikon, 45(2): 232–244. DOI: 10.1080/02589346.2017.1301022. © South African Association of Political Studies, reprinted by permission of Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group, www.tandfonline.com on behalf of South African Association of Political Studies.

Thank you, Angela de Jesus and the UFS Art Gallery, for facilitating the process by which Blessing Ngobeni kindly permitted us to use his linocut Black Rubber (2020) as the cover image for this book. I am unable to express the depth of my gratitude to Blessing and his management. With all the assistance I have received, the faults that remain in this book are mine. Last, but not least, many thanks to all my family members who have given up so much to allow me to follow an academic career.

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Ubuntu as a Living Spirit of LiberationA Foreword

T

he simple act of juxtaposing the terms ‘ubuntu’ and ‘warrior’ in the title of this book—of writing of ‘ubuntu warriors’—is subversive of the common moral philosophy in which ubuntu is imprisoned. To bring the figure of the ‘warrior’ affirmatively into discourses of ubuntu is part of necessary rethinking of thinking itself. To invoke the figure of King Shaka ka Senzangakhona (the founder of the mighty Zulu nation in the nineteenth century) as a warrior of ubuntu and place him in the same book with former President Nelson Mandela of South Africa who led South Africa out of formal apartheid, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu who presided over the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa is a radical act of intellectual synthesis, bringing figures who lived in different moments into dialogue and conversation. To invoke the spirit of Steven Bantu Biko—the quintessential leader of the Black Consciousness Movement simultaneously with that of the mother of the South African nation, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, putting the two xi

Ubuntu for Warriors on the same pedestal (as ubuntu warriors) is to bridge a yawning gap that has long needed to be addressed. I therefore find Colin Chasi’s book Ubuntu Warriors groundbreaking at many levels. It is indeed a product of a daring and restless intellectual mind that is eager to liberate ubuntu from so many articulations which deprive it of history and its subversive character. What is refreshing and indeed groundbreaking is how the figure of the warrior is rehabilitated in Chasi’s drive to rescue ubuntu from moral philosophy and rearticulate it so that it can set out desirable revolutionary pathways and thus set the course towards necessary liberation. But the historical and philosophical rehabilitation of ubuntu that is called for by Chasi does not deny morality itself. What is unique here is that virtues that include those of harmony, justice, unity, reconciliation, forgiveness are sought here not in lives of saints but from the practices of warriors. What is turned upside down in Chasi’s book is the idea of the warrior tradition as symbolized by homo polemos. As we follow Colin Chasi on the journey, not only of re-theorizing ubuntu with reference to the figure of the warrior, but also of creatively bringing the historical and the biographical into this useful intellectual intervention, we are introduced to greater possibilities for ubuntu to be a liberating force. For instance, we are able to begin to appreciate the painstaking nation-building by which King Shaka ka Senzangakhona in the nineteenth century cultivated pan-ethnic patriotism and comradeship out of kaleidoscopes of ethnic and cultural groups. Rethinking the warrior tradition in this way is an act of love of humanity. Such love, in fact, is a key ingredient of ubuntu as humanism.

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Foreword It appears to me that while Chasi is not oblivious to the haunting issues of violence in nation-building and in the warrior tradition, he is attentive to the elements of agency and actionality. He hence thinks about ubuntu as a living spirit of liberation that must be appreciated within concrete human history. In anchoring his vibrant account of ubuntu for warriors in the past of Africa in general—South Africa in particular—Chasi creatively and innovatively reminds us that figures such as Shaka, President Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Tutu, Biko and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela are players in how ubuntu is played out in cultural-historical settings by people who demand and have rights to liberation in all its splendid possibilities. In the course of this, a figure such as Mandela emerges in Chasi’s analysis as a person who was a realist, embracing violence and confrontation as necessary vehicles for liberation while at the same time remaining committed to values of peace. The cast of characters that the book presents is noted for its varied ideas and actionality in the service of humanity. Drawing on these distinguished characters and their legacies enables Chasi not to only historicize ubuntu but to also bring it into the coalface of struggles for life that entail strategic deployment and embracement of violence as a liberatory tool. I celebrate that in Chasi’s book one is taken on a journey into how precolonial warrior traditions informed anti-colonial liberation struggles. Readers of Ubuntu for Warriors are led to reflect on how notions (of non-racialism, pacificism, just war and humanism) that are now encased by ubuntu reflect understandings that emerge within complex realities of history, struggles and conflict. xiii

Ubuntu for Warriors Chasi must be commended for delivering a subversive text which will habitually defy and misbehave every time it is read from the conventional moral philosophy currently used to understand ubuntu. He successfully throws ubuntu into the battlefield of history and in doing so he allows it to reveal its sharp edges— reminding readers that ubuntu too must be dealt with carefully. Importantly, and evidently, Chasi’s call for embracing the warriors of ubuntu is subversion with care, subversion that refuses to descend into worshipping war and violence. Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Chair in Epistemologies of the Global South University of Bayreuth Germany

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1 UBUNTU FOR WARRIORS: Introduction

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buntu is for everyone,1 warriors too. But saying this goes against the grain. Indeed, it is paradigmatically heretical to think this way. These days, ubuntu is widely spoken about as a moral philosophy2 that values harmony,3 restorative justice, and other peaceable practices4 to the detriment of even thinking about ubuntu for warriors—those quintessential figures of warfare. Hence, it now seems a complete anathema to think of ubuntu for warriors, though morality is for warriors too. This unnecessarily and unfortunately weakens understandings of ubuntu because Africans5 have histories in which warriors have been part of the establishment and maintenance of good societies. As in the past, so too now and into the future, Africans need to know how, when, why, and to what end their warriors are leashed and unleashed in small and great fights for more just social orders. This book makes a pioneering case for ubuntu as a moral philosophy for warriors. Ubuntu6 is a name given to a moral philosophy developed by Bantu-speaking7 Africans. The word “ubuntu” is extant in different forms in various Bantu languages. Broadly speaking, it relates to a notion of 1

Ubuntu for Warriors “humanness/humanity.” Christian Gade’s (2011: 307) study of early written texts that reference ubuntu, dating back to 1850, identified common understandings associated with the term. The most common were “human nature,” “humanity,” and “humanness.” Gade’s study is not definitive, as he conducted his analysis on the basis of what he could find through Google searches. But his study does offer some grounds for thinking that there is a long history of seeing Africans as humans for whom all things are possible. As such, for Africans, it is intuitive to think that over history, notions of ubuntu have included thoughts on how people should fight—both for survival and to thrive—in ways that give value to warrior traditions. Ubuntu is most commonly expressed metaphorically with the isiZulu aphorism umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, which is notoriously difficult to translate into English. Most often one sees this aphorism translated to say that a person is a person with/through others. Though on the face of it, this may seem to be the case, a metaphoric reading shows that the grounding phrase of this aphorism, umuntu ngumuntu (a person is a person), is not tautological. For metaphoric reading presupposes that one thing is being read in relation to another so that saying a “person is a person” can reveal at least two meanings of the word “person.” The most obvious of such meanings is biological or natural while another apparent meaning is about the moral worthiness of individuals. Saying umuntu ngumuntu ngaBantu, “a person is a person with/through others,” is to remark that how a person is a person is somehow qualified by how they relate with/through others. The openness of the prefix nga (with/through) to multiple interpretations suggests 2

Ubuntu for Warriors: Introduction that human relations can and ought to have multiple forms, directions, or social constructions. Humanness (as well as human morality) is presented as something that is co-produced by individuals as they co-orient with/through others in the world. If this is so, ubuntu vests people with the creative power to construct the social good. It says each person is on a life journey that involves possibilities of self-actuating humanness. And this journey is with others. Alternatively stated, ubuntu is an expression of how persons should live their journey towards their own humanness with and through others. Ubuntu is a philosophy for altruistically journeying through life, in communities that are conducive to moral living, in such ways that individuals can become the most they can be. There is some semantic support for the idea that ubuntu calls people to uniquely human practices that are generous. In ubuntu’s 5,000-year history, new divergent meanings have been given to words that share etymological roots with the word “ubuntu.” For example, Wa Mberia (2015: 114) notes that because of historical semantic modification, In Luganda, ‘obuntu’ is a shorter form of ‘obuntu bulamu’ meaning ‘human behaviour’ whereas in Kinyarwanda ‘ubuntu’ means generosity. These changes have come about as a result of semantic shift. The word for ‘humanness/humanity’ in Kinyarwanda is ‘ubumuntu’.

Historical semantic analysis indicates that the clusters of words that have cognate relations with ubuntu tie together ideas about humanity/humanness with behaviors that are generous. This points to a universal association of humanness with altruism. And altruism is not for Bantu-speaking Africans only;8 it is not solely 3

Ubuntu for Warriors espoused by those who develop the traditions of ubuntu. Ubuntu is, to apply the succinct expression of George Lakoff and Mark Johnsen (2003), a metaphor we live by.9 Bearing this in mind, I am after presenting an account of African morality that speaks to the experiences of Africans who, daily, face violence and its effects.10 This book speaks of how, living with violence, Africans have developed a vast array of cultural and moral practices.11 Africans also share important thematic norms that relate to the concept, socio-organizational significance, and symbolism of the warrior (Mazrui, 1977b & 1977c). So I am writing here of the figure of the warrior, seeing the warrior character as a locus of moral agency in the ways in which it has and continues to direct action in African societies. The warrior, in metaphoric terms, reveals and situates the human capacity to act with agency that breaks down barriers, climbs over mountains, and worms through problems. The figure of the warrior expresses the capacity of people to secure survival by means of abilities to fight, destroy, and protect. In some instances, this has lent warriors legitimacy to lead African states, customs, and moralities. Recognition of the centrality of the warrior in the construction of societies is not new or original. Thomas Carlyle’s (1908) famous thesis On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, for example, develops various strands of argument that identify heroic warrior figures who lead and define their societies. But African warrior traditions are absent from professional philosophical discussions on ubuntu and on African philosophy in general. Philosophical erasure of the living moral traditions of warriors is practiced in writings 4

Ubuntu for Warriors: Introduction on African moral philosophy that were pioneered by the Belgian Reverend Placide F. Tempels (1959) in the book Bantu Philosophy.12 While on the face of it Tempels recognized Africans as humans who are sophisticated enough to have moral philosophies that guide their behaviors, he also had the prototypical colonial mindset that he was bringing Christianity, law, and civil governance where it was lacking. His work contributed, in his view, to a necessary civilizing mission. Tempels (1959: 18) saw Bantu Philosophy as a text written to outline “the true, the good and the stable in native custom… [in order to] be able to lead our Africans in the direction of a true Bantu civilization”—where that civilization is itself Christian and Western in its structures and modes of civil governance. However, Temples expressed skepticism about the colonial impulse to drive Bantu peoples to let go of their philosophies which have been crafted over generations. Doing this, he saw, amounted to driving the colonized to intellectual suicide. Tempels feared negative implications of epistemicide, reasoning that the loss of indigenous moral schema would leave the colonized without guides to moral behavior (Tempels, 1959: 19). Accordingly, Tempels (1959: 19) felt the prime task of colonialists was “to add new nobility to… Bantu thought”—to use Bantu moral insights in order to bond the colonized to Western colonial interests.13 Colonial power is propped up and propelled into many futures by actions that prevent warriors from arising to combat injustice. Colonial oppression is safeguarded by dissociating ubuntu from moral violence while tying it to notions of peace that foster oppression. “The allusion to peace, to peace as a state of harmony within an established order, has long been 5

Ubuntu for Warriors an indispensable tool in the arsenal of colonialism and racism” (Maldonado-Torres, 2020). Decapitating, dismembering, severing, or mutilating Africans’ links with warrior role models and traditions is part of how colonialism acts to make Africans fit to be menial and “herded”.14 In Something Torn and New, Ngugi wa Thiong’o (2009) describes colonization as a process that mutilates, dismembers, decapitates, and then re-members the minds of the colonized in ways that give priority to the colonizing system’s own cultural, intellectual, economic, and political experiences and memories. With language being but one of its instruments, colonialism captures the symbolic heritage of the colonized and thus bonds the colonized to servitude. Without giving the lecherous figure of the colonizer too many words, which could work to perpetuate its mainstream presence, this book focuses on giving expression to experiences that revitalize the moral traditions of ubuntu for warriors. To be clear, it is not that colonial discourses completely erase the figure of the African warrior from African history. Indeed, in many instances, colonial discourses place in the mainstream disfigured and noxious notions of Big Man rule that disfigure and bind cultures, customs, and traditions to colonial dictates. These mainstream notions aver in innumerable ways to the figure of the warrior, all the while obfuscating it from deliberations. In this context, the tendency for postcolonial African states to resort to military coups, to rule by violence (Houngnikpo, 2010) and in “climates of fear” (Soyinka, 2004), reveals societies that no longer know how to harness the power of their warriors for the production of desirable societies in which all individuals can become the most that they can be. 6

Ubuntu for Warriors: Introduction It must be borne in mind that even when it wears indigenous masks, colonial power compels and draws forth cultures of complicity within which power is distributed and protected in arrangements producing and reproducing societies that do not serve the needs of all those who live under them; rather, colonial misanthropy works by innumerable means to give colonial sovereignty “assurance of its omnipotence” (Mbembe, 2001: 34). Under colonial notions that valorize the “nobility” of Africans who peacefully acquiesce to colonial dominance, ubuntu easily becomes an approach that is incapable of combating oppressive structural and cultural modes of violence. Colonial forces, including those of apartheid, were well-practiced in making use of moral systems, including those with indigenous genealogies, to lull African masses into psychological stupors. Under colonial rule, Africans are constantly being reminded that they are a peace-loving, tolerant and communalist-minded people. The African is projected as an individual who has always been loath to shed blood. The corollary of this argument is that it would be immoral and against our nature to engage in revolutionary warfare. (Nkrumah, 1969: 18–19)

In the psychological stupors that they hope to induce, colonialist and apartheid forces believe that Africans will soon forget that “Military strategy presupposes political aims. All military problems are political, and all political problems are economic” (Nkrumah, 1969: 15–16). At the same time, and thereby, Africans are quietened into not dealing with the ways in which all economic problems are about the production and distribution of goods and services. Add too that all 7

Ubuntu for Warriors problems about the distribution of goods and services entrain questions about conditions for attaining, maintaining, and defending the good life. I am taking the stance that people who espouse ubuntu fight to produce good lives and to elaborate social conditions for lives to be lived well. This includes seeking to appropriately valorize the ideal of the warrior who practices ubuntu. Care, though, must immediately be taken to ensure that values that relate to the figure of the warrior are adopted in ways that are conducive to justice. It is particularly important that ubuntu is not presented in overly simplistic and optimistic terms; one should not fail to grasp that it comes with tendencies to value community which can be so powerful that, when left unchecked and unbalanced, they can give rise to wanton impulses to violence (cf. Blankenberg, 1999; Crais, 1998). It important to explore how Africans have thought about the moral exercise of violence. To this end, I advance insights into how ubuntu is philosophically enriched by values and practices associated with the warrior tradition. I do this while seeking not to diminish or to repeat other well-rehearsed insights into ubuntu that value harmony. For I contend that questing for harmony is consistent with the warrior tradition found among Bantu-speaking Africans who have historically valued and produced ubuntu. Ubuntu is best served whenever its traditions are heeded conscientiously and heroically. To put it succinctly, ubuntu is for warriors too. Anyhow, nothing good about ubuntu is alien to warriors. It is not in South Africa alone that discourses on ubuntu have been used to mollify Bantu-speaking natives who, having fought liberation wars, have 8

Ubuntu for Warriors: Introduction been sold the moral ideal of a non-violent approach to ending legacies of colonial or apartheid oppression. In Zimbabwe, in 1980, as Robert Mugabe15 became the first president of that country after the fall of Ian Smith’s white minority Rhodesia government, hunhuism/ubuntu was invoked to end colonialism and apartheid. Indeed, beginning with its groundbreaking codification in book form by Stanlake Samkange and Tommie-Marrie Samkange (1908) in their Hunhuism or Ubuntuism: A Zimbabwe Indigenous Political Philosophy, the postcolonial history of ubuntu is one of attempts to legitimate unity and non-violence within the country and non-violence in the country’s relations with its neighbors (cf. Gade, 2011: 310; Samkange & Samkange, 1980: 45, 50, 54). In human history, warriors matter. A natural history of humanity could suggest that in earlier times, dominated by semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer bands and clans, the most powerful hunters and warriors exerted great influence over other members. Because even the most powerful lone human actors were vulnerable to the elements, wild animals, and other human competitors, even the Big Men of these societies had to demonstrate moral–ethical qualities including generosity and concern for others (Van Vugt, Hogan, & Kaiser, 2008: 188). The emergence of agriculture produced larger settlements and increased inter- and intra-group conflicts over resources. This required the emergence of chiefs, kings, and warlords as a new class of powerful and privileged cultural elites. This history, whatever its unique notations may be, cannot be detailed well without narratives that variously raise up and cast aside the moral qualities of warriors.

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Ubuntu for Warriors The development of contemporary large human settlements, nation states, and global orders (as we know them) is accompanied by histories of warriors. They are mired in chronicles of violence from which contemporary thinkers can learn. But lessons are difficult to draw from idealized mythologies about African pasts that obfuscate inconvenient facts about the predations of precolonial African chieftains and kinships against neighboring communities (cf. Appiah, 2010). Such lessons are hidden from narratives that deny the in-group suppression of opposition by precolonial leaders in their quests for advantages and dominance (Ranger, 2010; Comaroff & Comaroff, 2009; Vincent, 2006; Coquery-Vidrovitch, 2010). Meanwhile, and for example, neo-patrimonialism that draws on the past and on myths of despotic leadership traditions characterizes contemporary African statecraft (Chabal, 2009; Mkandawire, 2013; Lodge, 2014). Thus, the modern African state continues to have leaders who model themselves as patriarchal warlords, chieftains, and kings who exhibit warrior-like practices. All this transpires in environments that are often far removed from precolonial African practices. What arises under postcolonial conditions is distorted and intermingled with colonialism and modernism. The moral values that guide warriors matter. In many instances when Africans, or other peoples, search for new moral orders that are desirable, warriors have a role. There are many reasons for this. Warriors go where no one else will go. They march ahead while others scatter and retreat. Stories of the attainment of flourishing communities are replete with superlatives about champion fighters who fought hither and thither, against terrible odds, building the spaces in which 10

Ubuntu for Warriors: Introduction happy and productive relations abound. In times of strife, warriors defend their communities. They are the ones societies turn to when the greatest of troubles are at the doorstep. They face what other people run from. As watchdogs, they lay guard over pleasant dreams and peaceful co-existence. For sure, when they act as dogs of war on the side of despots and when they use catastrophic means and seek dreadful ends, warriors can and do cause terrible harms. The point being made is simply that it is necessary to invest intellectual resources to thinking about warriors from the perspective of African moral thought. History has much to teach us about moral perspectives on warriors. As already posited, the figure of the warrior arises throughout known history. Likely, warriors were a major factor in prehistoric times. They had fundamental roles in how human societies across the world engaged in warfare, including whenever they experienced distress on account of climatic adversity and other factors which resulted in competition for scarce resources (Bowles & Gintis, 2012: 102–106). The mummified body of Ötzi, found in September 1991 in mountainous terrain on the border between Austria and Italy, showed evidence that the man, who lived between 3400 and 3100 BCE, had wounds that had likely resulted from acts of human warfare or murder. In South Africa, the two skeletal remains of Australopithecus sediba show some evidence of fatal injuries which could have been a result of violent combat (L’Abbe et al., 2015). War was key to what Coquery-Vidrovitch (2010) describes as the precolonial African mode of production under which elites exploited dominated external communities through controlling trade and collecting tributes by means of plundering military raids. Given 11

Ubuntu for Warriors the prevalence of war in human history, and given the significant role of warriors in history, it stands to reason that Africans developed notions of how to ascribe moral value to the warriorcraft involved in these precolonial practices. This book selectively draws on history to make a case for valuing the warrior tradition of ubuntu. Since prehistoric times, humans have formulated different accounts of how warriors should participate in achieving and maintaining the good. This may be supposed from the observation that human social communing in part arose to enable physically weak and slow humans to survive in difficult natural environments which, as an additional concern, are often populated by powerful competitors and predators who themselves, in many instances, possessed dangerous weapons, including sharp teeth and claws. This book does not discuss the natural evolution of morals, but readers can read Michael Tomasello’s (2016) A Natural History of Morality for an insightful engagement with how the human need for cooperation to mitigate risks and to combat dangers is central to the evolution of morality. Suffice it to say, here, that Tomasello’s arguments in this regard can be used to motivate the view that the African moral philosophy of ubuntu has roots and features that relate to how people should fight, as warriors, for the good. If ubuntu really is a system of moral thought that values humanity, it is reasonable to think that it should have much to say about how Bantu-speaking Africans name, explain, harness, and honor warriors. Yet as this book highlights and challenges, this seems far from the case, particularly when it comes to the written record of ubuntu. 12

Ubuntu for Warriors: Introduction I put the spotlight on ubuntu warriors in this book, a theme which is a priori illuminated with the view that war is like fire—it can burn and harm, or it can cook up a good thing or two! The social capabilities to harness war are fundamental to how societies are established, maintained, and developed. Without such advances, human lives are lived amidst endless wars, and are characterized by “continual fear, and danger of violent death; [such that] the life of man [is], solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Hobbes, 1997: 78). The development of human societies is, in this sense, tied with how societies invest in deepening understandings and practices by which warriors and wars are put to desirable social uses in multiple spheres. Meanwhile it continues as a norm that Africans are set up as different from all that Westerners are. Where Westerners are seen as violent individualists, Africans become harmonious collectivists who cannot fight for their interests. Colonial oppression of Africans was married to setting Africans apart as peoples with a childlike willingness to forgive, reconcile, and to live harmoniously: “It is clear that a race so unique, and so different in its mentality and its cultures from those of Europe, requires a policy very unlike that which would suit Europeans” (Smuts, 1930: 76). General Jan Smuts, who served as Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa between 1919 and 1924, and again from 1939 until 1948, said the following about what he termed the “black race of Africa”: It has largely remained a child type, with a child psychology and outlook. A child-like human cannot be a bad human, for are we not in spiritual matters bidden to be like unto little children? …No other race is so easily satisfied, so good-tempered, so care-free.

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Ubuntu for Warriors If this had not been the case, it could scarcely have survived the intolerable evils which have weighed on it like a nightmare through the ages. A race, which could survive the immemorial practice of the witch doctor and the slave trader, and preserve its inherent simplicity and sweetness of disposition, must have some very fine moral qualities. The African easily forgets past troubles, and does not anticipate future troubles. This happy-go-lucky disposition is a great asset, but it has also its drawbacks. There is no inward incentive to improvement, there is no persistent effort in construction, and there is complete absorption in the present, its joys and sorrows…. Enough for the Africans the simple joys of village life, the dance, the tomtom, the continual excitement of forms of fighting which cause little bloodshed. They can stand any amount of physical hardship and suffering, but when deprived of these simple enjoyments, they droop, sicken, and die…. These children of nature have not the inner toughness and persistence of the European, nor those social and moral incentives to progress which have built up European civilization in a comparatively short period. But they have a temperament which suits mother Africa, and which brings out the simple joys of life and deadens its pain, such as no other race possesses. (Smuts, 1930: 75–76, my emphasis)

Smuts delivered these thoughts as part of a lecture titled “Native Policy in Africa.” He did this as part of a Rhodes Memorial Lecture series at Oxford University in 1929. Memories of the First World War (1914–1918), which was called the Great War, had not faded. So when Smuts speaks of Africans being peoples who are fundamentally defined by how they, in childlike fashion, fail to countenance the hardships of the world, he is criticizing us for living in a supposedly harmonious, carefree, and joyous way that is not capable of the terri14

Ubuntu for Warriors: Introduction ble violence that great war entails. While acknowledging that Black people have fought wars, Smuts is of the view that even in such violence Black people remain largely childlike, incapable of becoming truly evil. For General Smuts, the fighting of Black Africans is a mockery of continual excitement that does not even approximate the brutality, seriousness, and horrors of war. One can say that Smuts’ views on Africans were not and are not unusual. Views such as these are integral to contemporary notions of harmonious Africans who are easily forgiving and reconciliatory. We do not need Cecil John Rhodes (1990) to remind us that those who say Africans are childlike can also say that Africans are just emerging from barbarism. We do not need to expound how comparative studies of national values have spawned stocks of studies that perpetuate such ideas of Africans. Do you hear the jokes about Black coons and goons who grind under the yoke of slavery and yet grin and merrily say, “Sure, good!” Do you hear the talk about Black drunks who commit aimless crimes and make merry in the nightlife of apartheid townships? No, there is little to gain here from offering up a compendium of notes on racist views on Africans. Let us rather be reminded that in an early written account of ubuntu, Michael Gelfand (1968) associates it with a process by which people achieve maturity. In the book African Crucible: An Ethno-Religious Study with Special Reference to the Shona-Speaking People, in a chapter titled “Ethical Conduct of the African,” Gelfand has a section titled “Hunhu.” For our purposes, it is important to know that it is well-established in the literature that the isiZulu word “ubuntu” is translated into chiShona as “hunhu”; the first book dedicated to 15

Ubuntu for Warriors ubuntu is in fact titled Hunhuism or Ubuntuism (Samkange & Samkange, 1980). At any rate, what matters here is that Gelfand (1968: 53) says: The Shona begin by considering a person’s personality or make-up, which they call hunhu. A man who has hunhu behaves in a decent, good, rational, responsible way. A worthy man has hunhu. A man who fights with others or steals can be said to be without hunhu (haana hunhu). He is not human. A person possessed of hunhu can control himself, his passions and instincts, but should his desires overcome him he has no hunhu. An individual with hunhu has good morals. Morality is equivalent to maturity. According to the Shona the difference between a human being and an animal is his possession of hunhu, i.e. he acts with reason, with sense and rationality. A baboon steals and eats. From this we can ask whether a child possesses this sense of responsibility, but true legal responsibility only comes at the age of maturity. There is an expression “wava munhu” (‘you are grown-up’) which is said to a child to remind him of his sense of responsibility which begins when he talks sense and uses his reason. Yet the Shona admit that a child can possess this sense in certain matters. For instance a boy can herd cattle and look after them. Thus, as the child grows so does his hunhu increase.

Gelfand (1968: 53) insightfully goes on to say: “Hunhu includes a sense of good foresight and appreciation of the situation.” Hunhu is, for Gelfand (1968: 53), therefore not associated with people who lack an appreciation of consequences. But one should surely take issue with Gelfand’s historically unfounded idea that Africans find no good in fighting. Ubuntu offers moral grounds for taking issue with unjust fighting and it offers reasons against unjust 16

Ubuntu for Warriors: Introduction commitments to not fighting when fighting would have consequences conducive to the good. In support of this position, chapters in this book, particularly those focusing on Nelson Mandela and Kenneth Kaunda, draw attention to how Africans who value peace, harmony, and societies in which all individuals can be granted dignity have taken just decisions to go to war or to support wars. This is not the first book to suggest that we should think about the role of warriors. To mention one of these books: after post-apartheid police in South Africa killed 34 unarmed protesting miners on August 16, 2012, wounding 78 others, Stanley Manong (2015) wrote an autobiographical account of his time as a freedom fighter. Manong said his key motivation was to highlight the ideals and values that guided and inspired those who fought against apartheid. Quoting Mark Shope, he pointed out that, “a soldier without politics… is a mercenary” (Manong, 2015: xxiv). He further quoted Le Duan, saying: …a wise political line is the pre-condition for the existence of good cadres. It is quite impossible to have good cadres if this line is wrong. Of course, a wise line alone cannot exclude the possibility of wrongdoing and degradation on the part of cadres because whether a cadre acts rightly and [sic] wrongly, is good or bad, depends on many other factors than the line, including his personal attributes… A wrong line will take the cadres away from a correct direction, throw confusion into their ranks, and push numbers of them into wrong doing. (Manong, 2015: xxvi, italics in original.)

Manong is obviously not aiming to present a philosophically grounded account that seeks to present a set 17

Ubuntu for Warriors of statements about the warrior tradition of ubuntu. In contrast, this book seeks to do just that. It is the only book I know of that seeks this end. If we are to have a chance of acting with a good sense of common purpose towards the good, we must articulate with wisdom the moral line that should guide our warriors. It is mightily important that we apply our minds to discern what the moral philosophy of ubuntu should say to warriors. Failure to do this leaves warriors to use violence without moral supports that guide and thus enable cooperation in realms that call for warriors to come to the fore. Drawing on a variety of biographical sources and interweaving these with conceptual arguments, the chapters that follow will examine the view that ubuntu is for warriors. The names of venerated Africans such as King Shaka, President Mandela, President Kaunda, Bishop Tutu, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, and Steve Bantu Biko will arise prominently.16 The plan is that this book’s unfolding re-appraisal of these Africans will make for engaging conversations about war, violence, warriors—and about the ubuntu of all these.17 In the establishment and projection into history of nations the works of warriors are important. Around warriors and through heroic accounts of their exploits, the ongoing actions of nations and their members are formed and rallied in ways that require careful study and stewardship. It is important that we give thought to this, to our warriors and to our traditions of warriors, if we are to mentor future generations towards greatness. To this end, this book traces out aspects of the warrior tradition of ubuntu in ways that invite extensive further research.

18

Ubuntu for Warriors: Introduction

Endnotes 1

This does not discount the fact that accounts of ubuntu do lay out conditions for the exclusion of others. For example, some accounts of ubuntu rest on consequentialist arguments that seek to proportionally dehumanize those whose actions dehumanize others (see Gade, 2012).

2

People’s social roles are “masks worn by social philosophies” (MacIntyre, in Brewer, 1997: 825), so that we can truly say that philosophy is for everyone (cf. Jaspers, 1969). Taking this view implies that I see processes that yield cultures and traditions (moral or otherwise) as profoundly philosophical processes. People articulate philosophies in the ways in which they write the world into being.

3

See Tutu (1994: 71–72) for a view of ubuntu that values harmony. Tutu’s views are discussed at some length later in this book.

4

See Gade (2013) for a discussion of how Ubuntu discourses began to be associated, in unclear and ahistorical ways, with restorative justice.

5

I refer to Africans even though then speak of Africa is to reference a gnosis that merits a continuing exegesis (cf. Mudimbe, 1988) and to impute a philosophy to Africa is complex and contestable (cf. Janz 2009). In significant part this is reflective of a my political orientation, which favors African Unity as proposed by great Pan Africanists such as Kwame Nkrumah.

6

Using insights from glottochronology and lexicostatistics, Kithaka wa Mberia (2015: 103–115) estimates that the word “ubuntu” is about 5,000 years old, probably having the Proto-Bantu form “abaBantu.”

7

Raymond Silverman (1968) traces the use of the word “Bantu” to describe the shared language practices of a large group of people who live in Sub-Saharan Africa to 1858, when the philologist Wilhelm Heinrich Immanuel Bleek coined it for this purpose. This classification was based on the observation that these languages shared a common base of lexicological characteristics. Later research applied statistical techniques to validate the view that these languages

19

Ubuntu for Warriors have common semantic and lexicological histories of innovations, suggesting that such a grouping does exist but that the statistical underpinning of this claim is questionable (cf. Ehret, 1999; Mann, 1999). Given that the classification of Bantu-speaking people is actively and commonly used by scholars, I am not overly concerned about trying to respond to and settle the vexed question of how one identifies and isolates Bantu-speaking Africans. For the same reason, I am also not overly concerned with trying to neatly tie Bantu-speaking peoples to practices and thinking associated with ubuntu, though I see that there are considerable difficulties in marking out and delineating both the idea of Bantu speakers and that of ubuntu and its practices. In any event, to attempt to address these matters here would be beyond the scope of this book. Note too that while I generally take the view that ubuntu as a practice and a way of thinking can be reasonably attributed to Bantu-speaking Africans who developed and coded it, I also take an open view to questions of whether or not the humanness associated with ubuntu can be seen as unique to these Bantu-speaking Africans. I go with thinkers who recognize that the ongoing process of ubuntu’s development does not necessitate that non-Bantu-speaking peoples have not contributed to its articulation, are not able to contribute to the development of ubuntu today, or that ubuntu today cannot be expressed and developed by peoples who are not Bantu-speaking. The statistical approach to classifying the Bantu into a language group recognizes that innovations and appropriations confusedly and relatedly occur between and among cultures so that a purist ubuntu that disavows external influences is evidently just a fallacy. 8

In English, the words “humanness,” “humility,” and “humanness” share a similar profile, being etymologically linked with the idea of generosity. But, more generally, being altruistic is not uniquely limited to Bantu speakers. Humanness is associated with altruism. There are strong, empirically grounded arguments for this. In this regard, I am particularly impressed by Michael Tomasello’s (2010) empirical studies that compare the behaviors of human infants with our nearest primate relatives. Tomasello’s studies brilliantly show that what makes human beings unique when

20

Ubuntu for Warriors: Introduction compared with other animals is the altruism that we show in giving to, sharing with, and informing others. Tomasello thinks it is this altruism which enables humans to establish common conceptual ground. It is upon this common conceptual ground that we communicate with each other in ways that are unparalleled in the animal world. The ability to communicate is itself bound up with extraordinary capabilities to teach and learn from one another in ways that produce and reproduce cultures—capabilities which have enabled humans to develop into the most powerful species on Earth. Tomasello’s focus on empirical behaviors reemphasizes the idea that to understand humanness it is crucial to focus on how people live. 9

The first aspiration of ubuntu philosophy, as Praeg (2014) argues, is produce a cultural appreciation of who and what Bantu-speaking people are. Ubuntu philosophy is not just an ivory-tower concern that is detached from real living. It is descriptive of the unique ways in which, for humans, building relationships is so fundamental that, as Martin Buber (1987: 11) said in a different context, “All real living is meeting.” Ubuntu philosophy is an attractive account of how humans should live to the extent that it expresses linguistically and then relationally what makes humans unique.

10

The simple reality is that Africans experience violence. We inflict it too. Our lives are often lived out among bad elements. To be Black is often to live under regimes of structural violence, immersed in cultures of violence. In these circumstances it is necessary to speak of how the moral philosophy of Bantu-speaking Black Africans prepares us to be warriors who can make out good lives for ourselves and for others.

11

This is not to say that violence is everything in African life. Africans have an infinite variety of experiences that both include and exclude violence. The realization that drives this study is that there is a research lacuna insofar violence has not been theorized in relation to ubuntu.

12

Temples’ discussion of African philosophy does not explore or mention the warrior tradition. It does, however, speak of a Bantu ontology according to which Bantu speakers have

21

Ubuntu for Warriors a vital force that accords with a God-given hierarchy and order which gives humans earthly pre-eminence. In terms of Temples’ Bantu ontology, the vital force of a person can be increased not by acquisition but by intensification as a person becomes more authentic through acting more morally, i.e., through acting in ways that produce communities which enable everyone to be the most they can be. Those who acquire the vital force of others do so in acts of witchcraft that are marked out as immoral because they work against the good of others and the communities in which they find themselves. In this way, in the work of Tempels, exploitative relations are, through a back door, positioned to be morally irrelevant to the very ontology of Africans.

In the same way as every good office, every help and assistance counts before all else as a support, an increase of life to him who is the beneficiary, so every attempt, however insignificant, against … the person of one who depends upon him, or simply upon his material possessions, will be considered as an injury to the integrity of his being, the intensity of his life. Every injustice is an attempt upon the life (sc. upon the vital force) of the person injured and the malice in it proceeds from the great respect due to human life, the supreme gift of God. (Tempels, 1959: 64)

13

Tempels sets Bantu speakers in a fantastical world in which humans, provided they do what is godly, are an absolute “yes” to which “no” may not arise. His theodicy says that God is on the side of those who perform right actions; it says God secures worldly relations that correspond with people’s moral standing. This denies how Africans, before, during, and subsequent to colonialism, have heroically taken their fates in their own hands even when they believed in divine authority. Think for a moment about how King Shaka of the Zulu famously tricked, exposed, denounced, and treated with contempt some who claimed to be agents of divine intervention (Hamilton, 1998: 179).

14

See, for example, how we are now cut off from ways of giving esteem to warriors that were part of the traditional art of praise poetry. The Zulu tradition is that the king has people who were recognized as the principal praise singers, and in preparation for war, eulogies of the king and of past kings

22

Ubuntu for Warriors: Introduction were recited (Rycroft & Ngcobo, 1988: 13). Among the Zulu, the importance of the esteem given to warriors in praise poetry can be seen from how even the great King Shaka was not averse to demanding praise or to trying to shape the terms by which his praises were recited:

Sometimes it even seems that the king himself had a hand in the shaping of his own izibongo. It is reported of Shaka that he once enquired: “What are the praises of this fellow?, meaning the Embo chief Sambela. The reply was, “He is ‘The one whose fame resounds even while he sits at Mngenela; it resounds among his enemies; it resounds at home.’.” Shaka said, “It is I who am “The one whose fame resounds even while he sits; the son of Menzi; the axe which surpasses other axes; the bird which devours others” (Rycroft & Ngcobo, 1988: 17).

15

I have more than a tinge of regret that this book does not address questions about ubuntu that arise in relation to Mugabe’s political violence. I could not fit it into the flow of the arguments that I wanted to make here. But I am not blind to the many ways in which Mugabe used violence in pursuit of independence from the British, in the Gukurahundi genocide perpetrated against minority Ndebele speaking Zimbabweans, or at any other time after independence. How he used ubuntu to justify the use of the gun raises serious questions in relation to peacemaking, nation-building, freedom, etc. Thinking about Mugabe and violence can excite the production of new understandings of the moral histories and philosophies underlying the Chimurenga wars. It can elicit critical new views of the militant, political economic and other figures of warriors whose ways shape so many lives and livelihoods.

16

Since these people have had considerable influence in the development of cultures that are associated with ubuntu, I assume their thinking is, at least in part, reflective of this moral philosophy. While the motive for writing this book was not to copy Western practices, it is nevertheless worth noting that Western intellectuals who think about just war—and about other concerns—do, as it turns out, think a great deal about how great moral thinkers such as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas have thought about

23

Ubuntu for Warriors relevant issues. In doing so, they too look at the biographical narratives of these great thinkers. Such readings of biography become integral to the whole project of scientific reading that gives meaning to the principles, precepts, and other philosophical contributions. 17

This applied communication study draws on narratives, biographies and behaviors/communicative acts as it puts forward new insights. Whereas I do appeal to logical intuition in crafting my arguments, my background as a scholar in the field of communication commits me, methodologically, to grounding my insights in what is communicated. I am optimistic that a communication imagination and a communication epistemology are evident in the ways in which I weave biographical facts with philosophical concerns to form a new tapestry of insights.

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2 UBUNTU FOR KING SHAKA AND WARRIORS “It is I who am ‘The one whose fame resounds even while he sits; the son of Menzi; the axe which surpasses other axes; the bird which devours others.”’ – King Shaka –

T

his chapter will discuss the warrior tradition with special reference to the figure of King Shaka Zulu, who is surely the most well-known precolonial Bantu-speaking African leader. We will think about a man who is mythologized as a perpetrator of extraordinary acts of violence, as a man who ruled by terror (Wylie, 2000 & 2006). An important intention is to speak of Shaka and ubuntu in a way that contests how the Shakan warrior role was first appropriated by Sir Theophilus Shepstone for the colonial state. Overall, the intention is to contribute to saying something about the need to learn from the Shakan warrior tradition, to say that it is possible and useful to imagine a moral philosophy of ubuntu that is for warriors too. The colonial capture of Shakan mythology ensures that, in the mainstream, it is now difficult to see Shaka as an anti-colonial leader. It remains though, that some popular thought still says Shaka sacrificed lives 25

Ubuntu for Warriors and limbs—entering into wars—to build a formidable empire that could resist the might of incoming Western colonial forces. On this view, he apparently feared that white colonialists were out to conquer indigenous lands (Madi, 2000). Indeed, in his dying days Shaka was deeply and frantically trying to negotiate with colonial forces who were settled at the boundaries of his empire (Laband, 2017). His preoccupation with fending off colonial encroachment is etched into Shaka’s reported last words, spoken to his brothers as they assassinated him: Children of my father, are you killing me, I who am of your house and king of the Zulu? Your country, children of my father, will be ruled by white people who will come up from the sea. (Eldredge, 2014: 273)

Colonization of Shakan mythology assures that Africans are not able, today, to draw upon Shakan history to learn important lessons about how warriors can and do build communities that are characterized by ubuntu. This is paradoxical since the prevailing myth of Shaka is one of a man who built a great nation by the force of arms.1 Among historians, there has long been debate on how initial resistance to white settler colonial rule in Africa intersected with subsequent anticolonial nationalist movements that fought for the advancement of equality and democracy (Ranger, 1968; Adeleke, 2012). But among moral philosophers, there has been no consideration of how the early resistance to colonialism involved an age-old warrior tradition that has increasingly been marginalized and erased from talk of ubuntu.

26

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors I am not going to enter into the historiographic debate that in part seeks to understand how and when warrior traditions of colonized peoples of Africa have been taken up in the development and emergence of nationalist movements. But I do recognize that moral philosophies guide human action, and I champion scholarly reflection on the warrior tradition, especially because lack of critical attention to this tradition means that it can be easily misappropriated and misused. It is exceptionally important, as shall be shown, to reflect on how Shakan myths have even been used to promote and legitimate colonial rule. In her powerful study of King Shaka of the Zulu, Carolyn Hamilton (1998) speaks of how Shepstone learned from Lord Henry Maine that native rebellion was best quelled and managed by deploying systems of indirect rule that used native socio-political structures. In India, in response to the Supoy Revolt of 1857, Maine had realized that it was impossible for the British to directly rule the large native populations of their colonies. Maine suggested getting to know how native people were supposedly bound to traditions and customs that stifled their abilities to culturally evolve towards modernity. Maine’s natives had collective identities that did not value individuals or individual enterprise and were hence trapped in social hierarchies, traditions, cultures, and customs. Natives were contrasted with Westerners who were projected as individualistic, enterprising people who obeyed laws that do not depend on customs. Maine’s writings became prescribed readings for those entering the British Colonial Service. His writing recommended that na-

27

Ubuntu for Warriors tive chiefs and kings be given authority in a system of indirect rule (Mamdani, 2012: 17). Shepstone, who was the Secretary for Native Affairs in the then-colony of Natal, a province of what is now South Africa, followed Maine’s guidance by becoming a significant colonial expert on Zulu cultural practices. He used this knowledge to grab the reins of Zulu political leadership for himself and for the British colonial state apparatus. Drawing a contrast with the widely held view that colonization involves the imposition of the colonizer’s culture on the colonized, Hamilton (1998: 74) argues that Shepstone shielded the Zulus of Natal from Western influences in order to appropriate Zulu “axioms and aesthetics” and to use these to intervene extensively in Zulu customs. Shepstone invested in learning Zulu traditions and cultures in order to command and manipulate the logics of Zulu societies. Shepstone in particular put into play colonial arrangements that sought at once to domesticate and put to work the capacities and predilections for violence that were supposedly part of the Shakan warrior state. Shepstone’s colonial art of governance functioned by drawing material and cultural resources from native practices. Shaka was for Shepstone a model for how the Black population of Natal could be ruled by terror. Shepstone’s Shakan kingdom was an aggressive, male, sensible, and pragmatically ordered system that was admirable amidst otherwise savage and cannibalistic African wildernesses (Hamilton, 1998: 101). What we are speaking of here was really Shepstone’s Shakan kingdom, because that kingdom was a myth in the very strict sense that Roland Barthes (1972: 144)

28

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors has outlined: we “do not have with myth a relationship based on truth but on use.” Myths appear wherever signs and meanings are appropriated and distorted. Under myth, complex and disjunctive but nevertheless productive interplays of people in history are emptied out, and in their stead there appears “a harmonious display of essences” (Barthes, 1972: 142). For as lived social-historical relations, which are produced, experienced, and negotiated symbolically, are captured in the logics and functions of myths, they are transformed into historical abominations. In this process, myths manifest meanings that are particularly useful for both naturalizing and justifying dominant systems of relations (Barthes, 1972: 128). The Shaka we know of today is removed from the historical contexts in which his life was lived. We do not even have a face to give him. The most popular image of Shaka, ostensibly by James Saunders King, is generally thought to be inaccurate and stereotypical and to smack of a colonial romanticism that conjures up an idealized tall and handsome noble savage— posing in a way that mimics conventions of European figure-drawing, while holding an oversized shield and under-sized spear (Whylie, 2016). Elsewhere, Wylie (2006: 6), for example, notes that informants say widely different things about Shaka’s buttocks. One claimed he had the narrow, well-honed buns of an athlete, while another claimed he had the broad buttocks of a king. What we have of Shaka is a concoction of oral traditions and written records that use Shaka to advance positions that are often in conflict with each other. Dislocated from the relations of signification in which his life was lived out, Shaka became a figure of 29

Ubuntu for Warriors colonial discourses on native violence and noble native statecraft.2 The mythical Shaka arises as a figure that distorts precolonial impressions of how natives communed harmoniously. This mythical representation works to ground contemporary notions of the Big Man in politics in ways that support the tyrannical purposes of some who have used his name and his history. Those who use Shakan myths do not use an empty and arbitrary set of associative relations; their mythical significations always analogize his historical achievements. Watch Bill Faure’s 1986 epic television series Shaka Zulu. Faure’s Lieutenant Francis Farewell, following an unsuccessful attempt on Shaka’s life, comments: “We need Shaka alive. If we can control Shaka’s soul, we can control the whole of southern Africa” (Hamilton, 1998: 187). Shaka the myth is not just produced by indigenous narratives that have been stolen and misused. Myths of Shakan despotism were key to the regime of exception that enabled colonial despotism. As they became entangled with cultures, heritages, and traditions that form the colonial passage, narratives of Shaka were mythologized and distorted. As myth, par excellence, Shaka naturalizes and justifies (cf. Barthes, 1972: 128) the existence of the native as a prototypical animal whose drives need a master-handler who knows how to deploy violence as a means of control (Mbembe, 2015: 26). For Shepstone, Shaka was a model and justification for how the Black population was to be ruled. He used the idea of Shaka to depart from liberal metropolitan notions of individual rights that were increasingly being voiced in Britain (Hamilton, 1998: 93).

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Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors The myth of Shaka was used to justify and naturalize the imposition of a regime of exception, by which common-law protections were excised when it came to natives (cf. Mbembe, 2015: 26), with two consequences. First, beginning with figures such as Shepstone, a sovereign right to the use of despotic violence was assumed by white administrators on behalf of the state in ways that sought to legitimate the tyranny of colonial and later apartheid regimes. Second, African customary law was created as a branch of the law that favored conciliation, reconciliation, and forgiveness. The upshot is that the African tradition of warriorship, which speaks of the uses of violence by sovereigns and by all others, was lost to natives who were left with the remainder: an ubuntu of non-violence, reconciliation, and forgiveness (cf. Chanock, 2004; Himonga, Taylor, & Pope, 2013). The creation and inscription of Roman–Dutch law in South Africa went hand in glove with the formation of customary law systems (Chanock, 2004: 34). On their face, these customary law systems were used to govern Africans on the basis of appropriated principles of native legal and moral practices. However, in colonial times, these systems were subjected to the moderating supremacy of white judges who used their own limited scholarship and experiences of native practices, insofar as these practices did not violate Roman–Dutch rules of law. Great despotic power went in this instance to administrators of the judicial system who could decide which customary practices to honor in which instance. Myths about African moral and legal practices that were built into both Roman–Dutch and customary regimes tended to serve the interests of dominant colonial elites. A good example of this concerns the re31

Ubuntu for Warriors ceived colonial view of African tenure. Even today it is commonly held that traditional African land tenure is “communal,” even though there is evidence that historically, native “farming land was divided and used individually, and was inheritable…. [T]he facts of this usage [were] not cognisable by the legal and political formulations” (Chanock, 2004: 381). Holding, in Shepstone’s formulation, that “the land belongs to the tribe” (Chanock, 2004: 381) while insisting that chiefs had unlimited despotic powers meant that the resultant colonial administration of communal tenure was engineered more to justify the seizure of African lands than to vest legal standing to precolonial or traditional land tenure practices (Chanock 1991: 381). The myth that precolonial native chiefs had undefined and unlimited powers which they achieved through despotic practices was particularly profitable for securing the interests of white colonial rule. As described by Chanock (2004: 282), There was … a long-established habit of justifying autocratic rule over Africans as being justified by their own methods. The despotism that was attributed to Shaka was invoked as appropriate not only for the Zulus but eventually for Africans as a whole. This attribution was within a wider imperial discourse about the government of others. Cohn (1996: 64–5) gives an account of the development of the ‘Despotic model’ of pre-British Indian government—a vision of arbitrary and tyrannical rule in which law was simply the ‘pleasure’ of the Mughal. This model of ‘absolute and arbitrary power, unchecked by any institution’, Cohn writes, was a part of the ‘ideological infrastructure of British rule in India’ (see also Hamilton 1998). The Natal Native Affairs Commission of 1852–3 had purported to find that ‘the powers, authorities and

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Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors functions of Kafir Chiefs are great and varied; in their nature they are despotic; in their extent they are only limited by the talents and energy of the individuals who wield them’ (see Welsh 1971: 33–4). Maclean’s Compendium stated authoritatively that ‘the Paramount Chief of each tribe is above all law in his own tribe: he has the power of life and death and is supposed to do no wrong’ ([1858] 1968: 78). In accordance with these definitions, the statutory position in Natal was that ‘the Queen’s representative has as Supreme Chief of the Natives absolute legislative authority over them’ (see Garthorne 1924: 28).

In 1907, a Transvaal court decided, in Mathibe v Lieutenant-Governor TS 557, that the colonial Lieutenant-Governor in his appropriated role of paramount chief could depose native chiefs (Chanock, 2001: 284). Judge Solomon ignored evidence from native witnesses who spoke of the authority of chiefs being limited, and he deferred instead to European experts. Solomon declared: “Practically [a chief’s] power over his subchiefs is a despotic power, a power which he can exercise of his own free will.” In other cases of the time, judges ignored the evidence of native witnesses such as John Tengo Jabavu. In cases such as Mogale v Mogale 1912, they found in favor of the European historical view that Shakan despotism was the standard way for natives to be ruled. The courts found that this despotic norm justified the establishment of similarly despotic colonial regimes (Chanock, 2001: 285). The move to make use of Western narratives of Shaka as a despotic figure was first prominently deployed by Shepstone. As the native administrator of the British Natal colony, Shepstone laid claim to the status of new father of the Zulus. Shepstone claimed to have been invited as the representative of Shaka, and therefore 33

Ubuntu for Warriors in the role of “father of the Zulu,” to the installation of King Cetshwayo in 1873. These claims were quite likely to have been somewhat embellished by Shepstone (Hamilton, 1998: 95), who as noted, was of a school of thought that—to successfully run a colony—it was necessary to appropriate the signs, symbols, and historical narratives of the native population. Shepstone recognized that colonial governance with its oppression of natives was best served by getting to know native cultures and practices in ways that enabled native power structures to be used for the purposes of managing and harnessing the natives themselves. All this helps to understand how Shepstone found utility in being named the patriarch of the Zulu family, something he did by instrumentalizing the distorted warrior tradition that rests upon Shakan myths.3 Today, Zulu peoples continue to invoke Shaka when they go into proverbial warrior modes. What is not clear is whose myths of Shaka they invoke. It is not evident whose uses of Shaka they call up when they draw on his name and history. What is undeniable is that the dominant myth from which their warrior aspirations are drawn is inspired by a Shaka who made the Zulu people great by leading his armies to great feats of warrior conquest. In a 1992 Shaka Day speech, the current Zulu king, Goodwill Zwelithini, affirmed the stuttering process towards the peaceful end of formal apartheid, which was underway at the time. As he did so, he also called for the discipline and order of warriors, in the name of Shaka (in Hamilton, 1998: 10): We are a people who come from warrior stock … This was the philosophy of King Shaka, a philosophy passed on along the long line of illustrious Zulu kings

34

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors who followed in his footsteps. It is this strength and courage in unity that flowed in the blood of the great warriors of King Shaka’s armies, and that today flows in our blood—the great Zulu nation of Africa … We, as the Zulu people, are prepared to die for our principles today because that is the way we were founded. We share the convictions of King Shaka’s great warriors who went forth to do battle, courageous men also prepared to die for their principles.

The previous year, in 1991, again on the occasion of Shaka Day, King Zwelithini is reported to have said that his people have “warrior blood” in their veins, for “only warriors” could have put together the empire that Shaka ruled (Hamilton, 1998: 202). Hostel dwellers in areas under his rule, who are sometimes stereotypically associated with violent tribal allegiances, apparently supported his views with some gusto: “[one said] Zulu-speaking hostel dwellers endorsed the king’s de-scription of innate Zulu militarism: ‘Zulus are born fighters who can respond spontaneously to any attack.’ Another elaborated on the origins of this militarism: ‘The Zulu Nation is born out of Shaka’s spear. When you say ‘Go and fight’, it just happens’” (Hamilton, 1998: 202). Saying this endorses the idea that, in its military-warrior modes, “[the Zulu system of] government was thus strongly authoritarian, with great emphasis placed on ‘law and order.’ Command, obedience, and order were deemed to be higher values than freedom, dissent, and opposition” (Hamilton, 1998: 210). Zulu nationalists such as Mangosuthu Buthelezi and his Inkatha Freedom Front supporters regularly mythologized Zulus as warriors whose order and discipline had Shakan roots (Hamilton, 1998: 209).

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Ubuntu for Warriors Today, the Shakan warrior tradition is arguably the best-known African tradition of warriorship. After his assassination in 1828, in the course of time, “the figure of Shaka has been increasingly established as a central metaphor in South African politics” (Hamilton, 1998: 6) and arguably also as a central metaphor of African warriorhood. Insofar as this is so, it is vital that more work is done to understand who Shaka was, who he is to us now, and who he should become for us as we seek out decolonial futures. In this conjuncture, it seems to me that we will do well to think about how, not if, the figure of the warrior is fundamental to the contemporary enactment of collective life and to our cultural evolution. As a mythical figure, Shaka, in the terms of Roland Barthes (1972: 157), “is certain to participate in the making of the world”. In reckoning with this, there is merit to seeing that the metaphorical usages of Shakan myths are dynamic. Metaphors provide people with languages and ways of thinking through, conceptualizing, and acting in the world (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980: 232–233). Ubuntu and Shaka form a particularly powerful conceptual metaphor cluster that complexly weaves together systems of moral, cultural, social, and political experiences with identities, practices, and traditions (cf. Kövecses, 2015: 4). Any insights gained from thinking about this cluster is likely to have significance for how we understand how, why, when, with whom, for whom, and to what ends Africans would morally value the use or avoidance of warrior roles. The philosophy of ubuntu is enriched by and can benefit from well-considered infusions of values and practices associated with the warrior tradition. These 36

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors can be excellently interwoven with values and practices from other traditions of ubuntu. From my vantage point, it intuitively makes sense to think that it is not necessary for purposes of recognizing the warrior tradition to have to disprove or diminish views that emanate from non-violent traditions of ubuntu such as those associated with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who emphasizes the value of harmony. Then again, it is critical that we challenge the Manichaeisms by which non-violent traditions of ubuntu are given pride of place while the warrior tradition is ignored. Large parts of this book, and certainly those referencing Nelson Mandela and Kenneth Kaunda, make the point that we must give space to the warrior tradition alongside the non-violent tradition when we talk of ubuntu. Beyond that, and in general, it will be useful for scholars to think rigorously about how Shakan warriorhood intersects with other traditions of ubuntu warriorship. Through history and across cultures, Africans have fought and continue to fight for a plethora of different and competing interests. People fight for practices and views, including epistemic ones, and for the possibility of elaborating new relational norms. In some instances, such fighting sheds blood and results in losses of life. Risks to life and limb can recede through the influence of social rules: with affordances of civil resources and social practices conducive to peace and justly shared prosperity, the shedding of blood, limbs, and life is often increasingly eliminated. In the West, there are many fine theories that speak of the sublimation of violence in human cultural evolution. For example, Sigmund Freud’s (1950) psychoanalysis drew on conceptions of ‘primitive’ African totem and taboo practices to develop an understanding of how violence is sub37

Ubuntu for Warriors limated to form laws and morals conducive to what he understood to be modern civilized relations. More recently, the leading agonist, Chantel Mouffe (2000: 1–17), has re-appraised and championed the view that Western democratic traditions owe much of their existence and vitality to ancient Greco–Roman practices of war that evolved to guide the establishment of contemporary civilizational norms. Similarly, in the East, there has been interesting work done, for example, on how Japanese samurai traditions have culturally yielded modern views of honor and civil relations (Benesch, 2014). There is a need to draw out theory describing the roles and functions of warriorship in contemporary African societies, and to do this in ways that chime with known African histories of warriorship. It is surely useful to draw lessons from African histories of community building that have often involved nomadic warrior-heroes breaking off from frictive communities to build new communities (Coquery-VIdrovitch, 2009). Valuable lessons on the relations between individuals and communities are lost when we blanketly marginalize, disavow, and ultimately belittle how conflictual and relational histories are. There is much value, for example, in recognizing practices of heroic warriors in narratives of the origins of the Zulu people. We will find valuable narratives with moral lessons to glean, for example, in the succession battle between siblings Qwabe and Zulu after the death of their father Malandela. We can find stories of warriorship in how the younger of the brothers, Zulu, having lost the succession battle, took flight on a journey that over time has given us the Zulu people.4 Ubuntu is now tightly coupled with values of harmony, peace, forgiveness, and reconciliation to the ex38

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors clusion of values that are closely tied to the warriorship that was pivotal to the historical emergence of the Zulu as we know them today. Yet, and at the same time, Shaka and other precolonial warriors served as sources of inspiration that animated and scripted resistance to colonial and apartheid rule. Shaka continues to motivate some people’s efforts to be world-beaters in multiple spheres—as seen in Madi’s (2000) popular book on strategic leadership. It is justified to worry that African notions of warriorhood have been bled of ubuntu by how historical accounts of warriors have been and are mythologized and (mis)used. They are used for the benefit of cultural, political, economic, and state hegemons. Just see how Zulu notions of warriorhood have likely been perverted and deployed by those who carry out politically and economically motivated assassinations. The recent Moerane Commission of Enquiry into political violence in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal Province included numerous mentions of the Glebelands hostel, where up to 2,200 mainly Zulu-speaking people live in abject squalor. The hostel is a known hotbed of support for the African National Congress, which heads the national government. It is widely reported that some residents of this hostel take on roles of hitmen and assassins in scores of deaths. At hearings of the Moerane Commission (2018: 181), Vanessa Burger reported that between 2014 and 2017, between 89 and 95 killings could be traced to the hostel and its residents. The mythical figure of inkabi (the powerful castrated bull) looms in the shadows of these stories. The word is only mentioned a handful of times in the Moerane Commission’s report. But wherever assassins are mentioned—and they pervade the 426 pages of the re39

Ubuntu for Warriors port—it is evident that inkabi could have been at work. for the word “inkabi” is often translated as “assassin.” Association of inkabi with the figure of the assassin is dramatized in the Mzansi Magic movie Isitha (2017). In that movie, Zulu assassins, cast in traditional Zulu war regalia, feature in magic rituals to steel themselves to carry out assassinations on behalf of a wealthy Big Man who lords it, in part by manipulating cultural significations of youthful power that symbolisms of inkabi also carry, amidst the depravation that surrounds him. The Moerane Commission and movies such as Isitha (The Enemy) reveal that warriors have perhaps become a stain on the moral fabric of South Africa, but they could surely be embossed with honor as champion fighters for all that ubuntu morality achieves. Consider and bemoan, then, how the myth of Shaka was used to support the imposition of spoor laws. These laws imposed collective punishments on the inhabitants of communities or kraals to whose proximity the spoor of stolen animals, and even other forms of property, could be tracked. Spoors laws are interesting: in Southern Africa, they have traditional roots in precolonial native practices which gave rights and obligations to communities and their members to conduct surveillance and to police the traffic of livestock and other property. Ideally read, these laws gave the attractive benefit to communities and individuals of the right to self-help in ways that were typical of all pre-state societies in which rights and duties of law enforcement were in the hands of victims and wider communities (Bennett & Jacobs, 2012: 215). However, in practice, in the context of a modern or modernizing colonial state, the laws served to give the state the right to assume whole communities were guilty of certain 40

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors offences, to place the burden of proof on those communities, and to reinforce the notion that native African communities did not brook private ownership of property. These laws also legitimated the colonial view that native chiefs held ownership rights to all property in a community. To wit, spoor laws gave legal effect to the view that chiefs possessed Shakan mythological powers to despotically access, distribute, or dispose of communal properties as they saw fit. What was unique about the spoor laws is that, prior to post-apartheid constitutional dispensation, they were the only supposedly traditional native customary law principles which were encoded into law in South Africa (Bennett & Jacobs, 2012). Instead of merely promoting the rights of citizens to self-help and to solidarity rights by which others could come to one’s aid in the instance of the theft of property, spoor laws despotically infringed upon the rights of citizens to the presumption of innocence, and they also offended against individuals’ rights to self-determination. It is worth investigating how the spoor laws gave rise to and legitimated, in some part, the apartheid logics of a state that could impose collective harms upon communities in pursuit of perverse notions of the common good. Crais (1998: 55) writes about a vigilante group called Makhulu Span which operated from the closing days of 1956 to 1962. The group presented itself as a representative of the moral good and as such promised to end the scourge of stock theft. Makhulu Span set up public courts that made use of discourses and practices associated with traditional chiefs’ and headmen’s courts (Crais, 1998: 56–57). Makhulu Span courts also tortured suspects to make them admit to alleged crimes in ways that seemingly invented new 41

Ubuntu for Warriors rituals of violence that were later to be taken up in public violence campaigns against those who were allegedly collaborators with the apartheid regime in the 1990s (Crais, 1998: 59). In similar fashion, beginning in 2002 and still today, a vigilante group called Iskhebe has been operating in the Nongoma District, which is where one finds the official residence of the current Zulu King, Goodwill Zwelithini (Checkpoint, 2018). By torturing suspected cattle rustlers and others accused of theft at informal public courts that mimic traditional courts, Iskhebe openly uses despotic violence to promote what its supporters see as order and the common good. The informal people’s courts of Makhulu Span and Iskhebe are sites where people are involved in self-help practices that operate outside of constitutionally recognized customary and Roman–Dutch law systems. There is value to studying the complicated ways by which such courts both appropriate and contest the constitutionally legitimated order of customary and Roman–Dutch law. At the same time, it is useful to see how people in these bodies are imagining, communicating, and enforcing traditional, colonial, and newly invented traditions, ideas, and visions of the relationships between individuals, their societies, and morality itself (Crais, 1998: 49). If this is so, there is merit to thinking about how Shakan myths of despotic violence feed into how violence is enacted in the name of establishing order and promoting the common good. There is surely some utility to asking questions of ubuntu as a moral system that is a product of traditions of thinking and of practices aimed at establishing social orders that are conducive to the good in locations that include the very places in which Makhulu Span and Iskhebe operate. 42

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors Contrast the use of Shakan myths of despotic rule to deliver colonial order by infringing upon individual human rights, as in the instance of the spoor laws, with how Africans have led the world in asserting solidarity rights. The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, which was ratified in 1981, is the “first and only binding international instrument that directly recognizes the solidarity rights of peoples: to existence, equality, self-determination, sovereignty over natural resources, peace, development and environment” (Winks, 2011: 453). Africans are articulating ubuntu as a system of human rights which supplements Western first- and second-generation rights to liberté (including negative civil and political rights such those relating to life, liberty, and privacy) and égalité (pertaining to positive rights that include economic rights to housing, healthcare, and social security) with rights to fraternité (as cardinally articulated under to the notion of solidarity): The limitation of first and second generation human rights is that they demand delivery from the state, and thereby abstract all responsibility away from the individual. African humanism, fostered in tribal societies not structured as nation states, does not divorce the individual from her or his community, nor her or his responsibility to the community, through the avatar of the state. Relations within the community, and its relations with other communities, were always the collective responsibility of the community members themselves. (Winks, 2011: 457)

The African perspective on human rights has been one that recognizes that power is not just in the hands of the state and that the power which is in the hands of individuals should also be used for the common good 43

Ubuntu for Warriors (Murray, 2000). Here, the despotism of the state is held in check by the power of individuals who have rights duties that work towards this end. Article 27 of the African Charter says: 1. Every individual shall have duties towards his family and society, the state and other legallyrecognised communities and the international community. 2. The rights and freedoms of each individual shall be exercised with due regard to the rights of others, collective security, morality and common interest. There is much work to do to recover how African warriorhood, including that which derives from Shakan times, should feed into contemporary constructions of ubuntu. We have much to learn about how ubuntu warrriorship factors into the building of morally desirable societies. The association of warriorship with the building of societies in which individuals can be the most they can be indicates that the warrior is not a pure “being-for-fighting.” The warrior is also a figure who seeks and fights for the achievement and maintenance of peace, for example. The warrior is a person, and persons have intersectional role-existences—that is, identities and roles that multi-dimensionally co-exist and are co-produced (Crenshaw, 2001). The appearance, if not the fact, of intersectionality in the performances of African moral identities related to ubuntu begs for recognition and extensive study of the different traditions that intersect to give the flux of moral views and practices we call ubuntu. It is important that we are beginning to see the development of literature on ubuntu and just war, for example (Scheid, 2015). This kind of 44

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors work will do much to destigmatize the use of violence in the quest for action that amends cultures and rights structures so that virtuous acts are normalized and encouraged by social arrangements. When the warrior tradition is destigmatized, it is imaginable that more well-meaning but socially reticent individuals may take up the cudgels to fight for more moral orders. As is, dominant narratives and negative mainstream stereotypes deny young Africans the scripts to assume roles as agents of change, when those justly involve the use violence and war. There is much to be done to recover the majestic power of King Shaka’s warriorship, and to extract from it important teachings that can enable Africans to regather themselves to achieve decolonial possibilities. A precondition for this is that there must be a willingness to, with critical discernment, re-open ubuntu to the mighty works of its warriors. Without denying the appeal of other traditions of ubuntu, there is much to be learned from the warrior tradition of ubuntu, too.

Endnotes 1

To mix metaphors, the myth of Shaka shows that warriors are ace builders. For his is a myth of a warrior who builds a society in which people can find it natural, customary, reasonable, and even spontaneous to do what is right.

2

Shepstone sought to know, understand, and explain the rule and legacy of Shaka so as to be able to analogize his own colonial role as ruler, as an extension of Shaka’s reign.

3

Thinkers as divergent as Mazrui (1977c: 9) and Cheik Anta Diop (1981: 111) trace the early development of clans, tribes, and nations to the development of family units. Whatever the case, it is widely accepted, not just in African phil-

45

Ubuntu for Warriors osophical circles, that “family” is a powerful metaphoric reference that organizes and animates nationalist discourses. What’s more, the work of securing and winning territories and resources for the survival and thriving of families, clans, tribes, and nations is associated with heroic warriors. Their heroic deeds are often lauded when these warriors are hailed as founders of these communities. 4

One such lesson could be that valuable legacies are not only built by those who emerge victorious from battles, or even from wars. We can also learn from how Shaka, a descendant of Zulu, is associated with a leadership that, by conquest (including of the Qwabe clan), built up the small Zulu clan into the core of the great Zulu nation we have today.

46

3 Ubuntu for Nelson Mandela And War “The struggle against apartheid can be typified as the pitting of memory against forgetting. It was in our determination to remember our ancestors, our stories, our values and our dreams that we found comradeship.” – President Mandela –

T

he moral philosophy of ubuntu is associated with peace, reconciliation, and forgiveness. Yet from the earliest times, African history has been, at least in part, shaped by violence (Coquery-Vidrovitch, 2009: 136–143). We have already addressed how King Shaka Zulu, for one, is mythologized as a man who used violent methods to craft his Zulu kingdom and as a despot whose methods established and maintained order (Wylie, 2000 & 2006; Hamilton, 1988). In postcolonial Africa, there has been a continent-wide tendency for populations and sections of various nations to move towards military rule (Houngnikpo, 2010). In this preliminary approach to seeking out an African perspective on just war and peace, I am not after addressing the arduous task of presenting an attractive perspective on the moral grounds for why vilified Africans who are perceived to be fermenters 47

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors and perpetrators of violence and violent coercion may value violence. Instead, I aim to put forward generally neglected insights on ubuntu for warriors from how the late President of South Africa, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, who is highly esteemed, valued the use of violence.1 The late former President of South Africa Nelson Mandela is heralded for championing values that are expressed in the moral philosophy of ubuntu. His views and actions arise in a unique biographical narrative that merits consideration when we try to understand ubuntu, particularly when we do so with reference to him. But we have yet to see careful thought applied to bringing forth moral insights from the biographical evidence that Mandela was a secular freedom fighter whose politics valued revolutionary struggle both against apartheid and for democracy. Importantly, I advance scholarship on ubuntu by using ideas from his biography to draw out a tentative but attractive philosophical perspective on just war and peace that can be fairly said to be Mandelaist. As another important contribution to the literature, the perspective on ubuntu that is gestured at here is refreshingly new in how it does not eschew war as a means of achieving justice and peace. Mandela came to national and international prominence as an agonist struggling against the system of apartheid in order to bring just co-existence where apartheid inflicted unjust separation and conflict. Today it has become fashionable to think of Mandela as a non-militant, non-rebellious icon of reconciliation. But Mandela first dominated national headlines in the brigand and outlaw role of the Black Pimpernel, eluding the clutches of apartheid forces which sought 48

Ubuntu for Nelson Mandela and War to incarcerate him (Nixon, 1991). Mandela was wanted for organizing, in May 1961, mass stoppages of work to protest against apartheid and the unilateral declaration which made South Africa a republic independent of imperial Britain. Already the ANC party knew that organizing resistance to apartheid was dangerous—in 1952 the party named its most dedicated volunteers “Amadelakufa” (those who defy death)! The young Mandela, as a pioneering militant, went on to bravely defy the deadly might of the apartheid regime. After the mass shooting of peaceful Blacks who were protesting against apartheid oppression on March 21, 1960, in Sharpville Township, Mandela and Walter Sisulu proposed the adoption of a militant option to the ANC national executive. In July 1961, this proposal gave birth to the armed wing of the party, which was named uMkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation). In the famous trial which led to his 27-year imprisonment, Mandela contended that the apartheid government had made it impossible for opposition to apartheid to be waged peacefully. He recalled that as a child he had listened to and been inspired by stories of African leaders who were praised for having fought against colonialism. In this speech, Mandela (1995: 420) spoke of electing to engage in acts of non-lethal sabotage in order to get the apartheid regime to reconsider its repressive practices: Umkhonto was formed in November 1961. When we took this decision, and subsequently formulated our plans, the ANC heritage of nonviolence and racial harmony was very much with us. We felt that the country was drifting towards a civil war in which blacks and whites would fight each other. We viewed

49

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors the situation with alarm. Civil war would mean the destruction of what the ANC stood for; with civil war racial peace would be more difficult than ever to achieve. We already have examples in South African history of the results of war. It has taken more than fifty years for the scars of the South African [Anglo– Boer] War to disappear. How much longer would it take to eradicate the scars of interracial civil war, which could not be fought without a great loss of life on both sides?

Mandela (1995: 420) said even though he and others in the ANC did not want to engage in civil war, it was important to recognize that: Experience convinced us that rebellion would offer the government limitless opportunities for the indiscriminate slaughter of our people. But it was precisely because the soil of South Africa is already drenched with the blood of innocent Africans that we felt it our duty to make preparations as a long-term undertaking to use force in order to defend ourselves against force. If war were inevitable, we wanted the fight to be conducted on terms most favorable to our people. The fight which held out prospects best for us and the least risk of life to both sides was guerrilla warfare. We decided, therefore, in our preparations for the future, to make provision for the possibility of guerrilla warfare.

For “treasonous” acts of sabotage, Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment. Strangely, the conviction itself appears to acknowledge that Mandela did apply violence with much care borne of knowing that the harms inflicted must be strategically measured and applied to advance the cause of justice and peace. In other words, he applied violence with great circumspection, 50

Ubuntu for Nelson Mandela and War making him quite different from Robespierre (2007), for example, who claimed, in the context of the French Revolution, that there is a virtuous violence that oppressed peoples are entitled to use to overthrow their oppressors.2 Today, instead of thinking that Mandela was ever someone who used terror to nefariously gain strategic advantages, most would likely now agree with Scheid (2015) that there is strong potential to articulate an African theory of just war by examining how Mandela and the ANC produce a broad political program that (1) pursues the just cause of ending the oppression of masses (2) under the leadership of a group that values and advances the common good (3) with the right intention of re-establishing democratic rule characterized by shared prosperity. The war that Mandela and the ANC were prepared to fight was hence waged (4) to achieve a more just and equal society (5) by progressively using proportionate violence against mounting oppressions (6) with the understanding that to be oppressed is to be under attack, i.e., is to have no choice but to defend oneself, even with the use of lethal violence (7) as a last resort. Without denying that Nelson Mandela sometimes acted without the consent of those he led, it is patently clear that he has renown as the democratic leader of the democratic movement against apartheid. He is the most prominent agonist of the South African struggle against apartheid whose story is often told as having a magical ending. He was released from prison after serving an unjust 27-year term for treason against the illegitimate apartheid regime, to lead a remarkable and relatively peaceful transition towards democratic rule. The way the story is often told is that Mandela was vic51

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors torious. Yet, among other legacies of apartheid, South Africa remains one of the most unequal countries in the world, along race lines. Democratic leadership involves the participation of both leaders and followers in the pursuit of democracy “through sacrifice, courage, symbolism, participation and vision” (Choi, 2007: 244). Spoken of as a democratic leader, Mandela is known for having taken, at huge personal and family cost, a leading political role of replacing apartheid structures, systems, and processes with ones with democratic teleologies. His struggle for the emancipation of the oppressed of South Africa is incomplete. Without denying that Mandela is a great agonist, to profess him a victor in the overall fight against apartheid is premature. It is important to recall that Mandela’s fight was primarily a political one.3 In the spirit of the Freedom Charter—a document drawn up by diverse people from who crossed the color line—Mandela’s political struggle was against the system of apartheid which he rightly opposed for being in an antagonistic relationship with the granting of human dignity and worth. He was an agonist for justice whose fight was directed at achieving revolutionary change that brings democracy, dignity, and worth to all who live in South Africa. To see Mandela as an agonist is to reference4 the ancient Hellenic figure of the agōn who was an elite fighter who did battle in the ancient athletic agones (games) in front of a gallery of spectators, narcissistically striving to outdo rivals in a fair and open contest for the praise and favors of publics and gods alike. Between the seventh and sixth centuries BC, the procedural and open violence of the agones began to morph and sublimate into more abstract political and discursive con52

Ubuntu for Nelson Mandela and War tests in public assemblies, producing ancient Hellenic democracy (Kalyvas, 2009: 23–25). …ancient democracy is understood here as a political and symbolic order that facilitates, regulates and channels the narcissistic urge of a multitude of individuals who compete to win and outdo each other in an adversarial quest for greatness, distinction and primacy. Agonistic citizenship is predicated on the freedom to vie for glory and fame independently of one’s social standing, wealth or education, but through one’s dedication and services to the public interest and within the legal, cultural and ethical constraints of the city. (Kalyvas, 2009: 26)

Against those who would argue against referencing the figure of the agōn and who would stress the view that Africans are far removed from engaging in fierce and violent public contests for prestige, I ask that readers look at the continuing tradition of musangwe among the Venda peoples of South Africa. “Musangwe’s champion/winner in return earns respect and often times emerge as community leaders since their victory and their strength is proof of one that is able to protect one’s family and community” (Tshishonga, 2013: 202). Similarly, one only has to remember the importance of stick fighting in the upbringing of young Xhosa men such as Mandela. What’s more, from the story of the Zulu musical genre of maskanda, there is evidence that stick fighting has been abstracted into other forms of cultural expression that enjoy social prestige (Coplan, 2002). Beyond all this, I also note that from the anthropological data, there are reasons to think that practices of public violence are related to the development of traditional African democratic institutions (cf. Ashforth, 1998; Blankenberg, 1999; Comaroff & Comaroff, 2004; 53

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors Coquery-Vidrovitch, 2010). So I am not convinced that, we have to be fearful of labelling Mandela as an agōn. The point is that the figure of Mandela is an agōn, a man who sought to make telling contributions in front of publics, hoping they would appreciate his sacrifices. This does not in any way detract from the fact that he chose to do this in pursuit of the greater good of others—it arguably amplifies his greatness that he wonderfully layered altruism atop selfishness,5 or atop what Kalyvas (2009) sees as narcissism. In the first chapter of his book on African leadership, Khoza (2012) argued that what makes Mandela great—and capable of successfully making unpopular decisions—is that when compared to Mbeki, Mandela was able to be a leader who was attuned to his followers. He contrasts this with how Mbeki became aloof or distanced from them.6 I have posited that Mandela displays altruism, which overlays natural human selfishness. I am also prepared to imagine that Mandela’s seeking out of public approval and public victories is, at least in some part, responsible for a significant number of his great altruistic achievements. I do this by claiming that part of what made Mandela attuned to his followers is that he wanted their approval. This line of contention can be recognized as reasonable and worthwhile when one sees that the narcissistic quality of wanting audiences’ approval is what Kalyvas (2009: 26) has elsewhere seen as critical to the morphing of agonistic practices into democracies. To play with the deceptively larkish terms of the title of the famous book by Steve Biko (1987), the struggle against apartheid is about individuals winning the right to write what they like, that is, to write the stories of their lives as they like. Mandela the agōn appreciat54

Ubuntu for Nelson Mandela and War ed this. He fought to be a good part of stories and histories in a time when Black people were in a Hegelian sense being written out of history. Something of this was recognized by Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman, at the 8th Mandela Lecture (2010). Dorfman recalled that Mandela once said: “The struggle against apartheid can be typified as the pitting of memory against forgetting. It was in our determination to remember our ancestors, our stories, our values and our dreams that we found comradeship.” Mandela (2010: 36) spoke of a struggle that was inspired by the dream to establish desirable forms of social organization, for he knew that there is significant distance between the work of words and the work of changing structural arrangements in order to end oppression. To re-coin a colloquial saying, Mandela knew that interactions that change structures speak louder than words. So, for him, the struggle against apartheid was against its material and institutional arrangements, which produced injustices most significantly according to the color line. Mandela was keen to achieve economic emancipation for marginalized and oppressed people. It would be disturbing if his critics had not found narrative incoherence in celebrations premised on victory having been attained over apartheid simply on account of the introduction of a new government regime, new parliamentary dispensation, and new constitutional orders and deliberative procedures in the national landscape. To the extent that the Mandela name is associated with such triumphalism, critics such as his erstwhile follower Julius Malema have accused Mandela of betraying the political struggle against apartheid. They say Mandela ended up putting too much stock in discourses 55

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors of reconciliation and forgot the cause of emancipation that led him into the struggle against apartheid. In fairness, in colonial and apartheid arrangements in which Africans have been denied, marginalized, silenced, and erased, it is revolutionary to engage in acts of observing and admiring that conceive (i.e., give birth to) new possibilities of justice and order. So, Mandela is already on a path to contesting apartheid when he starts to genuinely observe the possibility of justice; he is on a path towards freeing Blacks and whites who are respectively locked into and tied to perpetrating apartheid. This is as it should be, for the teleology of freedom fighters is one of freeing all humanity, the jailed and the jailors. And surely, the highest praise for Mandela is that which speaks of an agonist who sacrificed to overcome apartheid in all its forms. Unfortunately, thinking about Mandela as a freedom fighter becomes increasingly overshadowed by the cacophony of voices that praise him for not being Mugabe (or other African leaders whose narrative describes wrecking national economies in the purported pursuit of fairer distributions of the national wealth), says Žižek (2013). One could cynically say that such praise of Mandela is specifically directed at him for being a leader who acquiesced to and facilitated the entry of his people into a hegemonic liberal deliberative tradition of democracy that illiberally excludes and marginalizes his country and Black or poor people at multiple points (Roberts, 2007). In outline, the liberal democratic tradition holds that beyond mere procedural practices, democracy is achieved where people with equal rights deliberate, that is, discuss rational reasons regarding factual or forensic matters until they arrive at the most desirable 56

Ubuntu for Nelson Mandela and War outcome. So, it is trifling with a great legacy to make Mandela the answer to the popular question: Why, when numerous other African leaders have failed to bring democratic rule to their countries, is Mandela so successful at this task? But this is what is happens too frequently, as Žižek (2013) points out, when Mandela is compared with other African leaders. This is so even though South Africa remains far from being is a successful democracy in the terms of the liberal democratic tradition outlined above. At best, it is a nascent democracy that survives tenuously in the face of horrid inequalities that, among other human rights infringements, impose immense structural violence upon the weakest and most vulnerable who live in it. The majority of the people in South Africa have reason to support the view that their lives are miserable and characterized by meanness. They have reason to say that they primarily know the state and its structures, the private sector and its actors, and even civil society bodies as instruments which collectively function or malfunction to chronically deny and degrade the capacities of individuals to work, act with responsibility, develop skills, show love, have productivity, and so on. If the above are harsh statements, it is not extreme to say that in South Africa the rationalistic project of deliberative democracy has yet to adequately deliver what Mouffe (2000: 10) calls “the conditions of existence of the democratic subject”. Indeed, in South Africa the dominant history remains of democracy (or rather of people) being patently, structurally, and culturally violated. Following Mouffe’s understanding of the political and of politics, when Mandela positions himself to be an agent of the political intentions of disenfranchised Blacks, he enters a realm characterized by ineradicable 57

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors antagonisms of many forms in diverse social relations. As a person, his very human inabilities to fully comprehend and resolve the complexities about him invariably play themselves out as part of the struggle he wages against apartheid. Something of how gravely he must have experienced this can be seen in evaluating the fact that, as Lodge (2006: 9) points out, throughout his life, shaped by initial experiences of watching proceedings at traditional African courts, and later influenced by his professional Western legal training, Mandela believed that reasoned deliberation could address all problems. When one considers Mandela’s views on the traditional system of rule, one7 sees that he favored its democratic, deliberative processes. He confabulates it as representing “democracy in its purest form” (Mandela,1995: 34). One may speculate that this high praise was given on account of an epistemic commitment to the ancient African system of tribal justice. The simple fact is that the traditional African courts that Mandela described in idealistic terms were already in Mandela’s youth fundamentally part of repressive settler colonial authority structures. For this reason, the African traditional chieftainship and kinship they laid claim to were, in the terms of Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983: 1), “invented traditions”. After leading a process of negotiations towards the end of formal apartheid, after 27 years of the prison sentence that was unjustly imposed on him, Mandela reappeared as the father figure of a South Africa transitioning to democracy. He is widely praised for leading a remarkable transfer of political power from the apartheid regime to one that espouses democracy (Lodge, 2006; Moriaty, 2003). Arguably, the widely 58

Ubuntu for Nelson Mandela and War held contemporary view of Mandela can be summarized with reference to the words of Barack Obama, then-President of the USA, who said the following at the great man’s memorial service: …Mandela understood the ties that bind the human spirit. There is a word in South Africa, “Ubuntu” that describes his greatest gift—his recognition that we are all bound together in ways that are invisible to the eye; that there is a oneness to humanity; that we achieve ourselves by sharing ourselves with others, and caring for those around us. (Obama, 2013)

Accepting the view that Mandela is a person who excellently represents values8 of ubuntu, I aim to draw out an understanding of ubuntu that is consistent with some keystone ideas about Mandela. To be sure, I can neither claim to discuss all that Mandela represents nor can I claim to discuss all that ubuntu is. What I ambitiously seek here is to draw on limited yet significantly persuasive materials from Mandela’s life to indicate a possible new direction for the advancement of knowledge on ubuntu as a politics of justice. I note before proceeding that Mandela did not write systematically on ubuntu. What we have to go on, in seeking to uncover his perspective on ubuntu, are biographical materials that mark the contours of his moral thinking. When Mandela says “ubuntu,” he is not speaking about a moral order that idealistically assumes the possibility of achieving a harmonious egalitarian order. As a young member of the African National Congress, Mandela was initially drawn to Marxism, egalitarianism, and communalism. However, he also expressed reservations about Marxism. Most significantly, for example, while in Dar es Salaam canvassing 59

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors for support for the ANC, he expressed disagreement with Tanzania’s iconic President Julius Nyerere, who idealistically claimed that Africans, unlike Westerners, are inherently culturally egalitarian and hence predisposed towards socialist communal economic arrangements (Lodge, 2006: 97). Mandela’s ubuntu is found on the proverbial rough ground on which imperfect people do imperfect things. Von Clausewitz (2007: 17), whose seminal work on war Mandela read and admired, realized that because humans are imperfect, human war, justice, and peace are imperfect, so that the shortcomings, which affect both sides of a conflict alike, constitute a moderating force. Such a realization and acceptance of human fallibility is central to the work of Mouffe (2000), whose agonistic approach pushes the view that people, because they are imperfect and diverse, should humbly use the plurality of voices expressed in unavoidable fights for power and hegemony. Violent contestation, including that which is expressed in war, has its role in the pursuit of justice and peace. While in Morocco during his sojourn into the rest of the African continent, as a leader of the armed forces of the ANC, Mandela was advised by Houari Boumedienne, a leader of the Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale, that for most armed liberation movements, the objective of regime change was idealistic, and often, the waging of war was a means to force the enemy to the negotiation table (Lodge, 2006: 98). Mandela’s own narrative of his early life counts, at least in small measure, against those who imagine African existence to be harmonious.9 Mandela finds ubuntu on the tough and contested ground on which, among other examples, children engage in stick fighting, young men and women engaged in competitive 60

Ubuntu for Nelson Mandela and War courting rituals, and people took part in battles for justice in traditional courts.10 Mandela’s ubuntu is not founded in pacifism. His values and strategies for living and leading were learned in a society that taught its male children important life lessons by teaching them, among other things, to fight. Mandela’s pleasant childhood memories and dreams are not composed simply of sweet innocence. Meer (1990: 8) quotes Mandela as saying he “hunted, played sticks, stole mealies on the cob and… learnt to court…/ A well-known English poet [Wordsworth] had such a world in mind when he exclaimed: ‘The things which I have seen I now can see no more.’” Part of the attraction of Mandela’s understanding of ubuntu is that it reconciles the use of violence with the idea of justice. Where appropriate, Mandela was willing to use violence to yield justice. The strategic aim may create a new situation which may make it necessary to alter the general plan. Your tactical plans are governed by strategy. Your tactics will not only be confined to military operations but they will also cover such things as the political consciousness of the masses of the people, the mobilisation of allies in the international field. Your aim should be to destroy the legality of the Government and to institute that of the people. There must be parallel authority in the administration of justice, in administration and in supplies. (Mandela, 2010: 111)

Mandela’s life and its moral expressions of African traditions, including those of ubuntu, are bound up in unresolved battles between the individual and the individual’s life course that is lived as a project among other people (cf. Bonner, 2014; Ngwane, 2014). This fullness and greatness of Mandela is missed by anyone 61

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors who minimizes the plurality of forms and expressions that characterize human communication and human interactive being-in-the-world. Attractive accounts of African just war and peace must reflect the observation, re-crafted from the words of the ancient Roman poet Publius Terentius Afer (a.k.a. Terence), that everything, including all violent warring and peacemaking, is available for Africans to use as they search to live well (Chasi, 2014; Appiah, 2006: 110), and certainly when they seek justice and peace. I now proceed to use these insights to draw out principles that should, I think, ground African thinking about just war and peace. As I do so, let us bear in mind that, roughly speaking, Western traditions of thought have established that just war and peace are waged (1) in pursuit of a just cause (2) by a legitimate authority (3) with the right intention of re-establishing a world characterized by order and peace. Just war and peace are waged (4) with an emphasis on the common good, justice, and the use of reason to ensure that those attacked deserve it, and a course of war should be taken (5) with proportion, (6) only where there are reasonable chances of success, and (7) as a last resort. It is worth trying to learn from people who have earned great names as leaders in their spheres of operation. In the matter of building peace, South Africa has, in Mandela, a leader from whom much can be learned. Given that he rose to prominence in the struggle against apartheid when decisions about war were being made, much can also be learned from him about how to think about just war and peace. To do this, it is necessary to appreciate that to “each epoch and even to each individual the world looks different. To the particular profile of our personal project, circumstance an62

Ubuntu for Nelson Mandela and War swers with another definite profile of facilities and difficulties” (Ortega y Gasset, 2001: 114). In other words, it is important to value in context, including historical context, the life projects that people articulate. I have sought to learn about ubuntu from Mandela’s biographical project. Doing this, I have been able to indicate that it is legitimate to pursue ongoing searches for more elegant African formulations of what constitutes moral excellence by learning from past and present choices–decisions–actions. To do otherwise is as problematic as reading symbols without giving regard to the contexts in which these appear. Valuing the life projects of people, when thinking of just war and peace, allows us to remain aware of the fact that the good is an expression of moral excellence that is perceptible and tangible in relation to people’s practices, experiences, and situations. On this view, ubuntu is a culturally or situationally relative and hence fluid set of moral views. Attempting to abstract ubuntu (by detaching it from the life projects of those who profess, express, and negotiate emergent situations and dilemmas) is quite misguided. If I am right, then in the business of thinking about just war and peace, thinkers who are interested in questions to do with ubuntu do well to follow the traditional route of testing the attractiveness of their thinking (especially of their “What would I do?”) by asking what Mandela, or some other relevant historical figure, would have said. They should think carefully about the similarities and differences between the answers this question would elicit, for such answers indicate the significance of the human capacity to choose and act on different meanings.

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Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors It is in the context of the complex, negotiated, and contested biographical narratives of individuals and of societies that principles of justice, war, and peace arise and make sense. However, to ask good questions about what Mandela (or anyone else) may have said is only significant to the extent that the asker has invested in systematically understanding and learning from the thinking and acting of these others—and also about which questions are the right ones to ask. If we think that to be attractive and competitive, an African theory of just war and peace should attractively acknowledge African perspectives that bear on the matters at hand, scholars ought not make little of the fact that Africans have, over centuries, thought about these issues. Mandela and many others give expression to entangling and contesting traditions of thought about how life should be lived. Africans have fought, communed, and variously striven to settle the matter of how people should live—and this continues to be so. Archaeological evidence that focuses on evidence of violent trauma on bones demonstrates that Africans, in hunter-gatherer and agrarian-pastoral communities, have over history waged deadly wars between communities that affected significant parts of the populations (Kelly, 2013: 160–163) whenever communities and the individuals that compose them felt “that cooperation is a losing option and that trying to displace or dominate rather than work with a neighbor is the only viable course of action” (Kelly, 2013: 165). Both the simple fact that those who waged these wars were communities and the complex fact that these communities were quite fluid and often nomadic mark out that there was a peace, harmony, and productivity dividend for members. 64

Ubuntu for Nelson Mandela and War Beyond valuing the life of Mandela, thinking about just war and peace is an occasion to call for participation—for enabling Africans to be recognized and dignified in matters that concern them. This scholarly endeavor should value the histories in which life projects are chosen and acted out. The history of the Republic of South Africa, with its narratives of European colonial conquest, apartheid dominance, and Black African resistance, is shaped by tensions in the continuum between war and peace (Stapleton 2010: 1) amidst what Wilkins and Strydom (2012: 80) call the “ravages of war” and the “insidious ravages” of unjust peace. This history, and the present and future needs and desires it occasions, cannot be understood without valuing the individuals who shape it. Too often, by skeptics, Africans are treated as people who cannot represent or fight for their interests (Huntington, 1997: 47–48; Etounga-Manguelle, 2000). But even neo-Afrocentrists tend to deny that Africans are fighters. They too tend to stereotype Africans into every category that Westerners supposedly are not. So Africans become stereotypes of peace-loving humanity that unintentionally mimic the racist account (Appiah, 2010). It is surely worthwhile to prize theory that recognizes and values how Africans act as knowledgeable agents. Fighting for just war and peace is an enterprise taken up by strategists: that is, by those who would, within the limits of human capacities to know the truth, take up available forces to attain desired ends. To prize Africans as knowledgeable human agents is to see them as strategists who knowledgeably project reason as they choose and act in ways that take into account 65

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors how historical situations count. Indeed, to see a people as agents is to acknowledge the “capacity of actors to make practical and normative judgments among alternative possible trajectories of action, in response to the emerging demands, dilemmas and ambiguities of presently-evolving situations” (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998: 971). Theory about just war and peace in Africa is attractive when it treats Africans as people who have efficacy. I say this while subscribing to the view that human efficacy is expressed in the ways in which humans agentically interrelate with others, through the aegis of culture, using available resources, in ways that have the capability to effect transformative change. From this perspective, a theory of just war and peace is attractive when it treats Africans as agents with capacities to choose and act from ethical standpoints in ways that command respect and human dignity for the individual—enabling democratic leadership to manifest. Ubuntu is a credit to human cultural agency that is co-enacted through the biographies of individuals, such as Mandela, as they build and maintain right relations with others. I have shown that international and local efforts to build peace in Africa benefit from this new thought on how Africans can, consistent with extant traditions of ubuntu, morally use violence well for the purpose of securing peace.

Endnotes 1

In his study of the biographic and autobiographic narratives of Nigerian military rulers, Gbemisola Adeoti (2006) argues that, in their historical contexts, people develop moral perspectives with which they negotiate their unique

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Ubuntu for Nelson Mandela and War circumstances. A people’s history can in this sense be understood as a process that produces texts that continually enunciate and re-enunciate the moral. Seen in these historical and cultural terms, the moral is relative; it is continually and contingently negotiated so that what was morally relevant and desirable in one period does not withstand moral scrutiny in another. This underlying argument is one that Gyekye (1997), for example, adopts when making a case for what he terms a “moderate communalist” approach to African moral philosophy—one that recognizes that individuals can and do build their personhood, with its moral attitudes and practices, in communal relationships that matter. From this point of view, it is recognizably valuable to look at a renowned African fighter and peacemaker’s views and practices regarding war: from this looking one can find materials with which to guide thinking about how violence has uses in various drives to advance justice and peace. One will find that in the history of European philosophizing on just war and peace, similar use has been made of key historical figures such as St. Augustine. Similarly, when Western scholars have written on agonistic values—which promote the idea that violence is inevitable even in the pursuit of peace (cf. Mouffe, 2000)—they have made pertinent reference to biographical materials. 2

Comparison between Mandela’s and Robespierre’s thinking on violence requires more examination elsewhere, perhaps by others. Similarly, comparison between the thought of Mandela and Fanon on violence is worth further pursuit elsewhere. Hyslop (2014) has noted that Mandela, by taking in the advice of an Algerian mujahedin who held that war was to be used as part of a democratic strategy, was clearly adopting a different stance from that of Fanon, who saw violence as both a cathartic and a strategic means to overcoming colonialism and apartheid.

3

Unlike the politics, for example, of Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Mpilo Tutu (who seeks first the redemption of people’s souls), Mandela’s politics are avowedly secular. It is said that in private, Mandela spoke of himself as a Christian. But unlike Tutu, Mandela, having considered and abhorred how the apartheid regime was inspired and legiti-

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Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors mated with the misuse of claims to Christianity, reportedly felt that his religious beliefs should be removed from public consideration of political programs (Pillay, 2013). 4

To reference the figure of the agōn is not to reduce Mandela or the ubuntu traditions of warriorship to whatever is found in, or associated directly with, the histories of Ancient Greece (or of the Western world in general).

5

It will be recalled that Tomasello (2009) has developed the view that human beings are uniquely altruistic beings. He argues that human communication, culture, and cooperation—which greatly account for the great technological, intellectual, and other advantages humans have over other animals—are a result of human altruism. However, being an evolutionary psychologist, he is also careful to note that humans must have an inner animal core that is fundamentally selfishly interested in self-preservation. Though Tomasello (2009) did not intend to produce a treatise on human greatness, it is surely reasonable to think that Mandela is a great human being to the extent that he manages to exemplify the ideal that Tomasello outlines.

6

Gevisser’s (2009) account of then-President Mbeki’s handling of HIV/AIDS treatment and of then ex-President Mandela’s intervention in the matter is a good reference work on this subject. For someone who spent 27 years in prison, he displayed remarkably little of the hard ascetic disconnectedness to other humans that was supposedly evident in Thabo Mbeki, Mandela’s successor, who refused for a number of years to provide life-saving AIDS treatments and HIV prophylactics.

7

Mandela’s institutional conception of just legal practices involves an appreciation of both the colonial-apartheid Roman-Dutch and traditional-customary law systems.

8

Seeing and accepting Mandela’s human failings or evident and natural imperfection makes it easier to see that it is important to draw in multiple, conflicting, and divergent views from multiple sources if Africans are to give effect to values of ubuntu and of democracy.

9

Contrast Mandela’s idealized childhood memories with those which Wordsworth describes in Intimations of Im-

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Ubuntu for Nelson Mandela and War mortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, from which Mandela quoted (see above). 10

This counts against those who think Mandela learned about the harmonious ubuntu morality of African life from his childhood experiences.

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4 Ubuntu for Archbishop Tutu and Just War “How could anyone really think that true reconciliation could avoid a proper confrontation?” – Archbishop Tutu –

A

rchbishop Desmond Mpilo Tutu is one of the most renowned contemporary proponents of ubuntu, a philosophy with a Sub-Saharan African pedigree (Metz, 2007). Unmistakably, Tutu’s prominence is on account of a theological journey that involves political struggle for the emancipation of the oppressed Black masses of South Africa. He has construed this struggle to entail a quest for reconciliation between the Black oppressed and white oppressors to produce a just and harmonious order.1 Not only did Tutu play a prominent role as a member of the clergy who fought against apartheid. He was also a critical player in the formal transition from apartheid to the new South Africa, with his conception of ubuntu being widely referenced in debates and judgments flowing from the new and transformative democratic constitution of South Africa. This chapter briefly outlines how Tutu’s unique African Christian perspective 71

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors has shaped his conception of ubuntu as a means to get into discussion of how Tutu’s Christian conception of ubuntu has informed his judgment, practice, and thinking regarding just war. Others (cf. Shutte, 2001; Battle, 1997; Eze, 2010) have written on the broader question of how Tutu’s African Christianity shapes his understanding of ubuntu. Archbishop Desmond Mpilo Tutu was one of the most recognizable anti-apartheid figures. During the last decades of apartheid rule, Tutu become the first Black Archbishop of Cape Town and Bishop of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, and he assumed leadership roles in the South African Council of Churches. He used these and other positions of responsibility to fight, using peaceable means, to end the inequity and injustices of the apartheid regime. In recognition of his great work against apartheid, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984. The Nobel award recognized his place as “a unifying symbol for all African freedom fighters,” and attention was directed to his leadership on “the nonviolent path to liberation” from colonial and apartheid injustices (Nobel Media, 2014). Fittingly, perhaps, starting a year after the end of apartheid minority rule, Tutu chaired the seminal Truth and Reconciliation Commission process that ushered in the post-apartheid democratic order. Tutu’s life is a testament to the fact that there are significant continuities between Christian and indigenous African belief systems. In Africa, the introduction by missionaries of Christianity was often decidedly enabled by the leveraging of observable similarities between Christianity and indigenous theisms. Emergent African churches have continued to infuse Christianity with African values, mythologies, and traditions. This 72

Ubuntu for Archbishop Tutu and Just War is noted without losing sight of the fact that the “family squabbles” about the exact nature and form of the interactions between Christianity and Indigeneity that engross scholars of religion and tradition have tenuous bearing, if any, on the question of what ubuntu says about just war. On the other hand, in pursuit of an understanding of the Tutuist view of ubuntu, it matters that Tutu’s liberation theology, which informs and is informed by ubuntu, draws inspiration from the Christian-centered spiritual tradition. This is not strange. It has already been noted that African Christian beliefs are informed and shaped by the religions and traditions within which they manifest. Similarly, the cultures and philosophies into which Christianity is introduced are in turn influenced by Christianity. Before seeking to grasp the rudiments of the workings of Tutuist ubuntu and to imagine what this says for just war reasoning, it is valuable to immediately cast an eye to Tutuist Christian-centered spirituality. Note that the chronology of the presentation may appear to indicate that Tutu’s Christian-centered spirituality is the fountainhead of his beliefs. This seems fair, given the weight of the Christian identity representation markers that bear on Tutu. Tutu (2014: xii) has spoken of getting from God his “democratic” mandate to act on behalf of humanity. He does this as an adherent and proponent of a Christian-centered tradition of spirituality which emphasizes cosmic and blessed divine grace. The view is that God is in humanity and humanity is made in God’s image. Christian-centered spirituality values compassion as justice that celebrates God’s creation of humanity and grace through a spiritual journey that has four spiraling paths: “Via Positiva: Creation; Via Negative: 73

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors Letting Go and Letting Be; Via Creativa: Birthing; Via Transformativa: New Creation of Compassion and Social Justice” (Fox, 1983: 100). Tutu’s abiding belief is that the biblical narrative of the genesis of humanity reveals the primal state of the world and of humanity as one in which “harmony, unity, fellowship and friendliness abound…/ a condition in which God’s will was being done, in which his laws were being obeyed” (Tutu, 1994: 61). Arguing that this train of harmony and unity was disrupted by sin that brought a babble of disunity, disharmony, alienation, and apartness—as found in apartheid—Tutu (1994: 61–62) argues it is the duty of all Christians to follow the example of Jesus of Nazareth by fighting to reconcile the world. Something like the understanding of Christian-centered spiritualists, namely that the primal state of the cosmos is one of harmony, is shared by those who foster African traditional religious cosmologies and moral thinking (cf. Ramose, 1999; Tempels, 1959; Mbiti, 1970). It seems reasonable to think that Tutu shares something of this understanding as he speaks of there being a need for individuals to show gentleness, compassion, hospitality, and openness insofar as this is possible—even to those who infringe upon human rights. Tutu (1994: 122) notes that when Africans speak of ubuntu (in isiZulu) or of botho (in siSotho), they are reflecting how each person is bound up with others “in the bundle of life, for a person is only a person through other persons.” One interpretation of this is to say that no person gains from harming others, since harming others inflicts harms on oneself (through harming the community that one belongs to). Read in this way, ubuntu amplifies the Christian-centered valuing of 74

Ubuntu for Archbishop Tutu and Just War human conciliation in societies. Alternatively, in this view, ubuntu is consistent with the Christian-centered valuing of harmonious community. Tutu opposes colonialism and apartheid, as he recognizes that these oppressive systems inflict unjust violence. He both realizes and fears that colonial and apartheid violence in turn drive victims to violence. Amidst the struggle against apartheid, Tutu repeatedly cautioned that it was important not to push the oppressed masses so far that reconciliation would no longer be possible. Speaking at the burial of slain Black consciousness leader, Steve Biko, Tutu (1994: 20–21) warned of his nightmarish fear of a bloody uprising from a people whose gentle humanity was being so viciously crushed by the brutality of apartheid. His mission was to reverse this by re-establishing the reconciliation of humanity. Thinking, as outlined above, that the order that God created is harmonious and that God intervenes in the world to restore this order is key in the articulation of Tutu’s liberation theology. It is not an escapist faith that turns away from the needs of the marginalized: The whole of life is important: the political, the economic and the social. None of these aspects is untouched by religion… It is part of God’s mission and purpose for his world to bring about wholeness, justice, good health, righteousness, peace, harmony and reconciliation. These are what belong to the Kingdom of God and we are his agents to work with him as his partners… (Tutu, 1994: 71–72)

With the tone of a liberation theologian, Tutu insists that the real Christian church is one that should speak 75

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors with clarity and concreteness of actions that involve it in bringing about relief to people who suffer. Indeed, Tutu (1994: 29) espouses the view that individuals have responsibility for others; and that entry into heaven is tied to demonstrating that they have cared for the least or most weak and marginalized in a manner that mirrors the way of Jesus, “the man for others.” In Christian parlance, calling Jesus “the man for others” calls to mind how in the biblical narrative Jesus, in a way that is beyond compare, gave up his life for others. Jesus is in this sense the ultimate father of sacrificial love for neighbors. Something of being a man for others is called for by the African moral view of ubuntu, which says a person is a person through others. Samuel Crompton’s (2007: 39–40) book on the archbishop’s struggle against apartheid reads Tutu to be a man who understands ubuntu as a moral praxis under which “people cannot develop on their own. Everyone is dependent, in that he or she has benefited from the presence, actions, or prayers of many other people.” It is worth repeating a quote from earlier in this book. In a book on Christian values that sparingly refers to ubuntu, Tutu (1999: 29) expresses the view that: Harmony, friendliness, community are great goods. Social harmony is for us the summum bonum— the greatest good. Anything that subverts, that undermines this sought-after good, is to be avoided like the plague. Anger, resentment, lust for revenge, even success through aggressive competitiveness, are corrosive of this good. To forgive is not just to be altruistic. It is the best form of self-interest. What dehumanizes you inexorably dehumanizes me. It gives people resilience, enabling them to survive and

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Ubuntu for Archbishop Tutu and Just War emerge still human despite all efforts to dehumanize them.

Often referring to and amplifying the above quote, Thad Metz, in his work on ubuntu, has probably carried out the most incisive philosophical work to analytically distil Tutu’s valuing of harmonious community. Metz (2011: 544) has refined this approach further in arguing that ubuntu values the capacity for personhood, for communing, solidarity, friendliness, and shared identity in ways that are continuous with the obligations to establish, promote, and sustain human rights. Throughout his work, Metz contends that ubuntu authorizes and demands proportionately “unfriendly” action against those who act in “unfriendly” ways. He further sees the values of ubuntu being advanced in the post-apartheid constitutional zeitgeist of the Republic of South Africa. It is fair to say that Tutu’s understanding of ubuntu has been instrumental in justifying and advancing opposition to the “unfriendly” system of apartheid. After all, Tutu was and remains a prominent cleric in the struggle to produce a new constitutional order in South Africa that values human dignity, worth, and conciliation. This is not to say that Tutu has not advanced his Christian agenda. Criticisms have been levelled against Tutu: for example, it is alleged that Tutu has illegitimately inserted his Christian values on the post-apartheid narrative of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which Tutu headed. On this matter, for instance, it is said that he contrived to Christianize the commission’s discourses by emphasizing what Jacques Derrida (1986: 59) recognizes to be Christian notions that tie forgiveness to conciliation. The pity is that in making the Truth and 77

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors Reconciliation Commission a forgiveness mission, Tutu unintentionally delivered a dogmatic process that, from the top down, silenced and denied the sovereignty of individuals whose forgiveness could not be institutionally driven to conciliation (Derrida, 1986: 59). The charge is that, without this having been Tutu’s intention, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission deprived the individual victim of apartheid the right to “the minimal, elementary possibility of virtually considering forgiving the unforgivable” crimes against humanity that constitute apartheid (Derrida, 1986: 59). This is not the place to rehearse the stellar defenses of the work of Tutu and of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that have been delivered by scholars such as Michael Eze (2010). More broadly, and in a similar vein as how the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been criticized, there are fair grounds for contending that ubuntu has been used to silence the oppressed in South Africa. Judge Yvonne Mokgoro (1998: 24/279) reckons ubuntu was included in the interim constitution to manage “the potential for disorder that the guarantee of rights and freedoms may have [had] after decades of oppression and repression.” In other words, Mokgoro (1998: 24/279) asserts that the guiding values of ubuntu were included in order to pacify or “set the tone for peaceful co-existence. The preamble specifically required the need for ubuntu but not victimization.” There is no denying that Mokgoro (1998: 26/279) also optimistically finds that the founding values of the final constitution coincide with some key values of ubuntu(ism), e.g. human dignity itself, respect, inclusivity, compassion, concern for others, honesty and conformity. At the

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Ubuntu for Archbishop Tutu and Just War same time the ubuntu values of collective unity and group solidarity can translate into the spirit of national unity demanded of the new South African society. The collective unity, group solidarity and conformity tendencies of ubuntu can surely be harnessed to promote a new patriotism and personal stewardship so crucial (for a number of reasons) in the development of a young democracy. A number of similar survival issues in the law itself brought about by the challenges of constitutionalism, are easily identifiable. It is around these that law reform can harness the spirit of ubuntu(ism) to achieve appropriate responses to the demands of constitutionalism.2

But fundamentally, Mokgoro (1998: 26/279) gives an ear to the view that ubuntu has been used to harness and create the esprit de corps required to enable South Africans to co-exist under a post-apartheid state which would remain for a significant time materially, structurally, and culturally fragmented. As already seen, the putatively necessary pacification of the majority for the transition from formal apartheid towards democracy was significantly pursued by means of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa overseen by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who used the language of ubuntu to smooth out that enterprise. Meanwhile, for most Black South Africans, the social and economic rights that the constitution promises remain pie in the sky. Persistent material, structural, racial, and cultural forms of violence ensure that Blacks continue to experience inordinately wretched lives that are marked with pain, illness, unemployment, and so on. In contemporary South Africa, this has amplified criticism that ubuntu has been dispensed as a soporific for excluded masses. But Tutu is of the view that the reconciliation he tied to ubuntu is necessary for the 79

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors re-attainment of a godly state of harmony in which human wellness is assured. In opposing apartheid from the side of the Black oppressed, Tutu (1999) often asked, “if God is for us, who can be against us?” Now, the everyday evidence of Black pain from inordinate structural and cultural violence indicates that monopolistic owners of white capital and power, supported by institutional and material factors, continue to dominate. For liberation theologians, among whom Tutu stands, a hard problem is that Blacks experience inordinate suffering even where there is no evidence that Blacks have lacked faith in commensurable ways. Where Tutu argues for reconciliation, some of his critics claim, in response that he does not do enough for black economic emancipation. They ask what blacks have done to deserve to be marginalized from the national commonwealth. This question may be paired with other questions about why the post-apartheid settlement and the state it gave rise to (1) have not ensured Blacks enjoy reparations or retribution for harms committed against them or, (2) have failed to secure material and institutional transformations that bring about an end to suppression of the Black majority, while (3) persisting in demanding attitudinal-behavioral changes in order to end racism without thereby changing its material and institutional underpinnings. The sharpness of the feelings of some about the fact that Tutu is focused on making calls for reconciliation amidst continuities of colonial and apartheid inequities found an occasional champion in Zimbabwe President, Robert Mugabe who once infamously branded Tutu “an angry, evil and embittered little bishop” (Staff Reporter, Bulawayo 24).3 80

Ubuntu for Archbishop Tutu and Just War Notwithstanding the fact that this strident criticism came from a man whose own human rights record is deeply problematic, Mugabe’s charge that Tutu is “an angry, evil and embittered little bishop” is worth commenting on, at least insofar as it reflects aspects of the skepticism that some have towards the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Mugabe’s charge, at its core, challenges the claim to Christianity and goodness that Tutu is associated with. Significantly, its rhetorical strength resides in how, as an enthymeme, it leaves key conceptual grounds unsaid. Mugabe does not state that the good involves acting to remove structural violence against victims, that is, against who do not deserve it. He does not state that Tutu and the God he worships are evil to the extent that they do not side with the oppressed who the tyrannical Mugabe vainly claims to represent. Mugabe does say that Tutu and his Christianity are evil to the extent that they do not reward Blacks for showing reconciliatory attitudes towards whites who “are still contemptuous… still racist and we don’t want that in our society” (News24 Archives, May 24, 2004). In effect, and by reason of how his cultural beliefs are related to his expression of Christianity, Mugabe is also silently arguing that Tutu’s ubuntu is perverse. Much work must be done to understand Tutu’s claim to goodness (and hence to ubuntu) before one can pass informed judgment on it, as Mugabe appears to do. This is because, if one is to be fair, it is valuable to acknowledge—which Mugabe and other critics fail to do—that Tutu is critical of many of the human failings that his critics accuse him of glossing over. If one concedes that available evidence supports the view that Tutu has used ideas of the good (and hence 81

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors also ideas having to do with ubuntu) to justify fighting for justice, one must separate the question of whether or not Tutu has fought for justice and peace from the different question of whether his approach to fighting for justice has been effective. The simple fact is that Tutu has a record of fighting apartheid. Tutu (1994: 97), at one point likening apartheid to a Frankenstein, expressed the view that this dehumanizing system could not be reformed—it had to be dismantled. In the current post-apartheid era, no doubt Tutu is concerned that people continue to live in depraved conditions that inscribe legacies of colonialism and apartheid into the fabric of everyday lives. Tutu is at the forefront of a new call for sharing and caring that evidences the emergence of participatory and sustainable societies. For Tutu (2006: 233) holds that: …our interdependence… is how God intended us to live, it is the law of out being and when we contravene it then all kinds of things go wrong. Then we have endemic unrest. Then we abrogate the rule of law… We resort to violence.

In chapter nine of his authoritative biography, John Allen (2007) argues that Tutu does not fundamentally oppose the use of violence to achieve justice and peace. In offering a theological rationale for fighting against apartheid, Tutu (in Allen, 2007a: 6818) noted that reconciliation is a travesty if it is delivered without confronting systems that bring evil, unjust inequity, oppression, and viciousness. He asked: “How could anyone really think that true reconciliation could avoid a proper confrontation?” (Loc. cit.).

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Ubuntu for Archbishop Tutu and Just War However, in the face of apartheid, Tutu took the view that the chances of achieving military success were small, and he condemned violence which could not achieve positive outcomes. Still, in trying to negotiate the view of the South African Council of Churches that all violence was to be condemned, he argued for supporting those who became violent to overcome apartheid (Allen, 2007a: 3393; Tutu, 1994: 90). Tutu famously explained this position when speaking for a mitigation of the sentence of the accused in the terrorism trial of Tokyo Sexwale and five others. There, he told the court he understood why some turned to violence when the use of non-violent means to protest against state-sanctioned oppression was brutally crushed or ignored. Tutu became well-known for taking on the mantle of using his positions as a Christian leader to advocate for the ending of apartheid. As church leaders came to agree that peaceful means to end apartheid had not been exhausted, Tutu became a leading non-violent fighter against apartheid, advocating for sanctions against the apartheid regime. Tutu believes Christian churches have a prophetic mission. Christians, he argues, must therefore bring the truth that they are able to see to others who may not see these truths. His view is that this will advance the cause of justice and peace. Repeatedly, Tutu spoke as though all that was needed to change the policies of the apartheid regime was to communicate to its leaders and adherents the form and consequences of apartheid as experienced by its Black victims. To understand this, one must recall that Tutu is operating within a Christian missionary framework which sees communication as a process of transmitting information about existence in order to recreate the conditions 83

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors for communion between the individual, others in the world, and God. The circle of justice and peace, on this view, is complete when people are reconciled with each other and with God. Tutu wishes to bring people to a civil order in which a Christian culture produces peaceful co-existence. Strangely, Tutu (2011) apparently accepts the rather derisive description that he is a rabble-rouser for peace—one who approaches a rabble and rouses it for peace. To describe people as a rabble is to intimate that they are representative of a tumultuousness, meaninglessness, and disruptively vulgar or lowly state. Here one must recall that etymologically the word “rabble” is derived from the middle English rablen which has meanings that reference meaningless words and packs of animals. What’s more, knowing that Africans have been derisively spoken of as sleeping masses who fail to display rationality and agency, it is perhaps disappointing that Tutu allows himself to be called a “rouser” of rabble. But seemingly he was seduced by the ironic turn of Albertina Sisulu4 who called him a rabble-rouser—to describe how he seemingly spoke to stir angry mobs to violence, when the evidence is that all his initial fiery rhetoric was characteristically shaped to forge his audiences to a peaceful retreat (cf. Allen, 2007a: 6059). Repeatedly, in the sphere of inter-human relations, Tutu’s Christian thinking on how reconciliation should be achieved involves getting the perpetrators to not only (1) ask for forgiveness, but also (2) subsequently make restitution as part of (3) meriting forgiveness that is altruistically granted by victims (Allen, 2007a: 6836). The problem with this approach is that success appears to rely on all people behaving altruistically towards 84

Ubuntu for Archbishop Tutu and Just War each other, and especially on victims forgiving perpetrators and condoning beneficiaries of the injustice in the faith that their altruism will be reciprocated – or at least in the hope that justice will prevail. It is reasonable to argue that many perpetrators and beneficiaries of apartheid were always likely to take advantage of easily given forgiveness. It is also plain to see that one if investing in miracles if one banks on a gospel of forgiveness remedying the inequities of apartheid with the swiftness that justice requires. Tutu accepted this, but he still said (quoted in Allen, 2007a: 6875): Let us go… the Christian way, the way that says, yes there is a risk in offering people forgiveness; you don’t know how they are going to turn out. But that’s not… our business, that’s God’s business, with that particular individual.

From the perspective of putting forward a compelling African perspective on just war, is there anything to be gained from entertaining the question of how God may or may not reward Blacks for acting altruistically by forgiving their oppressors? Tutu argues that forgiveness, by God’s grace, is a gift that can and should be given among humans in order to repair societies (Tutu & Tutu, 2014: 120; Allen, 2007a: 7946). Noting that the question of God’s role in action is a matter of conjecture that requires leaps of faith, it can be contended that there is little profit to gain from foregrounding the question of theodicy5 (and religious faith and divine intervention) on behalf of those who are morally worthy of grace and against those who morally deserve their punitive just deserts. Taking this view facilitates the choice to follow William Jones (1973), who—having asked if it be should be said that God is 85

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors a white racist for allowing inordinate Black suffering— has concluded that the humanist move is to focus on the agentic actions that individuals are capable of. This in turn facilitates briefly saying something about how Tutu’s idea of ubuntu can lead societal change. Because he concludes that fighting the apartheid regime is an impossible mission, Tutu appears not to offer much by way of a strategic orientation to just war. What he offers instead is a set of transfigurative procedures for recovering and hence reforming humanity in certain ways. His primary aim is to reclaim what he believes is a lost spirituality and morality that accords with harmonious existence in what he terms a rainbow nation. Some observations will be presented in outline form regarding Tutu’s thinking on how individuals and hence societies can be transfigured before I present a challenge to the theodicy that underlies his approach. Thereafter, some thoughts will be shared on why Tutu’s approach is woefully short of a decisive and effective strategic framework for thinking about just war. Tutu (1994) argued for a transfigurative process to bring about the end of apartheid. The idea of the transfigurative describes a metamorphosis by which something is converted into a more beautiful or good version of itself. In this section, a brief critical discussion will be presented on key ideas that Tutu has shared about how this transformative process should take place in South Africa. The main critique will be that Tutu’s envisaged program is fundamentally spiritual even if it aims at political change. At its core, consistent with Jones’ (1998) humanist view, I am skeptical of the value of seeking fundamental political changes through pursuing, first, spiritual change.6 86

Ubuntu for Archbishop Tutu and Just War For Tutu, the steps of individual transformation involve getting the individual to (1) tell the story, (2) name the hurt, (3) grant forgiveness, and (4) renew or release the relationship. In many respects, Tutu got the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to play out this experiment—also giving us a basis to critique the viability of using this process for a national transformative agenda. Desmond and his daughter Mpho say in Tutu and Tutu (2014: 120): Renewing relationships is how we turn our curses into blessings and continue to grow through our forgiving. It is how we make restitution for what was taken and set right what was made wrong. Even if the relationship was injurious or hurtful, it is still a piece of shared history. Ubuntu says, “I am incomplete without you,” and whenever possible we must do the hard work to rebuild right relations with one another. Enemies can become friends, and perpetrators can recover their lost humanity.

Two simple observations stand powerfully against Tutu’s argument for starting the work of ending colonial relations and apartheid by changing, transfiguring, or redeeming people. First, there is much evidence that people wage war when they start to believe that cooperating is no longer a viable means for attaining a desirable and just share of the commons. In other words, as demonstrated by archaeological analyses of skeletal data from many centuries, arrangements regarding the production and sharing of material resources are a key determinant of whether or not people wage war (Kelly, 2013: 165). Second, it is known that people who claim to be and are known to be Christians have committed grievous acts of war and genocide. A recent example is 87

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors found in the genocide in Rwanda and Burundi. Also, the system of apartheid was developed and implemented by people who attested to and were known for being Christians. A spiritual framing of social problems and their solutions, in the manner of Tutu, has the attribute of ascribing moral blame to the victims. It seeks to account for human suffering and evil by finding causes or origins in the characters of morally culpable individuals. Notwithstanding that his view poses a fallacy of circularity that can only be resolved by means of a great leap of religious faith, Tutu’s theodicy could also justify thinking that the problems of societies can be resolved through individual moral reformation (Jones, 1998: xviii). This last point draws attention a significant cause of concern. A major problem for the theodicical account of suffering is that it is not clear that Africans suffer more because they have been morally more degenerate than the privileged who have perpetrated heinous colonial and apartheid crimes against them.7 Another major problem is that the theodicical approach does not address the agency of social structures that often direct supposedly good people to do bad things.8 In investing so much faith in the power of individual improvement to overcome apartheid and its legacies of continued suffering, Tutu appears to misread apartheid. He appears not to understand that apartheid has foundations in rule norms—norms that mimetically mispresent themselves as the good and excellent on account of how they shape and inform assessments of new actions. Apartheid is achieved using resource arrangements and distributions that differentially support misanthropic actions while discouraging and pre88

Ubuntu for Archbishop Tutu and Just War venting right relations between people. Conceptions of apartheid culture must therefore account for (1) the foundational agentic work of rules that instruct norm building, (2) the function of resource environments in shaping social relations, and (3) the significance of meaning-making human actors. A singular emphasis on the importance of spiritual and moral change in individuals denies how individuals perceive the good through foundational logics that are embedded in norms into which individuals are socialized. This emphasis also fails to adequately address how, in misanthropic orders, social structures have agency that directs and inflicts violence. Tutu, in other words, presents an account that appears to forget that good people do bad things depending on the cultural norms and structures in which they find themselves. Where perceived interests compete, people are pitted against one another in resource conflicts that tend to be paired complexly with moral discourses. This implies that the more conflict-ridden a context is, the harder it is to splice out moral issues and relations from structural and cultural factors that occasion them. One could refer to Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber (1973), who wrote of wicked problems—those that confound rational or logical planning because they are immensely intractable. These problems are troublesome to describe, explain, and control without incurring untenable costs. If one describes underdevelopment as a condition that is positively associated with the occurrence of wicked problems, it becomes apparent that underdeveloped African contexts are not easy places in which to attempt to solve problems by asking people to assign themselves the task of making humanity good.9 It is not a troublesome task to compile 89

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors awful lists of atrocious commissions (and omissions) that were justified and led by claims to Christian belief. There are so many examples to draw upon.10 Beyond action to change people’s religious beliefs, it is necessary, for one who would transform an apartheid-afflicted country into one that democratically grants recognition, dignity, and human rights, to take up political action to create the conditions for desired change. As discussed earlier, Tutu approaches the problem of apartheid as an evangelical challenge which merits spiritual action to transfigure people in ways that recover original goodness. However, “the primary processes involved in the production of the everyday world are inseparably material and meaningful” (Comaroff & Comaroff 1991: 8): that is, the primary processes involved in the production and substance of apartheid are directly political, not spiritual. To be sure, spiritual arguments do motivate some to act against injustice. People such as Oliver Tambo, leader of the ANC in exile, were inspired by such Christian thought to become political combatants against apartheid (cf. Tambo, 2014). Tutu himself, motivated by the idea of a godly state that is characterized by wellness, has been a powerfully peace-abiding fighter against human rights abuses. To orchestrate justice and peace, Tutu relies on communicating with consummate humor, friendliness, and candor—that is, with the use of many tactics and strategies. Sometimes he has also communicated with forceful but peaceful action. Dramatically, on some occasions, he physically waded through perpetrators of violence, be they police or unruly mobs, to protect victims (Crompton, 2007: 62).

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Ubuntu for Archbishop Tutu and Just War I would like to generously think that, within their spheres of operations, many Christian leaders and followers act to protect the weak. Even some pioneering Christian missionaries in South Africa intervened to protect the vulnerable. Robert Moffat, the well-known missionary, is reported to have said: No missionary, however, can with any show of Scripture or reason, refuse his pacific counsel and advice, when those among whom he labours require it, nor decline to become interpreter or translator to any foreign power, or to be the medium of hushing the din of war arising either from family interests or national claims; nor is it inconsistent with his character to become a mediator or intercessor where life is at stake, whether arising from ignorance, despotism, or revenge … A missionary may do all this, and more… (in Comaroff & Comaroff, 1991: 253–254)

What distinguishes Tutu is that his engagements to advance a godly state encroaches upon the fuzzy lines between political and spiritual realms. Pioneering “mission societies accepted—indeed, positively urged the separation of church and state, the sacred and the secular” (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1991: 252). What sets Tutu apart from many of the early missionaries, who inadvertently or otherwise furthered colonial and apartheid ends, is that he is lauded for fighting to end injustices that correspond with colonialism and apartheid. Indeed, Tutu has long understood that religious postures and dogmas can and do produce, aid, and abet monstrous systems such as apartheid. He understands that the poverty, marginality, and depravation produced and distributed unjustly by colonialism and apartheid must be overcome in order for justice and peace to prevail. 91

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors Looking at Tutu’s conception of ubuntu through the lens of his life perspective, even with the bare details outlined above, suggests that someone who does not adhere to the Christian perspective that Tutu articulates may well come up with different articulations of ubuntu. It is not strenuous to find Christians and non-Christians who have taken radically different and even opposing positions to Tutu, both in and after the formal era of apartheid! Tutu calls for sanctions where others go to war. He talks where other people call for arms. He articulates ubuntu as a means for achieving reconciliation and harmony when other interpretations, which will not be explored here, are imaginable. Thinking about Tutu, and taking his life seriously, amply demonstrates some benefits of granting recognition to Africans as moral agents who are situated amidst often wicked problems. Seeing how Tutu has constantly negotiated his circumstances, and how he has agentically produced fluid but rugged formulations of ubuntu reveals that ubuntu is a relational ethic that is complex and multivariate. In this sense, I hope this chapter adds to how readers see ubuntu as a moral philosophy for everyone. Ubuntu is a philosophy for everyday living amidst dilemmas whose solutions are often incommensurable or incomprehensible. We lose sight of the lived significances that occasion ubuntu when we focus on ivory-tower versions that are quite apart from lived-histories. One goes some way to meeting this challenge whenever one lowers one’s eyes to see the ebbs, flows, and flux of the streams of life in which one’s own and other people’s lives are found.

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Endnotes 1

Race has marked significance in South Africa with its history of apartheid. In this chapter, the reference is to apartheid distinctions between Black and white, which are (farcically but with institutional force) problematically based on perceptions of difference that are themselves socially constructed.

2

While it was there in the interim constitution (The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa Act 200 of 1993) and then removed in the final constitution (The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996), legal scholars are widely of the view that ubuntu is the guiding value of the South African constitutional state (Bennett, 2011; Mokgoro, 1998).

3

Mugabe was purportedly responding to views Tutu expressed that were taken (a) to be oppositional to the disorderly land reclamation process that Mugabe was leading and (b) to decry human rights infringements that accompanied Mugabe’s leadership of Zimbabwe.

4

Tutu’s fellow icon in the struggle against apartheid, Albertina Sisulu, was a social worker and I do not know of her being especially interested in words and their etymologies. However, as a theologian, Tutu is aware of the significance of words and of their etymologies.

5

Theodicy is a theological reckoning with the existence of evil among humans. It asks questions of the role of God in questions the appertaining to how beneficial or harmful outcomes are meted out and experienced by people (be they good or evil).

6

My point of view is not that spiritual enlightenment is not without value. Rather, I think that desirable political changes can take place without being foregrounded by spiritual changes. Further, it seems to me that desirable spiritual changes can be constrained by failure to achieve viable political transformations.

7

To be clear: I am not hereby alleging that Tutu espouses the view that Africans are more morally degenerate than others who suffer less than Africans do.

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Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors 8

This problem has been brilliantly explained, among others, by MacIntyre (1999), who describes how good German citizens acted in ways that actualized Nazi crimes against humanity. Social structures do tend to compartmentalize organizational decisions in ways that can anaesthetize ethical judgments that would otherwise be morally problematic.

9

Simple solutions to wicked problems frequently become sources of new and great injustices. In thinking about this, there is some merit to recalling how Africans have attacked, maimed, and killed one another in pursuit of various ideas of the good. The group that called itself Makhulu Span in 1980s and 1990s South Africa tried to violently institute its own ideas of the good (Crais, 1998). Necklacing, which is the burning alive of people using tires strung around their necks, was used to advance ubuntu by killing perceived traitors in South African township during the struggle against apartheid (Blankenberg, 1999). In the mid-1990s in Rwanda and Burundi, one of the largest genocides in history was committed by Africans who were pursuing a “cleansed” form of society (Longman, 2011).

10 Now, apartheid is itself an abomination which was instituted and supported by self-professed and known Christians. “The apartheid concept first emerged in the context of discussions by Dutch Reformed Church missionaries in the 1930s, only gaining wider political currency in the 1940s” (Dubow, 2014).

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5 Ubuntu for Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Honor “To this day, I ask God to forgive me, for not forgiving Tutu” – Winnie Madikizela-Mandela –

H

onor arises in systems of practices. Honor practices relate to the public personas, practices, or “faces” that both assign and lay claim to status or rank for persons (cf. Darwal, 2013: 24). Insofar as they mark out grounds for the loss of status and rank, honor practices also set out or script identities and representations by which individuals and collectives live lives marked with respect or with shame. For this reason, one would expect scholars of ubuntu to give much attention to how honor is or is not advanced by the practices which are attached to ubuntu. Strikingly, there is yet to emerge a scholarly attempt to discuss systematically how honor relates to ubuntu. This is surprising, because ubuntu scholarship is suffused with concerns about how people who live a life

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Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors of ubuntu are involved in practices that lend respect to themselves and to others. Honor as an ascription of virtuous conduct and personal integrity represents a set of statements about a reputation for moral⁠–⁠ethical conduct. Honor is moreover qualified as something that is given and earned among people who matter because they belong to a society of equals. It invokes notions of belonging that determine, as a matter of power, the rights of individuals in a society. This means that honor is not just a matter of the qualities of a character. It is also a question of status and power. This makes it highly conducive to practices of violence and war that seek to advance, defend, or extend honor (Nisbett & Cohen, 1996: xvi). All questions and possibilities having to do with honor do arise for Africans. Together with Appiah (2006: 110), in the stirring expression of Publius Terentius Afer, I want to recognize that we Africans are human and all things human are possible for us: “I am human; nothing human is alien to me.” It is worthwhile to move away from the narrow history of how we may honor Africans. One important step is by moving towards recognizing how Africans have developed and used a requisite variety of interventions, with war on one extreme and peace on another, in pursuit of just orders, and how Africans may do so. In short, we need to put honor back into how Africans are humans with other humans, in war and in peace. Of particular interest here is to find ways to express honor for those Africans who have waged wars to advance human dignity and worth. I do so while realizing that African warriors are easy to malign and typify as sources of unjust violence, terror, horror and devastation. This is the case even more so 96

Ubuntu for Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Honour when the warrior is a woman, since woman are typecast as embodiments of chastity, virginity or marital fidelity, peace, caregiving, and motherly nurturing in ways that normally make them the objects of contestations, knowledge⁠–⁠power, shaming, control, violence, and wars that are justified as practices that procure, defend, and secure societal honor. Many people continue to hold the prejudice of thinking it is the exception for a woman to be a warrior. Women warriors are people who transgress patriarchal norms. They break out of the marginal places of the societal circuits of power, violence, war, and honor given to women. Such women warriors are hence liable to be shamed, a tendency being for commentators to be critical about such women’s personal moralities. Such prejudice relies on saying a woman’s social role is to be a caregiver and this does not sit well with how warriors are associated with violence and its uses. With the above in mind, it is interesting to turn to the complex figure of the late Winifred Nomzamo Madikizela-Mandela, who was popularly known as Winnie.1 Let me do this while championing the view that she was denied honor in significant part because she fought against oppression while being a Black woman. Winnie is a helpful figure to focus on in this regard because of the ways in which she took on a warrior role in joining and leading the struggle against apartheid injustices—which denied rights and therefore honor to Black South Africans, including women. The point of thinking about Winnie in this way is not just to see how she may be honored. It is also, significantly, to shed light on ubuntu. Doing this will enable us to see that there is an urgent need for work that re-inscribes honor into ubuntu. 97

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors When Winnie was nine years old, the Second World War ended. Having heard the news, Winnie convinced her father to take her and her siblings to celebrations in town. Unbeknown to her, Blacks were not permitted in the town hall where whites celebrated the end of the war. Winnie and her siblings had to content themselves with picking up sweets that jubilant whites threw onto the dirt street. Even as a nine-year-old, in this first encounter with white South Africa, Winnie was hurt by the malaise of racism-inspired humiliation that marred (and still marks) the land of her birth. The memory stuck with her. From Winnie’s autobiographical Part of My Soul Went with Him (Mandela, 1984), we learn that her mother, Nomathamsanqa Gertrude, was a Christian religious fanatic. Nomathamsanqa would force the Madikizela children to pray with her two or three times daily. Always, Nomathamsanqa prayed for a son, and this drove Winnie to want to prove that a daughter could be just as valuable to a parent as a son. Perhaps this helps to explain why Winnie was never afraid of bucking gender stereotypes. As a young girl she would sometimes physically fight with those who caused her offense. She wore shorts and played with boys—including in Xhosa stick-fighting jousts that do not commonly involve girls. God did not give her mother a son, but when Winnie was seven years old, a younger sister, Vuyelwa, died of what Winnie later suspected to be tuberculosis. Perhaps pining for her lost child, Winnie’s mother withered away. She died at the age of about forty, having borne nine children. Winnie “hated that God who didn’t respond to her [mother] and instead came for

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Ubuntu for Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Honour her when she was breast-feeding a three-month baby boy” (Mandela, 1984: 47). Upon the early death of Nomathamsanqa Gertrude, Winnie had to assume a large role taking care of her younger siblings. Her father’s clothes were worn and tattered. For six months, Winnie even had to leave school for a while to tend the fields and take care of the household. In all this, she confronted the realization that their family was very poor. No doubt, she experienced the pain of sacrifice and was aware of how some of the pain that came her way did so because of the combined facts of her being a woman and a Black person in a context in which both of these identities come with socially produced disadvantages. Growing up in the rural Pondoland district of Mbizana, Winnie learned from her father and from her paternal grandmother, Makhulu, to detest white supremacy. She learned from them to feel hurt by Black poverty and to see herself as a Xhosa child whose heritage included nine failed Xhosa wars of liberation. Winnie learned to understand colonial rule as a disruptive, deadly, and dangerous process. Her father, Columbus Madikizela, a school principal, taught her primary school history while offering counter-narratives that were outside of the colonial history texts. He included stories of heroic Xhosa resistance. He also spoke of tragic times when the Xhosa lost in battle and were driven into Western colonialism and its civilizational processes. Thus, from Columbus and Makhulu, she learned to admire Xhosa heroes such as King Hintsa who lost their lives in the nineteenth-century Xhosa wars against colonial rule, which had ended just about 60 years before Winnie’s birth.

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Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors Makhulu, who held fast to Xhosa traditional beliefs and practices, entertained children with stories of life before colonialism, featuring great hunters, heroes, and spirits. Makhulu spoke of how the arrival of colonial rule brought the Bible and money while white settlers stole Black people’s land and cattle. Makhulu resented the ways in which the culture of white settler colonialists destroyed local customs and values. Winnie grew up in the context of changing and sometimes violently intermixing Xhosa and white settler colonial cultures, with their different, converging, diverging, and sometimes conflicting practices. It is in this context that, from an early age, Winnie began choosing her own life path, albeit from limited options. Winnie was determined, from an early age, to “start from where those Xhosas left off [to go] and get [her] land back” (Mandela, 1984: 48). Already as a young girl, she saw herself fighting to regain land lost to colonial rulers She spoke of “my land,” of her land, of owning the land in ways defiant of the colonial notion that Black people did not traditionally value the possession of land—and that Black women in particular could not claim ownership of land. So it is Sisonke Msimang’s (2018: 49) insight that when Winnie, as 17-year-old young woman, went to Johannesburg to take up training to become a social worker, she already had the basic traits that she would later become known for. She simply became more of what she had always been. Soon after her arrival in Johannesburg, Winnie entered into life-long friendships with women who were like-minded world-changers in many respects. These include stalwarts of the struggle against apartheid such as Adelaide Tsukudu, Albertina Sisulu, Ruth Mampati, and Ruth First. The young Win100

Ubuntu for Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Honour nie’s story involved progressively selecting and entering into communities of honor that valued practices that liberate Black people and women from historical injustices associated in particular with colonialism and apartheid. Her choices as a young woman set Winnie on a path on which she was to be called the Mother of the Nation of South Africa. She went on to be heralded for fighting for emancipation from apartheid and for the release from prison of Nelson Mandela, the father of the nation of South Africa, who was her husband. Her reputation was not to be all positive. She was also cast as a murderer, kidnapper, sexual philanderer, criminal, and many worse things. When she died, it was not clear how people would recall her life. Drawing on Msimang’s (2018) impressions of media coverage in the days following Winnie’s death on April 2, 2008, it can be said that the world was unprepared for Winnie’s death. Initial obituaries in the media compared her unfavorably with her late ex-husband, Nelson Mandela. He was the saint and she was the sinner. These first voices were followed mainly by young Black voices which rose in protest. They said Winnie was much more than a reckless agitator, that she was a heroic warrior. Subsequently, many nuanced and complicated accounts of Winnie Mandela’s life arose. None of these was, in my view, more sophisticated than Msimang’s slender book, The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela (2017), which grappled with finding a way to give honor to Winnie. Winnie is regaining honor in ways that suggest many people are coming to recognize that they share an identity with her. They are finding that her struggle of living apart from her jailed husband, Nelson 101

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors Mandela, is akin to the experience of many South Africans whose families are ripped apart by violent and cross-cutting structural, cultural, economic, and cultural forces. Many who honor Winnie do so because they value how she chose to fight apartheid at great personal cost. They see how she gave up many benefits of having been an elite educated Black woman in order to fight to end apartheid. To be sure, she fought against apartheid to free her husband, Nelson Mandela. Nevertheless, it is even more compelling to say that she did so as an act of solidarity with those who suffered from and continue to suffer the effects of apartheid and its legacies. Regrettably, one of the reasons for somewhat discounting the idea that Winnie only fought against apartheid to recover Nelson Mandela from prison is because the apartheid regime did such a good job of communicating the message that she had numerous para-amorous relationships while Nelson Mandela was in jail (cf. Pohlandt-McCormick, 2000). Her relationship in the 1990s with the much younger Dali Mpofu, even after Nelson Mandela had come back from prison, is common knowledge. Without being conclusive, this detail throws into question, to some extent, the significance for Winnie of the romantic motive of bringing Nelson Mandela back from prison. What it does not do is deny the fact that she could genuinely have wanted to have Nelson Mandela back from prison for public political gains. Situating Winnie in the course of a struggle for emancipation from apartheid, The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela contests the idea that her association with violence during the apartheid years was a matter of 102

Ubuntu for Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Honour personal failure on her part. Msimang points out that there is a hypocritical paternalist bias against Winnie, who is mercilessly criticized and condemned for having incited, participated in, or led or taken part in acts of political violence against innocent parties. Yet men such as Harry Gwala are lionized almost without criticisms for how they reputedly played key roles in numerous political assassinations. When Winnie publicly advocated for necklacing, she was castigated for it. She is condemned by a large number of people because of this. The practice of necklacing, which continues intermittently, is a gruesome extrajudicial tactic. In necklacing, a mob kills a person who the mob itself declares to be an enemy of society. The mob determines that such a person deserves to die painfully, typically in full view of the public. As in all public displays of gruesome justice, an aim of necklacers is to deter others who would contemplate undertaking the undesired course of action that the victim is found guilty of. The doomed person is doused with petrol and is then burnt with a rubber tire slung around their neck. A sordid sense of humor led communities to name the burning tire “the necklace.” Winnie has been publicly maligned more than anyone else for calling for necklacing. This is so despite the fact she did not initiate the practice. Before her, the ANC—the political party she and Nelson Mandela belonged to until their deaths—had issued statements that called for the assassination of those who acted as informers and collaborators of the apartheid regime. The revered long-serving President of the ANC, the late Oliver Reginald Tambo, called for perpetrators of highly undesirable actions to be tried and dealt with 103

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors by people’s courts, self-defense units, and street committees. As early as 1985, when news coverage of the practice began, it was evident that the ANC was at least signaling that the organization was ad idem with mobs necklacing those who were deemed “sell-outs and puppets” (Msimang, 2018: 101). Even in March 1986, when public sentiment in South Africa began to go against necklacing, the ANC’s Radio Freedom still advocated the use of necklacing and other brutal tactics to win control of the streets of South Africa (Msimang, 2018: 103). A month later, in April 1986, Winnie issued a statement that continues to taint her reputation. She said, “Together, hand-in-hand, with our sticks and our matches, with our necklaces, we shall liberate this country” (Msimang, 2018: 103). Months later, similar statements were issued by Alfred Nzo, who was then ANC Secretary General. Nzo never faced the same public scorn. It was only in 1987 that, under the weight of coalescing international and South African public opinion, Oliver Tambo issued a statement that distanced the ANC from necklacing. Evidently, at one point in history, some in the struggle against apartheid built reputations by taking part in necklacing or by championing it. This is not to say that necklacing was ever a morally acceptable practice. What was manifestly the case is that at some points in time, necklacing and other such strong-arm tactics to kill and deter sell-outs and collaborators formed part of the honor world of the struggle against apartheid. Without having the same garish meanness, other areas of the struggle against apartheid drove warriors to deadly violence against sell-outs and collaborators (Trewhela, 2010). For example, outside South Africa, 104

Ubuntu for Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Honour in camps run by the ANC (cf. Manong, 2015; Martin & Johnson, 1985), people were at times tortured and killed to protect the struggle and its cadres from apartheid infiltrators and traitors. There is some value in seeing necklacing within the context of a time in which lives were placed in harm’s way wherever people acted conspiratorially with agents of the apartheid regime. The history of how the ANC came to distance itself from necklacing, after more than 400 people had died in necklace killings between 1984 and 1987, is archetypical of how honor practices can be drawn to an end by publicly shaming those who commission or practice them (Appiah, 2017). Quite likely, with exceptions, most commissioners and participants in necklacing incidents would have agreed that the practice was reprehensible. Their argument would have likely been to say that they only sanctioned this behavior to use its horror to end an even greater wrong. One would do well to read the decision to necklace or not to necklace as a political question that had to do with how membership in the community of oppressed people could be policed, protected, empowered, freed, and honored. When it became clear that necklacing brought shame and not strength or any other morally desirable attribute, the practice was called to an end. When the language of shame is applied to Winnie and necklacing, there is plainly more of an edge to it than when the ANC and its other, mainly male, cadres are called to question for having supported necklacing. Understanding the reasons for this is crucial to understanding how Winnie’s identity as a mother, the Mother of the Nation, an educated Black woman, a social worker, a Christian Methodist, a beautiful woman, and a powerful leader all work together to burden her 105

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors with an inordinate weight of blame and shame for the ills of necklacing. Given such over-determining identity markers, the practices she was expected to be involved in did not involve fighting to maim and kill, or even worse, the cruel inflicting of pain and death that necklacing represents. Association with these activities made Winnie a problem—the proverbial witch, in many people’s eyes. It is instructive to think about why this is so in view of how her identity variously marks her as a member, subject, object, and participant in various intersecting honor practices and honor communities. Tapping into a sliver of Njabulo Ndebele’s oeuvre can help here by, among other things, showing how plenty of what befalls women when questions of honor arise has to do with the monstrous web of relations that patriarchal orders, and the men in them, make for women. Ndebele (2013) has written a complex and reflective post-apartheid novel on a Winnie persona made by men. The novel The Cry of Winnie Mandela is not a biographical narrative. It is a creative set of imagined conversations on the life of Winnie. Ndebele dramatizes a narrative of conversations held by six women, who are all constrained to wait for men in various ways. In this sense, at least, the female characters that Ndebele pens in The Cry of Winnie Mandela are literally made who they are by their relationships with men. The impression this is Ndebele’s stance is reinforced by how the author gets a character he calls ‘Mannette Mofolo to say, as though it is a simple fact, that women always respond to things that others begin (2013: 115). The Winnie of Ndebele’s imagination is created by men. Columbus Madikizela, her father, gave life to her. Nelson Mandela, whom she married, gave her 106

Ubuntu for Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Honour political life. Major Theunis Swanepoel of the South African police, who violated her body, “slept with violence against [her] body to produce” her by torture (Ndebele, 2013: 148). What Ndebele presents is a man’s world in which men pull the strings of the women who are puppets in it. Contrast this with how the living and breathing Winnie started things. Even though this landed her in some ethical pitfalls, she refused to march to the rhythms of patriarchal norms, to move evenly with the tugs of unjust societal strings of power. For Ndebele’s purposes, this Winnie would not do. He needed to draft a simpler, less agentic and therefore more amenable woman. Ndebele had to create his own Winnie and to make her work for him. You can see Ndebele’s discomfort with a free-willed Winnie in a story he narrates in the introduction to the 2013 edition of The Cry of Winnie Mandela. There he reveals his discomfort at how she, uninvited, showed up at a bookshop in Johannesburg to take a celebrity role at a September 2003 launch of the book. There, even before meeting her, when he was informed that “Mummy” was in attendance and would like to see him, Ndebele was at pains to not fall under her power and authority. He took passive-aggressive pride in staging the situation so that she would appear less daunting to him, as just Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, not as the formidable person he experienced her to be. Ndebele goes about writing The Cry of Winnie Mandela by first trying to overcome the primacy by which Winnie could change things even where change seemed impossible (Ndebele, 2013: 152). To overcome Winnie’s primacy, he takes recourse to reducing the painful intensity of contemplation that she demanded of him by virtue of the compelling power of her life. To 107

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors write about her, he distances himself from her. He formulates for himself the role of a creative artist and thus abjures the role of biographer. To justify this move, which by design aims at effectively excommunicating the subject of his narrative, he invokes the terribly gendered notion that he needed “to avoid the lure of close proximity to the real subject” (Ndebele, 2013: xiii, my emphasis). It looks like she troubles him, in some part, because she is a beautiful woman, with an intelligence, openness, courage, and determination to agentically start things. To “fix” her, he draws up an imaginary substitute. The trick is that it is this substitute, this creature of his imagination, which will speak for his Winnie. The Winnie of Ndebele’s imagination is a puppet, and he is the ventriloquist. Nevertheless, Ndebele cannot magically remove Winnie’s relevance from a book that is about her. Human beings demand unique recognition because of the ways in which their presence and even their absence starts or shapes things. It is useful to draw on Jean-Paul Sartre (1956: 9–10) to realize that when one has a person in mind, everyone and everything else is, in an original act of nihilation, synthesized into the background so that this person can appear in the foreground. The absence of the flesh-and-blood Winnie from Ndebele’s book does not obliterate her. It merely puts a question mark on the Winnie of his fiction. His imagined Winnie is a marginal impression that gains vitality from the possibility that something of the fleshand-bones Winnie will appear to the reader. On every page of his book, the historical Winnie comes constantly to mind as a daunting absence on the grounds of the authorial erasure of her engaging self. While statements 108

Ubuntu for Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Honour about her are absent, the Winnie who lived daily life amidst situations she was thrown into appears as the central question in a book that deliberately sets out to fictionalize her. Resisting negation from her own story, she constantly appears as the principal person the reader should seek to encounter. Ndebele (2013: xxi) sells The Cry of Winnie Mandela as a story that locates Winnie in the larger historical forces of her time. He promotes it as a book that encourages readers to ponder how she experienced the pleasures and pains of her efforts to make her own history, seeing her as powerless against the necessity of her efforts. He claims to want Winnie to appear as someone who, within limiting circumstances, nevertheless created terrains within which people could draw up the rules of action. Many a tradition of storytelling flows from the premise that fiction, fairy tales, and legends can ironically reveal truths that otherwise would be impenetrable. Søren Aabye Kierkegaard’s (1947: 332) magnificent observation in this regard is that “No illusion can be destroyed directly, and only by indirect means can it be radically removed.” Still, it is strange that Ndebele says his simulacrum of Winnie “seeks to create public authenticity, where even politicians can ‘cry’ out their personal dilemmas and win public affection” (Ndebele, 2013: xxxvii). Yes, puppets can have a certain public authenticity, and indeed, they are often lovable. However, in our postcolonial and post-apartheid milieus, in which there remain many barriers to granting and/or acknowledging the agency of Black women, it is a fiction to think that making a puppet of Winnie could straightforwardly beget authentic encounters with Winnie. 109

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors Ndebele is not after validating or authenticating Winnie and her choices. He judges Winnie negatively for how she drew up rules for living out her unique circumstances. He does so by drawing on social norms that would bind a woman to be caring, nurturing, and motherly. He is harsh in his assessments of how she lived as a warrior. He does not acknowledge that her rules were those of a community of warriors operating in tough circumstances. Out of hand, he discounts any merits that could flow from how her membership in the armed struggle against apartheid made her a warrior with the duty to maim and kill, where there was need, in order to produce a democratic, prosperous society free from the dishonors of colonialism and apartheid. Ndebele does not discuss how honor could accrue to her, given the conditions in which she lived her life. Patterns of practices establish social organizational arrangements by which honor groups, honor societies, honor nations, and other orders of honor are recognizable. As a question of identity, honor attaches ritually to people in recognition of the different social roles they occupy in fragile, fluid, and often contentious ways. Roles that ascribe honor to individuals arise both apart from and together with other roles. Social roles appear and disappear in different contexts. They appear to actors in situations that involve others. They arise as people co-enact worlds with possibilities and impossibilities. In acting out social roles, through the course of a lifetime, and in different episodes thereof, people acquire honor in part by reason of how they are perceived to excel in the roles they play. Esteem is a dimension of honor. Individuals and collectives can

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Ubuntu for Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Honour acquire esteem by excelling in how they live out social roles. Insofar as Ndebele works from a narrative logic that erases Winnie’s warrior credentials while rooting her in a cultural ecology of women who are defined by the men in their lives, he undercuts any warrior’s self-defense that she may mount. For the patriarchal standpoint largely still deems it incomprehensible and even wrong that a woman should be a warrior. It scandalizes women who are associated with violence. Instead of placing her primarily in the public role of a fighter against apartheid, which is what she is best known for, Ndebele positions Winnie as a descendant of the Penelope of Homer’s Odyssey. Penelope famously waited nineteen years as an involuntary celibate, turning down numerous suitors, while her husband Odysseus fought in the Trojan War and travelled the world. His aim in doing this is seemingly to set the stage for a set of feminist statements about how South African society is structurally and culturally violent in the many different ways in which women wait for men. If he is critical of any of the women, it is for waiting for men who took too long to come back. Ndebele makes it evident that he thinks Penelope should have been free to go her own way instead of waiting so many years for the return of Odysseus. Ndebele seems to defend Winnie for finding other lovers instead of waiting for Nelson Mandela to come back from prison. In this respect, she may even gain some honor, in Ndebele’s eyes. On the face of it, Ndebele displays a general sympathetic interest in how women are cast into violent cultural and structural contexts. Migrant labor systems that were birthed by apartheid economic and special planning brutally and mundanely separate families in 111

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors ways that are particularly unjust for women as they are often unable to chart their own courses to achieve lives without unjust social judgments that are centered on gendered notions of fidelity, chastity, and feminine honor. Ndebele takes issue with the fact that the language of honor is used to disempower women by stigmatizing and shaming them. Women are shamed for acting independently in search of happiness by, among other things, making decisions to have new relationships that meet their sexual needs. Honor has historically been associated, for women, with chastity in ways that do not apply for men. Initial impressions can mislead. From the vantage point of the seeming feminism that Ndebele exhibits, one would think The Cry of Winnie Mandela could develop into a roaring endorsement of Winnie. At least it may be expected that Winnie would stand a chance of being honored in the creatively engineered position that Ndebele sets up for her. That would not be correct. It turns out that Ndebele is not really interested in honoring Winnie. His feminist guise set him up as a false friend. He cannot justify the warrior roles she assumes. Ndebele smites Winnie hard for how she is associated with violence in the struggle against apartheid: Winnie is deemed to not be authentic. Winnie is judged to not belong. Winnie, it is asserted, needs to be reconciled. Winnie is excommunicated. Should any of this surprise? It should not. In the afore mentioned discussion of Winnie appearing as a surprise guest at Johannesburg launch of The Cry of Winnie Mandela, Ndebele made evident that he was surprised that Winnie would chose to attend if she had read the book. He wondered whether the person she reported to have informed her of the book had actually read it. Ndebele recalled 112

Ubuntu for Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Honour wondering about her claims to not have read the book, “but deciding not to be interrogatory. This was a time of pleasantries” (2013: xv). The Cry of Winnie Mandela fails to raise honor as a specific concern when it comes to Winnie Mandela. This is not to discount that Ndebele works to cleanse Winnie of stains of dishonor that have been placed on her by societal demands that women who are separated from their men should be chaste. It is to say that the word “honor” does not appear in the eponymously named chapter “Winnie Nomzamo Mandela.” But more seriously, the idea of defending Winnie’s honor is not broached either. I repeat, defense of her honor does not appear there. This is so even though the chapter is written in an imaginary Winnie’s voice. It should surely be her primary opportunity to launch a self-defense. The opportunity is forsaken. The monstrosity that Ndebele imaginatively summons to appear as the person of Winnie merely testifies against the flesh-andblood Winnie. The monster damns the life of Winnie without deference to her biography with its facts, circumstances, options, and limitations. Whereas Winnie’s public countenance is that of a political warrior, Ndebele sees this as evidence of a conversion ‘by torture’ at the hands of Major Theunis Swanepoel. He says this torture converted Winnie into the enemy she was fighting. Ndebele sees his Winnie as deluding herself into thinking she is a warrior in a terrible act of hubris. He finds the hubris to be borne out of a love of power and an enjoyment of abusing it. Ndebele pictures his Winnie after months of imprisonment and torture at the hands of Major Theunis Swanepoel. He sees her banned by the state and confined to the small town of Brandfort in the Free State. 113

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors There, he envisions her discovering the monstrous alchemy of personal efficacy, power, and beauty, inseminated with the cruelty Major Swanepoel had thrust upon her by torturing her. There, Ndebele (2013: 152) has his Winnie say, “Brandfort was my first taste of power.” His monstrous Winnie cries: Yes, the drama of Brandfort really ended back in Soweto where I perfected it. I, the child of Major Theunis Swanepoel, born in his torture chambers, nurtured in Brandfort, and matured in Soweto, took on the world alone. I stayed aloof from other waiting women. They had nothing for me. From time to time I created more of them by taking their men. I was the law of struggle. I was the definition of heroism in waiting. I could lead the people to the promised land. On that journey of perils, “the drivenness of depravity” became the drivenness of banality, when I felt myself totally lost in the power I wielded. In my hand I brandished my brand like a spear: MANDELA. Mandela United Football Club, my army of bodyguards. They did my bidding. I lorded over Richardson, the coach. I lorded over the boys. Men: drivers, bodyguards, kidnappers, torturers, murderers, fugitives, arsonists, spies, lovers, comrades, slaves, opportunists, hangers-on. I dominated them all. I, queen of Brandfort. They came, wanting me in secret, yet yearning to display their trophy in public. Opportunists. Dogs on heat. Men! I despised them. Except Nelson! (Ndebele, 2013: 156)

This inauthentic cry from the bowels of Ndebele’s Winnie could not possibly create public authenticity. It could not cry out in ways that bring to light the historical Winnie who experienced personal dilemmas. It could not win public affection in the manner claimed by Ndebele (cf. 2013: xxxvii). 114

Ubuntu for Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Honour Ndebele’s thrusting imagination does not stop to ask what the evidence said about the grotesquely implied admissions to gross crimes he put into the imagined mouth of Winnie. Well before 2013, when the book was first published, Ndebele had access to scholarly resources with which to ask probing questions about what was known of Winnie’s involvements with various alleged kidnappings, tortures, murders, fugitives, arsonists, spies, lovers, comrades, slaves, opportunists, hangers-on, and so on. He could have read, for example, Helena Pohlandt-McCormick’s (2000) journal article “Controlling Woman: Winnie Mandela and the 1976 Soweto Uprising,” which argues with detailed archival evidence that Winnie was a likely victim of state and even of ANC machinations for power. Pohlandt-McCormick makes the point that Winnie was the apparent victim of state-sponsored spies and state-manipulated media coverage which sought to manipulate her public image using disinformation and manufactured information, among other perverse means. The apartheid state sought to create a reputation that dishonored her as a woman who failed to observe the rites of marital fidelity. The apartheid regime wanted her to be known as an uncontrollable political asset for the ANC and an untrustworthy cadre in the ANC’s military wing, uMkhonto we Sizwe. What’s more, pervasive public comments about how Winnie was not a powerful warrior against apartheid do not necessarily reflect how the ANC and uMkhonto we Sizwe were themselves riven by the same shortcomings that Winnie is accused of. The fact that Winnie is a woman likely makes it easier for such damning comments to hold sway and prevent her from gaining the steely esteem of a militant. That this is the 115

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors case—that being a woman should count so thoroughly against her—should rankle all fair-minded people, particularly when it silently influences how her credentials in the struggle against apartheid are esteemed. Admittedly, it is difficult to detail the scale and scope of Winnie’s involvements as a cadre of uMkhonto we Sizwe. It is not easy to establish accurately how important she was to the overall struggle against apartheid. What is not difficult is to say is that few doubt that Winnie steeled the will of many, within and beyond South Africa, to fight against apartheid. She was, during much of the time that Nelson Mandela was in jail, the most visible public representative of the ANC in South Africa. Few could read Winnie’s (Madikizela-Mandela, 2013) account of her imprisonment and torture, of her solitary confinements, house arrest—and aspects of her struggle, resistance, and fight against apartheid—without being stirred to some acknowledgement of her honor. Honoring Winnie as a fighter is complicated, because it involves thinking about a Black woman doing ‘warrior things’, and that may be too much for those who see women as reconcilers whose warm bodies should unite and not divide. What often remain prominent in public discourse are sexist comments that cast aspersions on Winnie. Frequently she faced ridicule, for instance, for having been someone who flaunted “her militant credentials by referencing looks she wore during the 70s as a firebrand activist or in the 80s as a revolutionary figure…” with the effect of invoking “the memory of the combat fatigues and ladylike blouses paired with thuggish accessories of her revolutionary past” (Young, October 21, 2014). 116

Ubuntu for Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Honour It is in the context of debasing associations of the militant struggle against apartheid with base thugs that Ndebele says he was motivated to write The Cry of Winnie Mandela. He confesses to feeling driven to write the book by a failure to get his head around feelings of anger that Winnie could be accused of having a hand in harming and even killing innocent youths. He says this anger and the anguish of thinking about the “deep injustice that tore up a woman’s world” led him (Ndebele, 2013: xx) to write the book. I wonder if Ndebele’s evident deep discomfort at seeing Winnie in the role of a violator of the rights of others could have led him to balk at asking awkward questions about how war, violence, and injustice intersect with her honor. He does not ask how her membership in an armed and violent struggle could justify and even give honor to violent actions—that inherently violate rights such as those of bodily integrity. He does not ask how her role as a warrior on the side of forces waging a struggle against a system that is a crime against humanity could frame a defense of her actions. Failure to examine such possibilities suggests that relevant matters, replete with their influential forces and guiding principles, were likely not accessed by Ndebele before he delivered judgment on Winnie. It is unjust to judge an action without situating it in its context. It is unfair to judge a person before placing that person in their historical context. Yet Ndebele takes Winnie out of her constraining biographical situation in order to make unfettered judgmental comments about her. In finding Winnie guilty of being a dehumanized being who used violence unjustly, Ndebele (2013: 202) elects to draw on tropes of horror, from the deep well 117

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness with its racially charged typecasting. Worse, accepting that Ndebele fails to get his head around his own anger that Winnie stands accused of harming or killing innocent youths could explain why Ndebele could, while showing feminist sympathies for women’s need to satisfy bodily desires, brutally see Winnie as the very embodiment of a heart of darkness. Indeed, to foreground a woman’s sexual appetites, even as a seeming credit to her, is often a patriarchal move to “fix her” for mud-slinging maneuvers that follow. It is not at all self-evident that what stirred Ndebele to anger when he realized that Winnie could be associated with violence was by nature a legal or moral–⁠ethical concern. It could well be that he was upset by questions of honor that confusedly intersect with such concerns. On the face of it, Ndebele, because he did not have the information to determine Winnie’s moral–ethical or legal culpa, was quite likely reacting with anger because an idea of honor was being violated in ways that affected him. Honor specifies that the connections we have with others matter for our own self-respect and for the respect that others are afforded in virtue of a fellow-feeling being observed. Honor is a moral–ethical concern in that it helps individuals in societies to live well, or constrains them from doing so (Appiah, 2017: 91). Confusing honor with moral–ethical or legal umbrage can yield disturbing outcomes of the kinds that Ndebele succumbs to in his The Cry of Winnie Mandela. He delivers a confused and confusing mess of moral–ethical and legal judgments, jumbled together with a seemingly pained sense of dishonor that someone with whom he seemingly shares an identity (at least by sharing a 118

Ubuntu for Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Honour similar education, class, and political interest) should be accused of the things Winnie was accused of. Honor does not always intersect with morality, ethics, or with what is legal and lawful. It is therefore important to think about the claims to the good that are associated with honor. In this regard, consider briefly how pacifism and a willingness to partake in war represent different and intersecting notions of morality, ethics, law, and honor. A flaw in the stance against Winnie that Ndebele presents is that he seems to eschew violence and to assume that this is a purely moral position when one could well charge that his anti-violence is a position replete with considerations of honor. It could be that Ndebele’s intention was to speak to a mesh of issues related to how his and other South Africans’ honor was harmed by Winnie’s being tied to shameful violent and deadly practices. In his disavowals of such actions, Ndebele not only appears to abhor violence, but he also stands for a counter-intuitivism by which unlikely reconciliations are possible (Krog, 2013: 265). What he does not come out with is pacifism or belief in non-violent means to achieve reconciliation. This idea can be supported by seeing how, for example, in his famed short story Fools, Ndebele (1983) crafts a counter-intuitive episode in which an anti-apartheid Black activist submits himself to the brutal whip of an apartheid-era policeman. The policeman is then so struck by the act of submission that he cathartically weeps, and this all achieves something of a magical reconciliation. If Ndebele ascribes to a pacifist and magical non-violent path to reconciliation, it is beneficial to know how this gets smuggled into his condemnation of Winnie’s association with violence 119

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors on seemingly moral–ethical grounds. From this vantage point, it would valuable to know how the fact that Winnie was a woman enabled Ndebele to place her in the community of pacifists and non-violence practitioners against her stated support for the use of warriors and war to overcome the injustices of apartheid.2 Honor is a broad concept that arises out of notions of identity. It marks out practices that are fitting for a person who has or shares your identity. Thus seen, it is insightful to say that you can share in “honor deriving from the achievements of others whose identity you share” (Appiah, 2017: 2189). This coheres with the undertaking by which membership in an honor community entails acceptance by members of rules that govern how different people may act.3 Ndebele’s anger and anguish at hearing that Winnie was accused of violent actions seems to have been animated by a feeling that she had taken such a disturbing and incomprehensible change in direction that something was now tearing up her world (Ndebele, 2013: xx). In other words, the anger and anguish which led him to write The Cry of Winnie Mandela could be explained in terms of Winnie’s having upset what he saw as socially accepted scripts of life that govern honor and social roles. Erving Goffman (1967) recognized this kind of reason to be about the maintenance of norms and to not be about what is ethical or moral per se. Stated differently, he understood that such reasons are about the maintenance of people’s face in communities, when people’s identities are conservatively tied to how others keep to their lines of expected behaviors in ways that maintain individual and collective affordances and accruals of honors.

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Ubuntu for Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Honour An extreme view is that, perhaps, the real target of Ndebele’s attack is the armed anti-apartheid struggle itself, not because he supported the apartheid regime, but because he seems to hold the philosophical view that violence and war appear to have been options that were counter-productive. He puts this point across clearly when his ghoulish Winnie spouts out the following claim: “We have an acquired will to perform roles that do not accord with our being. The Struggle rerouted many of us away from our destinies” (Ndebele, 2013: 182). But if one were to pursue a less extreme view, it may be useful to ask: for what roles was Winnie unfit? Is it because Winnie was beautiful that she could not play some roles but could be designated to take up others? Is it because she was a woman, a caregiving social worker, a mother, the proverbial Mother of the Nation—is it because of her occupancy of these roles that wielding match sticks, using violence, and being a warrior at war was not for her? Ndebele is not forthcoming with answers in this regard, but the historical Winnie, who willingly occupied the center of attention, was criticized along such sexist lines. It is unfair to both Winnie and Ndebele that readers do not really have a clear sense of the grounding values that are at work each time Ndebele takes positions for or against Winnie’s use of or complicity in violence. Without this clarity, it is not evident how, when, for whom, or under what circumstances Ndebele’s views would change. Does it matter that Winnie stood on the side of the weak and marginalized? Does it matter if Winnie was a member of uMhkonto we Sizwe? Is it consequential if Winnie was acting for uMkhonto we Sizwe on appallingly unclear instructions coming through the broken telephone of multiple undercov121

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors er agents operating in notoriously dangerous circumstances? Does it matter if her suspected victims really were enemy agents who posed significant danger to many innocent parties? What if some of Winnie’s suspected victims were involved with the apartheid regime in ways that posed a clear and present danger to the struggle against apartheid? Can one equate Winnie and others who fought against apartheid with collaborators, supporters, perpetrators, and fighters on the side of the apartheid regime? Ndebele does not get his imagination dirty by addressing these kinds of questions. Yet he damns one monster, his Winnie, for moral culpability. He finds her guilty, in particular, for failing to take responsibility for having done wrongs by associating with, commissioning, allowing, creating conditions for, or for personally inflicting violence with consequences that maimed or even killed possible innocent people. Without arguing the merits or presenting grounds for this, Ndebele throws his authorial voice such that his puppet Winnie says the realization that she disappointed Archbishop Desmond Tutu pained her. This after Tutu, as head of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, pleaded with Winnie to say sorry for things that went wrong during the struggle against apartheid. Ndebele (2013) has his puppet Winnie say that she should have apologized to the mother of a boy, Lolo Sono, who apparently died while in the care of her Mandela United football team. Ndebele’s Winnie prop regrets having feigned indifference at Lolo’s death and at other such wrongs on the basis that she was at war. Ndebele puppeteers his Winnie to say this was her hell. She adds: “My hell was also in my denials; letting down Archbishop Tutu, whom I love 122

Ubuntu for Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Honour and respect, whose fatherhood and mentorship I could accept more than Nelson’s” (178). Susan Sontag (2003: 6) argues that it is wrong to make assumptions when talking about the pain of others. Ndebele’s assumption that Winnie was pained for disappointing Tutu is, in an exemplary way, misplaced and wrong. Winnie did not express regret for having resisted Tutu’s public plea for an apology. To the contrary, a documentary, simply titled Winnie, was aired on South African television days after Winnie’s death. It starts with Winnie talking in response to Tutu’s insistence that she apologize at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: “To this day, I ask God to forgive me, for not forgiving Tutu” for having forced her to ask for forgiveness (Zeeman, April 12, 2018). There is something deeply troubling when someone does not respect the pain of another and makes assumptions about it in the manner of Ndebele’s characterization of Winnie’s pain. Add to this the fact that, as already noted, there is cause to be outraged by Ndebele’s strong expressions about Winnie’s guilt—which many have called into question. In the documentary Winnie, a former head of the apartheid state Strategic Communication, Vic McPherson, admitted to having had about forty journalists working illicitly with the state to disseminate propaganda against Winnie. McPherson claimed the state had numerous undercover operatives, including in the ANC, working to subvert Winnie in large part by damaging her reputation. In response to the documentary, social media platforms were replete with South Africans denouncing the triumvirate of Tutu, Nelson Mandela, and the TRC for not standing by Winnie Mandela.4 123

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors It may be fair to say that the impression of Winnie that Ndebele fosters is one that should heap shame on her. Kenyan feminist Shailja Patel (in Gqola, 2015: 38) says, if “you want to understand how power works in any society, what who is carrying the shame and who is doing the shaming.” In interpreting this idea, Gqola (2015: 38) proceeds to comment as follows: “Shame is a function of oppression; it has everything to do with who is valued and who is invisibilised… Shame is the product of dehumanisation, and all systems of violent oppressive power produce shame in all those they brutalise.” A nation’s sense of honor can direct citizen and state action (Appiah, 2017). We need to take particular care what we allow to be honored or dishonored, when and by whom. It is crucial to give thought to how what Appiah calls an honor world evolves with criticisms or praises of Winnie—and to ask how this adaptive sense of honor coincides with, diverges from, and contests emergent notions of ubuntu. Winnie belongs to communities of people who live with unjust shames distributed according to historical patterns of colonialism and apartheid. On the occasion of her death, many who lived under the yoke of colonial, apartheid and gender-based oppression expressed solidarity with her, decrying how she was dishonored or at least how she was denial it. They therefore chose to figuratively resurrect her. They went out of their way to make her a monument to the ongoing struggle against very real legacies of apartheid and colonialism. This is the significance of the title of Msimang’s The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela. This is likely why Msimang (2018: 157) ends her book with the words: 124

Ubuntu for Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Honour In a perfect world, her place is not on a pedestal. She belongs, I believe, with all the rest of the sinners who occupy the world around us. In this sense, her resurrection and our desire to make her a hero are both sad and beautiful. Winnie’s resurrection is a shining monument to the work of nation-building that that is still to be done.

Winnie is increasingly recognized, it seems, by Msimang and many others as a person who fought for the emancipation and deliverance from suffering and pain of the oppressed of South Africa. This position is far removed from the claim of Ndebele that Winnie failed to turn to reconciliation by failing to join Mandela and Tutu, in their counter-intuitive peace-emphasizing move to reconciliation and forgiveness. Without it being a call to bloodshed, Winnie is raised from shame, oblivion, and death by many who realize they still struggle for the emancipation of all. The newfound openness and search for the truths of Winnie’s life that Msimang pursues is at odds with the distancing and closure with which Ndebele avoided encountering Winnie. The willingness of Msimang to consider Winnie a heroic warrior who merits honor, albeit with sadness and caution, is distinct from how Ndebele presents Winnie as a monstrous problem that post-apartheid South Africa had to deal with. Ndebele, as already noted, takes this position without offering relevant justifications. Deployment a tricky rhetorical strategy, that omits key premises so that unaware audiences accept an argument as logical and trustworthy when in fact it relies on a strategic omission, is powerfully bamboozling readers into accepting his position.

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Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors One can see such logical omissions in how Ndebele does not reveal the moral standards he applies to present a negative argument against Winnie. More concerningly, Ndebele initiates a logical slight of hand5 when pledging he is writing about a fictional Winnie when he is intentionally doing more than that. Ndebele (2013: xiv) then performs a magical turn in that he scripts a Winnie “who leaps from the pages and transforms into a real person [in a way that] may impose an authority not derivative from the narrative.” More than this, Ndebele’s magical prestige is realized in that he is not really bringing the real-living-historical Winnie to readers’ attention. He is bringing forward a damning commentary of her. This puts new light to how, he gushes, seemingly with pride, to say “the overwhelming view was that the novel pried open some space for a more honest and potentially healing public reflection on the life of one of South Africa’s most compelling public figures, and her impact on politics and public sensibility” (xxvi). The way in which Ndebele’s monstrous Winnie is called up into a presence in the story invokes traditional incantation processes by which spirits of the dead are called back into our world to occupy a human medium. What is called up is a ghoul that magically enters the realm of the three women who call Winnie into the world. The ghoul enters the scene of the dialogues the three women are having without resort to a door or even an entrance walk. It simply appears. When it appears, it apparently bears the physical form of Winnie, but it multiplies into two copies of her—sending one of its materializations to various parts of the country while another stays in conversation with the three women. With the ventriloquist authorship of Ndebele 126

Ubuntu for Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Honour throwing up words for it, the apparition is also a puppet for the delivery of Ndebele’s own thoughts. One thing to be sure of is that the Winnie represented by the apparition is a woman who is not what she is, but what politics and torture made her (Ndebele, 2013: 181, 148). Something of this is expressed when Ndebele’s ghoulish Winnie twice puppets the following line from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: “Mees Winnie—she dead” (2013: 180, 156). Confusedly and confusingly, the Winnie apparition, with Ndebele as its puppeteer, is strangely also a zombified being. It is a living–dead or dead–living thing. It has no life but it occupies the lifeworld and conceptual body of Winnie, the daughter of Nomathamsanqa and Columbus. The figure of the zombified person looms large in Bantu cosmologies. Its presence is a mark that the cosmic order of life and death has been disrupted. When the cosmic order is disrupted, evil sets in and the gift of vital force that God is said to have passed onto each individual is laid to waste. The gift of vital force is the gift by which people are agentic co-creators, with each other and with God, of worlds in which each individual can be the most that they can be. Something of this is surely signaled when Ndebele (2013: 182) gets his ghoulish-zombie Winnie to lament that many of us have “been derailed from… our giftedness” by taking up alienating roles in the struggle against apartheid that have alienated us from our destinies. Ghoulish-zombie Winne continues: “Destiny? A big, heavy word. It refers not to a life laid out like a robot… it refers to a certain sense of personal capacity and an enabling environment to give expression to it.” Ghouls and witches are frightening because of the ways in which they, like the Winnie who breathed and 127

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors walked the earth, transgress boundaries. This is why powerful women are often branded as witches, feared, and put down. They appear where they should not. They are not limited by locations as they should be. They are not limited by their gender as they should be. They cross boundaries that societies and their elites make and police. There is merit to having caution around those who cast powerful women as frightening, dangerous, ghoulish, and witchy people. The ghoul meme says that Winnie does not belong in human society with its orders of honor. She is too much of a ceiling breaker or rule breaker to abide by an honor code. It is trite to say the trope of zombified leaders who thirst for blood, who have insatiable desires to copulate without fidelity, is commonly applied in postcolonial and post-apartheid settings. Allied with this trope is that of these zombified leaders driving around in expensive cars and wearing expensive clothes while generally engaging in conspicuous consumption, without care for the poor masses they repeatedly traumatize, impoverish, and suck joy from. Frequently, the faces and names of these zombified leaders are male. There tend to be few African women in positions such that these tropes can be applied to them as leaders. Yet Ndebele’s (2013: 182) ghoulish-zombie Winnie is cast as such a cursed fiend. His ghoulish-zombie Winnie refuses to demobilize, she scorns peace. The impression is that she takes pleasure in the pornography of pain and suffering: “And so it is, that each time I run to a squatter camp after a tragedy occurs there, I seal my doom, simulating a political response out of proportion to the care I genuinely feel.” (Ndebele, 2013: 182)

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Ubuntu for Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Honour To undercut any credit Winnie may have got from Ndebele’s earlier feminist assertion of women’s rights to find sexual partners outside of the constraints of shattered marriage arrangements, ghoulish-zombie Winnie reminds us that when it is her wont, she takes and sexually uses the men of these suffering women too (Ndebele, 2013: 156)! For Ndebele, the Winnie who lived and died in the flesh and who was widely criticized for stirring up populist discontent was a problem. Worse, she needed to be marked as the bearer of a curse. She needed a mark on her forehead, “‘BMB’: ‘Beware of my beauty’. Signed: Winnie (Winnifred) Nomzamo Zanyiwe Mandela” (Ndebele, 2013: 87). This is the brand of truth delivered by Ndebele’s ghoulish-zombie. On Ndebele’s view, the work of the post-apartheid nation of South Africa is to exorcise her from its midst. He has his ghoulish-zombie Winnie confess this to this. The ghoul says: “For me, reconciliation demands my annihilation” (Ndebele, 2013: 182). In other words, instead of undertaking to understand and perhaps to honor Winnie, Ndebele prescribes scrubbing her from history, killing off any chance of recognizing her morally excellent legacy of warriorship practices along with the wrongs that she no doubt committed.6 When the putative intentions of a project include promoting the honor of women, as seems to be the case (at least in part) with Ndebele’s The Cry of Winnie Mandela, questions should be asked about the depth of the chivalrous gesture. This is particularly the case when judging women’s moralities is a central feature of such a project. This is certainly the case when such judgments partly rest on unspecified moral frameworks and notions of honor. Without care, problematic norms 129

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors take form in ways that inform how moral insights and honor systems work. This has impacts on how people normalize and make normative behaviors by which societies and their members enable or prevent women becoming all that they can be—in the largest possible varieties of desirable moral–ethical and honor communities. It matters that an unexplained notion of ubuntu is subtly at work in Ndebele’s moral judgements on the life of the Winnie he imagines. In this regard, it is fascinating to read Ndebele’s thoughts on Winnie through a review essay by Antjie Krog that is included in the second edition of his The Cry of Winnie Mandela. Krog reckons that Ndebele uses the language of honor to set the stage for the presentation of his Winnie’s views on her life. Krog finds that Ndebele speaks of the practices of women in love as human practices. Women are people and should be honored as people, she hears him say. Read in this way, Ndebele is contributing to the rehumanizing of women. By marginalizing how Winnie is judged negatively for her associations with violence, Krog also understands Ndebele to be presenting a narrative that advances reconciliation as an alternative set of practices over those of judgment and condemnation that go with the language of honor and shame. She perceives this in how he seems to say that because we are interconnected—men and women, Penelope and Winnie—we should desist from rejecting and banishing each other on the basis of judgments that seek aberrations in others (Krog, 2013: 266). Instead, we should see that we all have weaknesses and strengths that bind us together as a mighty humanity, in which none is there merely to serve another with fidelity, but each lives 130

Ubuntu for Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Honour as an “essential ingredient in the definition of human freedom” (Ndebele, 2013: 193). The moral system that Krog identifies to be at work in Ndebele’s crafting of a reconciliatory perspective in The Cry of Winnie Mandela is unnamed. But it is ostensibly ubuntu that she references, since ubuntu is commonly acknowledged as the communal value system developed by Bantu-speaking Africans, including Winnie. This being said, it is not apparent that one can reasonably agree that ubuntu is a system in which individuals do not have meaning outside of a communal location—unless what is meant is the axiomatic fact that meaning in general is always contextual. I have elsewhere in this book contested the denial of the individual that some, in the service of valuing community, associate with ubuntu. What takes the chapter forward here is that Krog (2013: 265) argues that Ndebele rethinks honor as something that is not so much about needing to be faithful without choice as it is about reconciling with oneself and with others. Honor becomes a value that is attached to the establishment and maintenance of a communal system in which the individual has no meaning on their own outside of the meanings that arise from having a communal location (Krog, 2013: 263). This idea of honor that Krog identifies, by a backdoor, calls to mind notions of fidelity and chastity. Krog goes along with Ndebele and does not speak of how Winnie’s warrior involvements and entanglements could have merited honor for how they helped advance the formal end of apartheid or the progress towards the reconciliation of people that is now underway in South Africa. At the very least, she demurs from commenting on the fact that Ndebele does not offer an 131

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors understanding of ubuntu that relates to the role and functions of warriors. This is all very ironic because Krog hails Ndebele for presenting a feminist point of view on the life of Winnie. She follows Ndebele by talking about reconciliation as an outcome of “counter-intuitive” decisions that avoid violence. In this way, she too ends up condemning Winnie for having taken decisions to align herself with those who would fight, as warriors, to end apartheid and its legacies. What flows from this is that Ndebele’s selective use of honor to talk about Winnie’s fidelity and chastity and not about her warrior involvements falls in line with how, under patriarchal arrangements, talk of honor serves to domesticate, control, and limit women. Drawing on Ndebele’s inaugural King Moshoeshoe Memorial Lecture, Krog (2013: 265) ahistorically argues that the move to reconciliation is possible when one makes a counter-intuitive move—one that realizes that common sense would lead to unwanted outcomes while the unexpected act could yield greatly desired possibilities. This move is ahistorical, most certainly in the context of talking about the progress towards ending apartheid and developing reconciliation, since in this country blood was shed and warriors sacrificed to bring about the reconciliation that Krog speaks of. Indeed, some of those warriors lead negotiations to counter-intuitively bring an end to apartheid, and they are championing processes to advance reconciliation. The South African lesson is that warriors’ turns to violence are not incompatible or incommensurate with the pursuit of peace and reconciliation. Krog’s point in setting up this ahistorical ground is to malign Winnie by making her an enemy of necessary efforts to 132

Ubuntu for Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Honour reconcile the people of South Africa around a nascent national identity that overcomes legacies of colonialism and apartheid. Krog (2013: 265) makes the harsh claim that, unlike Nelson Mandela, Winnie failed to make the counter-intuitive move towards reconciliation. This could very well be the case, but neither she Krog Ndebele bothers to examine Winnie’s views on the matter, which appear to involve saying that social reconciliation must be allied with economic transformation (Msimang, 2018), otherwise you get racial integration as a soporific while economic segregation continues (cf. Biko, 1987: 22). To be fair to Krog as I tried to be fair to Ndebele earlier, she has led us to talking about Winnie without the benefit of combing her biography for evidence that might put a check on maligning statements that can be directed at this warrior. At the same time, when fuzzy notions of honor are mired in conceptions of ubuntu that are not rigorously examined, the result can be confounding and even damning. An examination of both Krog’s piece and Ndebele’s book suggest that it is necessary to re-inscribe into ubuntu clear notions of how honor should work in ways that enable women to be recognized and dignified in all spheres of possibility. To do this, it will be useful, for instance, to recall how a woman such as Nehanda Charwe Nyakasikana led the Shona peoples of Zimbabwe in an insurrection against British colonialism from 1896–1897. It will be of some advantage to also realize that there is no history, by a man or a woman, that cannot act as resource from which lessons can be learned for giving honor to future endeavors of women in all spheres of life. Where there is need, ubuntu must be critiqued and reformed to articulate

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Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors prospects of the greatness of women in all spheres of human life. There is much to learn about ubuntu and honor from how, against the odds, Winnie is popularly being recognized as a person among other persons who do both right and wrong. This is an important take on the idea of ubuntu. It humanizes and rehumanizes by accepting that we all have faults. This approach values the whole person without reductively taking them apart and then discarding the whole person because one part of them can be met with disdain. The holism of this approach coheres with traditional notions of ubuntu. As I speak of holism, it is important to see that ubuntu does not make the individual a mere cog in a system. To deny the humanity of a person in this way would work against the thrust of ubuntu to humanize each person. For doing so would shear choice and freedom off of individuals, making them incapble of acting as mature individuals who can make unique contributions to establishing communities in which each person can be the most that they can be. From this vantage point, it is possible to admire how Winnie commanded recognition by acting with choice and freedom even among constraining circumstances. In the same breadth, see the injustice that is evident in how demand that others recognize her was met in many cases with attempts to deny her honor, respect and dignity. In this light, it is important to see that the honor that Winnie is receiving entails a fundamentally communally changing project that aims to enable individuals to become the most they can be. Here, honor is more than Ndebele and Krog’s idea of a communal val134

Ubuntu for Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Honour ue system under which individuals have no meaning on their own outside of the meanings that arise from their place in the collective (Krog, 2013: 263). Rather, communities gain in merit insofar as they enable individuals to act in ways that rehumanize themselves and others. In multitudes of everyday practices, ubuntu is being enriched by recognition of Winnie’s warrior practices. I pray that through everyday discourses that traverse multiple platforms, a transuniversal reversal of practices that deny honor to other women such as Winnie is underway. Countervailing patriarchal norms are, however, painful to overcome. I pray that scholars enter into the fray, with care to capture and nurture these epistemological advances using appropriate materials from the requisite range of pluriversal sources. Failing this, ubuntu will likely continue to fail, in too many normalized instances, to advance the honor of all individuals who deserve it, with the most marginal Black women being probably the most dishonored the most frequently. There is much to fear. Winnie, who had tremendous personal stature and commanded social prominence, could be dishonored by, among others, some who used dirty and fallacious means. Seeing this gives us opportunities to glimpse, without the masquerade of incidence and coincidence, that unjust mainstream logics still make it difficult to honor poor, uneducated, and socially marginalized Black rural women. We can also visualize a more desirable notion of ubuntu emerging from this realization. Ubuntu is better than what misogyny allows for. What is more, ubuntu can do a great deal other than promote notions of honor.7 This does not mean that 135

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors ubuntu should eschew warrior notions of honor. It does mean that warrior honor should be fit for ubuntu and ubuntu should be articulated in ways that craft a place for honor in how societies are co-produced by members. Under this vision of ubuntu, it should mean a great deal for communities to honor individuals who gain esteem by performing well in practices that make individuals the most they can be. The proviso being that, in a virtuous cycle, this also makes the community better than it otherwise would be at enabling individuals to be honored. Ubuntu esteems people, men and women, who fight for what is good using practices that are themselves also good. Indeed, an important lesson to take from this chapter is that if ubuntu is conceptualized in ways that do not recognize individuals such as Winnie, it will continue to fail to reckon with the idea of honor. Such an ubuntu will be too imprecise to splice apart practices of honor that cohere with ubuntu from those which conflict with ubuntu and with other moral–ethical standards. Ubuntu is capacious enough to honor Winnie Madikizela-Mandela for the great roles she took to advance the people of South Africa from apartheid to a dispensation that develops democratic institutionalism. Ubuntu can guide us to think with empathy, congruence, and fairness about the justice and injustice of the practices by which Winnie Madikizela-Mandela lived. As a moral philosophy that is concerned with recognizing and uplifting both our shared and unique humanities, ubuntu can schematize how we may enable individuals to be all that they can be in communities that enable such greatness.

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Ubuntu for Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Honour Ubuntu, well told, does enable the downtrodden of colonialism and apartheid to say, “Black is beautiful.” Insofar as ubuntu is liberatory, it does enable us to say “Winnie is beautiful” without this being scandalous. It should challenge deeply held views of inferiority that haunt and diminish the wretched of colonial and apartheid legacies. To do this is to begin to challenge the oppressed to see themselves as human in ways that can give birth to their rehumanization and to the rehumanization of all of humanity (cf. Biko in Arnold, 2017: 55–56). Ubuntu is capacious enough to recognize the beauty in the hard honesty of how Ndebele grapples to understand and to even love Winnie Mandela when he perceives how apartheid distorted and disfigured her. I say this particularly bearing in mind Ndebele’s reflection on how in January 2017, he realized, after decades of reading and rereading Steve Biko’s I Write What I Like, that Biko writes of “the envisaged self” (Ndebele, 2017: vii). Ndebele writes: “The envisioned self” was Biko’s futuristic concept by which he called for more than just the recovery of a human essence dismembered, distorted, disoriented, oppressed, but also for how that essence could be recovered and remoulded under new historical circumstances spanning more than one hundred and fifty years of a painful yet purposeful effort of seeking to reconstitute it into a new human being. (Ndebele, 2017: x)

Reading his conclusion to the 2017 introductory essay to Biko’s I Write What I Like, where Ndebele reflects on Biko’s notion of an envisioned self, it is apparent that Ndebele is painfully aware of how “those once oppressed… in the third decade of their freedom, must 137

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors [continue to] pursue their ‘envisioned self’ (Ndebele, 2017: x). It is not a fault that Ndebele does not mention Winnie Mandela in this brief essay—she is not its focus. But it seems to me that this essay gives us a most gentle way to read how Ndebele grapples with how even the beautiful Winnie, who is so associated with the struggle against apartheid, could have been damaged by apartheid to the point of becoming a central figure in ugly stories of human degradation and dehumanization—extending even to the murderous death of women and children. For their contributions to our ideas and to possibilities of freedom, I love Winnie and I love Ndebele. As far as we are from our envisaged selves, there is a mighty battle ahead. We still have ourselves to reclaim from amidst the grind of the hard circumstances of apartheid and its legacies. From these circumstances, may we have the ubuntu to still see the beauty of a Winnie, a Ndebele, a Krog—an us. In this sense, I am keen to fight for reconciliation and forgiveness. Honor as a moral–ethical concern says a great deal about rights and obligations that people have to societies of shared identity. Ubuntu can benefit from a systematic examination of how honor intersects with, is produced in, or conflicts with notions of these relations. It has something to say about how individuals realize these relations with reference to ideal notions of individuals and communities that traditional African societies have developed.

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Ubuntu for Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Honour

Endnotes 1

The fact that I struggled to know how to name Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, as well as the fact that I finally resorted to calling her Winnie, is telling. I, together with many South Africans who also call her Winnie, do so with a sense of familiarity that is also filled with respect for how the way she lived her life required us to grant her recognition, respect, dignity, and worth. To see this, one must note how the heroic men who are highlighted in this book do not present me with any difficulty when it comes to how I should name them. This much is noted by an early reader of the manuscript, who pointed out the “strange thing that Mandela is Mandela, Tutu is Tutu, and Winnie is simply Winnie.”

But Winnie is not simply Winnie. In South African patriarchal society, she is complexly and simply a woman, and women are named in ways that attempt to place them within arrangements that are named after males, who are given the headship role. To call her simply Winnie is to say that she was her own woman. Her name is not under but before the names of the males who gave her surnames. Remember that to speak of a surname is to invoke the Latin supernōmen or suprānōmen which honors the superior whose name stands over one’s own. 2

It is important to recognize how associating Winnie with violence would also take her out of an honor society of pacifists and non-violence adherents in ways that would encourage Ndebele to lambast her for warriorship practices.

3

Ervin Goffman (1967) says different people assume certain acceptable “lines of life” that manifest with the social roles they play. One can think of these lines of life as characters forms or as styles of living that appear differently for different people, irrespective of the social roles they may occupy. A person who adopts a line that is marked by integrity and courage can manifest this while being a mother, a politician, and a social worker. Once there is social capital given to the line a person has adopted, this will constrain that person’s public performances of self, on the basis of the set of expectations that are mutually accepted by the individual and the public of that individual’s behavior. “Should the person

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Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors radically alter his line, or should it become discredited, then confusion results, for the participants will have prepared and committed themselves for actions that are now unsuitable” (Goffman, 1967: 8). 4

One should not sweep under the carpet the fact that in 2017, before she died, Winnie, without any known evidence, accused journalists Thandeka Gqubule-Mbeki, Anton Harber, and Nomavenda Mathiane of being agents of the apartheid government’s Stratcom propaganda unit. Almost two decades earlier, at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Winnie had made similar accusations against Gqubule-Mbeki and Mathiane. In 2018, when these accusations were repeated by the Economic Freedom Fighters on April 12, 2018, this resulted in a defamation lawsuit by Gqubule-Mbeki and Harber in which the South Gauteng High Court found that the statements of the EFF and its spokesperson, Mbuyiseni Ndlozi, were defamatory and false (Modiba, 2020). This not only demonstrates that Winnie was not infallible; it also demonstrates that she was part of a history that remains clouded by intentional and unintentional falsehoods, as well as by sheer disregard for the truth in many quarters.

5

I apply the notion that stage magic has three steps ‘the pledge’, ‘the turn’, and ‘the prestige’. This notion, which Moin, Devlin and Mckechnie (2016) interestingly apply to the marketing art of branding, is explained as follows in Director, Christopher Nolan’s movie, The Prestige (2006):

Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called ‘The Pledge’. The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course … it probably isn’t. The second act is called ‘The Turn’. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you’re looking for the secret … but you won’t find it, because of course you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn’t clap yet. Because making something disappear isn’t enough; you have to bring it back. That’s why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call ‘The Prestige’.

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Ubuntu for Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Honour 6

No doubt, Winnie had her blights. All people commit errors and faults. But to suggest that she should be annihilated from the national memory is surely extremely harsh.

7

When well used, ubuntu is able to tame and ride monstrous cultural systems of honor.

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6 Ubuntu for Kenneth Kaunda: Pacifism And War “Whoever is driven to harm another human being is in need not of vindication but of forgiveness.” – President Kaunda –

B

eyond questions of whether and how just war can be waged, there is the question of whether pacifism can be reconciled with violence and war. What does the African moral philosophy of ubuntu have to say on this? There are historical narratives we can draw upon to help us. In this chapter, an extraordinary African leader’s pacifist views are explored, special focus being given to his acceptance of the need for violence. It is valuable that this anti-colonial and postcolonial leader is also a key thinker on Zambian humanism, which is an early articulation of what is now more generally called ubuntu. Former Zambian President Kenneth David Buchizya Kaunda’s views on pacifism and waging war are laid out in his excellent book Kaunda on Violence (1980). Focusing on the ideas set out in this book is important at least because the book presents the most important 143

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors treatise on pacifism from the perspective of African humanism. One reason for its importance is that it is the only such treatise, that I am aware of, authored by a leading African political leader. Kaunda on Violence is an intellectual project that has deep connections with realist concerns. It discusses how Kaunda came to see that it is unwise for one who must make political decisions to pontificate straight truths in unbending ways when the world is bent (Kaunda, 1980: 33). This is not to say that he came to think politicians should not be expected to apply rational arguments to problems. What he advocates for is an idealism by which the highest1 and not the fittest survive (Kaunda, 1980: 44). In other words, he came to believe in the need to fight for what is good, even if this means making deliberate and careful decisions to shed blood. The alternative, he came to think, could often involve allowing much worse outcomes to eventuate. Something of this realist and pragmatic view grounds Jean-Paul Sartre’s (1949) play Dirty Hands, in which the idea that one can govern without using violence is viscerally debunked. Kaunda realized that political leadership involves taking on the heavy responsibility of using violence, because good governance cannot be achieved while recklessly and permanently putting away the powerful weapons of violence. For purposes of nuancing the discussion, it is worthwhile to place Kaunda’s increasingly realist views on pacifism and war in conversation with the idealist pacifism expressed by Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, the founder and leader of the Inkatha Freedom Party. Regrettably, this strategy assures that Buthelezi and his moral perspective are not afforded the limelight in this chapter, but I hope referencing him here 144

Ubuntu for Kenneth Kaunda, Pacifism and War will encourage further work on his life with specific focus on implications thereof for our understanding of ubuntu and pacifism. By supporting violent insurgencies, Kaunda would go on to play significant roles in ending colonial rule and apartheid in Southern Africa. In contrast, Buthelezi’s apparent pacifist idealism was a mismatch with his party’s involvements in political violence in ways that call his pacifist idealism into question. There is value in thinking about similarities and differences in what these two men have said. These similarities and differences are best understood in the context of the times in which they were written and also in relation to the political histories that the two men were authoring with their actions. A point to be made is that ubuntu is consistent with both the use of violence and pacifist intentions—that is, when the use of violence and adherence to pacifism are tempered by realist considerations that accept that violence is unavoidable. To be sure, sets of biographical notes, even notes with great detail, will always fail to provide sufficient proof for any thesis. Such notes certainly cannot fully support the theory that pacifism should be tempered with the realization that violence is inevitable. They cannot fully underpin the view the violence can be chosen and directed with the greatest care in ways that can genuinely minimize harms to all. For this reason, the biographical materials drawn on from Kaunda and Buthelezi end up serving the purpose of lending persuasive appeal to an African moral account of pacifism that seeks to avoid violence while being willing to weigh up war and appropriately strategize and engage in war in order to both prevent and ameliorate harms. 145

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors Suffice it to say that the merits of a culturally informed theory on the moral uses of violence for pacifist purposes intuitively seems worth outlining. As is to be expected when drawing lessons on a moral philosophy from any human life—let alone one as storied as that of Kaunda—there is so much to discuss that important matters must be left for others to expound. Among many omissions, the chapter does not sufficiently address the uses of violence to maintain state authority under Kaunda’s leadership. No doubt, when full consideration is given to the work that Kaunda did for peace, it will be important to more fully discuss the extent to which he drove repressive policies within Zambia. Writing in response to news that, on January 29, 2020, Kaunda had been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, one reader of the Lusaka Times opined: On the front of liberating other Africans, KK deserves this award. The one party state and tight security was necessary as the rhodesians [sic] and the aparthied [sic] regimes were hell bent on [destabilizing] our country. KKs economic model failed but it was well intentioned as he built infrastructure like ZESCOs and at the time he left power (which he contributed to democracy by willingly ACCEPTING defeat), he left behind several valuable assets for us. On the whole he deserves this award for the foundation he put up for this country. (Zambian Citizen, 2020) This chapter should not, therefore, be read as an attempt to assess Kaunda’s statecraft. It certainly does not dwell on many of Kaunda’s failures in this regard. For instance, it does not discuss his failure to deliver strong economic development to his people. It matters little here that Zambia’s postcolonial economy has to146

Ubuntu for Kenneth Kaunda, Pacifism and War day come to be among the weakest in the world. This chapter does not aim to insulate Kaunda from legitimate criticism. Simply, there is no relevance here attached to advancing or hiding, for example, that development is tied to the extent to which a people have freedom (cf. Sen, 2013), and hence the failure of development in Zambia appears related to Kaunda’s “One Zambia One Party” policy which was institutionalized in a one-party state governance system from 1972 to 1990. Admittedly, too, there is a tortured connection between Kaunda’s one-party state politics and how his domestic politics failed to embody non-violence. This much is clear from the comments of another reader of the Lusaka Times, who commented on Kaunda’s nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. Man of principle, KK [Kenneth Kaunda] is. He was important in the liberation of African States. Had a vision and compassion for Africa and the country. But at the domestic front, how many people mysteriously disappeared or where jailed under his rule. There was no democracy and limited civil rights. The economy has not recovered from bad policies instituted by the Matero and Mulungushi Reforms. Will the committee honor a former dictator? We shall see. (Chongwe, 2020)

From this broad vantage point, it is useful for scholars to think critically about ubuntu and the violence of postcolonial states such as Zambia. This chapter will make a limited contribution to this endeavor as it addresses ubuntu and pacificism with vignettes of Kaunda’s biography in mind. 147

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors Kaunda is the son of an ordained minister in the Church of Scotland. He has the distinction of being the longest-serving head of state of the small Southern African state of Zambia. He led his country from 1964 to 1991. Ian Taylor (1997) discusses three strands of scholarship on Kaunda’s international policies, which cohere more broadly with how his internal policy has been read. First, starting from the first years of his leadership, Kaunda was often proclaimed to be Africa’s moral compass. This was particularly true from a Western media which adored his apparent earnestness and commitment to non-violence. Kaunda often cried in public when decrying his country’s poverty and weakness, and he maintained the reputation of having fought a peaceful struggle against colonialism even while speaking of reluctantly embracing the need for violence in limited circumstances. Second, in the mid-1970s, critical Marxist literature exemplified by the work of Timothy Shaw presented structural critiques in whose terms Kaunda is seen as a weak leader who projects independence and a commitment to fight structural inequality when in fact he is dependent on local and international elites who drive his policy agenda. Then, beginning with Klaas Woldrin in 1980, but increasingly associated with Stephen Chan thereafter, a realist school emerged which takes into account the weak position the small state of Zambia is in. From this perspective, the structuralists may be right to point to how Kaunda bent himself to meet or avoid large national and international forces. But they are not correct to suggest that this somehow makes him weak or dissimilar to anyone else who could have taken his place. Instead, while being willing to credit Kaunda in certain instances, realists are interested in 148

Ubuntu for Kenneth Kaunda, Pacifism and War critiquing the rationality of the actual choices Kaunda made, pointing out that he often made the worst of bad situations. So, for example, realists are prepared to applaud how Kaunda developed the Zambian education system, starting with just 99 university graduates at independence and going on to establish a national system with several universities at its disposal. But they are also keen to point out important flaws. A pointed example is of how Kaunda failed to both combat corruption and harness the limited economic resources at his disposal to get the Zambian economy onto better footing. To read Kaunda’s humanism against his political leadership practices, it is not necessary to discuss how Kaunda’s work on Zambian humanism is of a piece with Julius Nyerere’s Ujamaa. Both are variants of African socialism and share the African episteme that Samkange and Samkange were to later name hunhu or ubuntu in their 1980 classic Hunhuism or Ubuntuism. It adds little here to reflect on the ways in which Africans in the colonial period and continuing in postcolonial times are often drawn to socialism. Kaunda and Nyerere have argued that Africans are naturally or at least historically of the socialist persuasion. But calling on Buthelezi, who stands for a liberal capitalism, is already evidence that there is a problem with this narrow essentializing of African political thinking. However, it is also worth realizing that socialism provides a language with which to speak persuasively against unjust suffering brought forth by imperialist, capitalist, fascist, apartheid and other such forces of unjust domination. Also, socialist comradeship provides practices and communities of solidarity that Africans

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Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors have historically drawn upon for material and cultural resources with which to fight for their emancipation. Kaunda and Nyerere’s talk of socialism suggests that African moral cultures and philosophies are articulated in languages and practices that emerge in diverse contexts. To say that African cultures and philosophies vary in time is not to say that they lack a persistent character. It is only to recognize that they are given forms and meanings in the lives and experiences of Africans, including in their political strivings. A sense that African cultures and moral philosophies have a persistent character is captured by Kaunda (1980: 31–32) when he speaks of Zambian humanism as a tree whose roots determine its growth above the surface. On this view, Zambian humanism is rooted in deep precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial experiences. To extend Kaunda’s tree analogy, one can say that humanism in colonial and postcolonial Zambia has been watered with Christian beliefs, and this imbues it with a new set of flavors and characteristics. This recent watering, with Christian beliefs, manifests itself visibly in the way the outer growth rings of the tree of humanism have formed. But the roots remain those of ubuntu. The branches which one finds in (e.g.) Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Africa are exposed to different climatic conditions, but the roots remain the same. To be careful, it is important to point out that culture is not a tree. The root metaphor can easily project the false impression that there is an unescapable essence to culture and in particular that the African moral philosophy of ubuntu has a predetermined “genetic” code when in reality cultures and their meanings are composed of

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Ubuntu for Kenneth Kaunda, Pacifism and War fluid, negotiated, blended, meshed, and contested figments and acts. Kaunda’s experiences of culture are experiences of change. He lived through a time when Zambian identity itself was being formed, bringing together diverse indigenous and colonial immigrant populations. In the period 1888 to 1910, through a series of concessions signed with local chiefs, the territory that is now known as Zambia came under the influence of the British South Africa Company. It was in 1923 that the British government allowed the power of the British South African Company to expire in the area. The British government hence annexed Zambia. But it was only in 1924 that Zambia became a protectorate under the British Colonial Office. It was also in 1924 that Kaunda was born. It stands to reason that in his lifetime, Kaunda has seen massive cultural changes that have driven Zambians from precolonial pastoral communities into a third-world postcolonial state that struggles to be economically competitive in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution. It is unreasonable to think that Kaunda championed an idea of culture that is static and not negotiable, for his humanism is rooted in African traditional thought systems—but by wide consensus it intermeshes these with Christian, Gandhian, and socialist thought. Kaunda has adapted his values over time. While accepting socialist principles, Kaunda importantly broke with socialist determinism. He, as did Jean-Paul Sartre (cf. 1985: 37) before him, championed the view that humans can will themselves to recreate their factical, material, and cultural worlds with others. But where Sartre focused on the classic existential question of individual choice and freedom—and without focusing 151

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors on the obvious fact that Kaunda decried atheist tendencies among communists, Sartre included—Kaunda set his humanism apart from socialism by following a traditional African social philosophical pathway that focuses on how community can be formed in ways that enable individuals to become the most that they can be. He says: “To a humanist, Man [sic] is the center of all Creation and nothing is more important” (Kaunda, 1988: 8). Without thereby centering Christian or other religious logics, it is worthwhile to say that such valuing of human beings is vital for the elaboration of democratic rule. While Kaunda does not sufficiently qualify the word “individualism,” his centering of the world on persons—in existentialist fashion—does bring to mind a sentiment expressed by Ali Mazrui (1967: 21–22) when he says: “The paradox of the African experience is that nationalism in Africa derived its original intellectual stimulation from an ethic of individualism.” Mazrui sees this reflected in how, at least in British Africa, much anticolonial rhetoric did not dwell on questions of collective self-determination but instead made much of the constructs of “individual freedom,” “oneman, one-vote,” and “majority rule”—which variously focus on the individual. When Africans recognize individuals, they are not practicing something that is Western and supposedly alien to Africans. Those who see only ugly binary differences between so-called Western individualist and African collectivist cultures may argue to the contrary. A more attractive interpretation is that Africans’ valuing of individuals points to the fact that there is much that holds human beings together. This goes to affirm the existential observation that if one wants to under152

Ubuntu for Kenneth Kaunda, Pacifism and War stand human beings, their experiences, and their phenomena, then one must recognize and value individual subjectivity. At the same time, one must recognize that the individual in question is embedded in an objective context which itself must be known (cf. Kierkegaard, 1947: 210–11; Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 57). For those interested in shared universal humanity, it is worth seeing how, in works of scholars such as Hillary Putnam (Bowling Alone, 2000) and Richard Florida (The Rise of the Creative Class, 2002), in the socalled Western tradition, one can find ideal visions of the relationship between communities and individuals that accord quite well with an African valuing of community as a means for realizing individual lives par excellence. Eze (2008) comes close to making a similar point. Reuel Khoza’s (2012) theorizing of ubuntu as a philosophy of leadership in organizations and society has this slant. These are very diverse theories that are interested in how communities can be established in such ways that the individuals in them can be enabled to live out their potentials in the greatest ways possible through the promotion and development of the communities they find themselves in. Kaunda’s idea of Zambian humanism treasures ways in which the Zambian people can use the natural and human resources of their country to enable the establishment of a social, political, and economic order that favors “man-in-community” (1988: 4). Zambian humanism seeks ways to enable individuals to work in ways that enhance their own and others’ human dignity and worth (1988: 108). It envisions this happening in a society that does not exploit anyone (1988: 71), for it values the participation of everyone (1988: 108). The kind of society that is imagined under Zambian 153

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors humanism is one that functions by caring to “understand more and more about Man, what he is, where he comes from, what he is here for and where he is going” (1988: 108, italics in original). As already noted, Kaunda’s quest to understand humanity, in a way similar to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s exploration of many religions in the quest to enrich his understanding, takes in aspects of Christianity, and of African traditional cultures and traditions. In fact, it takes in the thinking of Gandhi. From childhood, Kaunda identified himself as a Christian pacifist. He saw pacifism as a fulfilment of the Christian injunction that one should treat others as one’s neighbors. As a young freedom fighter on the run from British colonial forces, Kaunda was given a hiding place by members of the Indian community, who gave him some translations of the work of Gandhi, popularly known as Mahatma (The Venerable) Gandhi. Kaunda found in Gandhi a practical method to guide his belief in pacifism. In 2012, Kaunda was awarded the Mahatma Gandhi International Award for Peace and Reconciliation. The award recognized his leadership—following Gandhi’s famed principles of Satyagraha—of a peaceful civil disobedience movement that led to the collapse of colonial rule in Zambia. The Mahatma Gandhi award also curiously recognized Kaunda’s support for the violent armed anticolonial struggles of the peoples of Zimbabwe and South Africa. This perhaps puts a unique stamp on Kaunda as a pacifist who is also recognized in some part for his support for the option of war when, in his judgement, that is the best way to minimize harm and advance the social good.

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Ubuntu for Kenneth Kaunda, Pacifism and War In the early 1960s, in the throes of fighting for the independence of Zambia, an Indian pacifist well-wisher named Kasterbhai Narayan advised Kaunda that entanglements in political life and struggle would pollute his better self. Kaunda saw Narayan to be right in that the exercise of political power and the nature of political decisions entail choices about the use of violence in ways that do not sit well with saintly pacifist principles. Narayan illustrated his point by pointing out that Mahatma Gandhi turned down the possibility of taking up a position in the government of India when colonial rule ended there. As Kaunda continued with the fight against colonialism by advocating for civil disobedience, it struck him that he was often asking his followers to go into situations that could turn violent, depending on how the police, protestors, and other parties interacted. In August of 1961, for example, twenty protestors were killed when the police opened fire on them (DeRoche, 2008: 373–374). These experiences led him to realize that the Satyagraha of Gandhi had often worked because others such as Jawaharlal Nehru sharpened the conflictual issues. This is to say that the conflictual approach of people such as Nehru for pacifists such as Gandhi to be appreciated. From this vantage point, violence and threats thereof were thus an inevitable part of Gandhi’s peaceful advocacy against colonialism. The negative associations with violence that were attached to Nehru and others like him, and the very real precarity of the historical situation fomented in this way, made Gandhi more desirable and palatable as a negotiating partner with British colonial masters in India. In this way, Kaunda came to understand that

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Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors violence and non-violence are painfully sharp strings in the guitar of political life. Kaunda advocates for the pacifist attitude for meeting those who sin by exercising violence, even against their deepest wishes. He calls on them to assume an attitude of contrition and penitence. He further holds that, “Whoever is driven to harm another human being is in need not of vindication but of forgiveness” (Kaunda, 1980: 101). Kaunda chose to continue leading the fight against colonialism in solidarity with his fellow oppressed peoples. But Narayan’s questioning drove Kaunda to further contemplation that revealed that non-violence can sometimes lead to conditions and outcomes that are intolerable compared with the harms that a determined, strategic, and limited act of violence would have caused. Even more, Kaunda saw that non-violence is a symbolic practice that works best when the enemy is honorable. The symbolic naming and shaming tactics of non-violent pacifists have no chance of stopping the ravages of shameless brutes. Still more, it became increasingly clear to Kaunda that politicians assume the responsibility to exercise powerful admixtures of force and violence under conditions of uncertainty. Politicians are responsible for using the blunt violence of the law and the violent arms of the state without guarantees that any of the positions and actions they take will produce desired good outcomes. Even in the smallest of matters, government policy action works by both distributing harms and allocating goods and services. Particularly when facing what have been called wicked problems (Rittel & Webber, 1973), political actors are assured that the problems they face are so large, so complex, and so intractable 156

Ubuntu for Kenneth Kaunda, Pacifism and War that much-needed action will likely be inadequate and produce more harm. Contemplating this, Kaunda reasoned that it is important that governments should be led by people who are troubled by the exercise of such mighty powers—enough so to try to do their best in advancing the good and limiting the harm of state positions and actions. So he, a pacifist, entered into government to take responsibility for the use of state violence in all the ways he could. Kaunda’s party won the 1964 elections, making him the first Black leader of his country, the first President of Zambia. Kaunda also stands against absolute Gandhian pacificism. Just half a year into Kaunda’s government, followers of Alice Lenshina hailed her as the Prophetess of the Lumpa Church she founded. Alice and her followers refused to pay taxes, formed their own justice tribunal system, and were accused by Kaunda of following a doctrine that drove members to kill in order to be honored by their fellows. When, on July 24, 1964, a gun battle broke out between Lumpa church members and supporters of Kaunda’s UNIP party, Kaunda ordered a violent clampdown against the church and ordered the capture of Alice. For Kaunda, it is was simply not practical for the leader of a government to remove violence as a real option and tool for a society’s use. As President of Zambia, Kaunda was to take the decision to support both economic sanctions and armed struggles in what was then called Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa. For him, these were very inexpedient decisions that were ultimately decided by considering the fact that the white regimes

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Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors in both these countries were unwilling to enter into negotiations towards a peaceful resolution. His decision to support war against colonialism did not involve denying that there would be victims. In particular, Kaunda saw that armed struggle involves many innocent victims. For example, innocent Zambians along with poor Zimbabwean refugees were killed in bombing raids by the Rhodesian Air Force. Internal recriminations led to violent strife in the liberation forces, and this saw many die needless deaths (cf. Manong, 2015; Martin & Johnson, 1985). These deaths were just some of those (of innocents and protagonists) that Kaunda can point to as markers of the unfathomable horrors of war. While he supported armed struggle in Zimbabwe and South Africa,2 a testament to Kaunda’s abiding commitment to finding peace is that he steadfastly continued to seek to bring the warring parties to the negotiation table. Kaunda was ultimately instrumental in setting up the 1979 Lancaster House talks which led to the end of colonial rule in Zimbabwe. The 1985 talks he brokered in Lusaka, between various white South African stakeholders and the ANC, are now celebrated for having been key to building the trust that enabled Thabo Mbeki, for the ANC, and Roelf Meyer, on behalf of the apartheid government, to drive towards a negotiated settlement to formally end apartheid. In saying this, Kaunda (1980: 97) never forgot that it would be a grave mistake to make “a virtue of necessity and rob violence of its horror.” War is terrible. It causes untold and unthinkable suffering. Thus, in Kaunda’s view, it is wrong for anyone to talk of war as an act of love for one’s enemies. While those who wage justly must do so out of love for themselves and for 158

Ubuntu for Kenneth Kaunda, Pacifism and War those on their side, it is necessary, Kaunda (1980: 99) argues, for the harshness of the hatred for the enemy to be felt and reckoned with, saying, it is important to see that those who are sent out to fight wars do get some of the strength “to take the lives of others by drinking from the well of darkness.”3 What Kaunda refused to do was to turn away from the horror of war and violence. He denied the feasibility of turning away violence as a force (1980: 41). For him, violence could never be virtuous in any manner that Robespierre claimed on behalf of the forces of the French Revolution. Instead, in Kaunda’s view, any exercise of violence attracts moral responsibility to the perpetrator, and to deny this is to deny the humanity of the perpetrator, or, alternately, to deny the worth of the victim (Kaunda, 1980: 100–101). Kaunda recognized that there is much danger in the adoption of saintly attitudes by those who navigate the murky waters of government. Saints become dictators. Saints stir straight according to their moral compasses. They do not compromise. In navigating a ship of volunteers, it may be said that the saint holds no one hostage, and this somehow reduces the saints’ own moral sensitivities to the collective harms suffered when the saint-leader follows strident pathways. Kaunda perceived is that in matters of the state, many a denizen is conscripted by democratic and other institutional processes to march on with such saints, regardless of the costs of war and other violence, on all contending sides. Too many faithfully follow saints as they glory in the language of martyrdom, sacrifice, and virtuous violence. They are led to think that their side is virtuous, and the other side is not, that good is with them and evil is against them. For Kaunda, this 159

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors accentuates the need for leaders who weigh carefully the moral and strategic benefits of various courses of action instead of resting with saintly piousness on atrophying moral platitudes. In a strong sign of the influence of Kaunda in Southern Africa, the preamble to the 1976 version of the constitution of Inkatha—a political movement that operates in South Africa—reads, in part, 2. ACCEPTING the fact that we have many things to copy from the Western economic, political and educational patterns of development, and striving for the promotion of African patterns of thought and the achievement of African Humanism otherwise commonly known in Nguni languages [as] UBUNTU and in Sotho languages as BOTHO… (in Temkin, 1976: 395)

Inkatha’s explicit referencing of African humanism implicitly pays homage to Kaunda. Other parts of the party’s constitution reflect the influence of Kaunda on Inkatha (Temkin, 1976:395). In a statement that captured the zeitgeist, as South Africans earnestly undertook negotiations to end apartheid, Buthelezi (1990: 6) wrote that the spirit of the ubuntu/botho is one that foregrounds reconciliation. He described ubuntu as a perspective that enables the establishment of a national community in which everyone can learn to live, love, and communicatively share experiences in deliberations and dialogues that overcome past hatreds, distrusts, and betrayals. What Buthelezi (1990: 6) said of ubuntu includes the reconciliation of differences without talk of violence. It does not discuss how past and prospective harms and gains are to be settled. It does not acknowledge how violence may or even should figure in deep processes 160

Ubuntu for Kenneth Kaunda, Pacifism and War that give, take, share, and distribute material and symbolic goods to communicatively act out the ubuntu of this reconciliation. This statement on ubuntu is also no acknowledgement of how the contexts necessitate continual and pragmatic development and redevelopment of values. These omissions are disturbing, for they suggest that Buthelezi is articulating a notion of ubuntu that is idealist rather than realist. The fact that Buthelezi so strongly articulates an anti-violent rhetoric is jarring, at least because he does so as the leader of a Zulu cultural movement that strongly associates itself with the Zulu Kingdom that King Shaka’s leadership established. Indeed, Inkatha has consistently associated itself with warrior imagery and the ideals of Shaka.4 Buthelezi founded the National Cultural Liberation Movement in 1975. This movement went on to become the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), which has taken part in democratic and non-racial elections in South Africa since 1994. Inkatha has its political base in KwaZulu Natal. This is a province founded around the contours of the nineteenth-century Zulu kingdom that King Shaka founded. Inkatha’s national following predominantly comprises speakers of isiZulu. In part, this is because the party arose from an attempt to revive an early Zulu nationalist cultural movement called Inkatha Yenkululeko Yesizwe (Inkatha Freedom Nation) which was founded in 1928 by King Solomon Dinizulu to promote Zulu nationalism.5 Concerns that Buthelezi’s account of ubuntu does not give violence its due can be conceptualized by looking at the Zulu mythology of the inkatha. The inkatha has a special place in Zulu mythology of community formation. This mythology partly serves to 161

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors show that in Zulu traditional thinking there is tacit acceptance of the inevitability of violence and an implicit understanding that violence can and should be used to nurture or provide for communal wellbeing. In this regard, the symbolism of the inkatha, from which Buthelezi’s own political party takes its name, is captivating. On the one hand, an inkatha is a woven grass coil placed on one’s head to cushion the weight of a heavy burden. In daily life it may, for example, be used by women when carrying heavy buckets of water on their heads. As a domestic utility, the inkatha is a symbol of maternal care and provisioning through hard work. One could say that the knitting together of the grasses readily speaks of the ways in which societies are made up of different bodies that are woven together using skill and hard work. On the other hand, as a sacred national symbol, a royal inkatha was large enough for a king to sit on. The intertwining of the grasses that compose it unsurprisingly represents the ties that bind the different strands of the nation together. Traditionally, Zulu kings put together the royal inkatha using grass drawn from the roofs of enemies and neighbors. These are bound together using their own sacred excrement, fats from the bodies of slain enemy rulers, and potions that drew on the magic powers of wild animals. The sacred symbol was then bound together in python skin. The royal inkatha symbolically held the people together (see Knight, 1995: 152–153). The royal inkatha symbolizes the power of the nation to bind people together into a union that cushions the weight of heavy burdens and powerfully provides for the nourishment of the nation’s people. That the king’s grass inkatha is woven with putrid materials of human excrement and death, and that it is also made with magic potions 162

Ubuntu for Kenneth Kaunda, Pacifism and War that symbolically draw in the powers of wild animals, speaks of a cosmology that holistically places violence at the service of the creation of flourishing communities. Buthelezi admired Kaunda’s pacifism and sought to emulate it. For Buthelezi, part of the appeal of the rhetoric of ubuntu, as initially demonstrated in Kaunda’s politics of humanism, was that it entrains an idealistic language and praxis of pacifism. Buthelezi used this rhetoric of peace to present ingratiate himself to the nation as a peaceful alternative to Mandela’s ANC and to the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania which took up arms against the apartheid regime. In this regard, Buthelezi could and does frequently reference the view that his path of non-violent pressure to end apartheid was in the tradition of the first South African Nobel Peace Laureate, Chief Albert Luthuli. In Buthelezi’s view, the Nobel award showed that there is honor to following a path of peace, in the supposed manner of Chief Luthuli (cf. 1962: 236). Internationally, too, Inkatha sought to portray itself as a partner with which business could be conducted. With Buthelezi having been designated Prime Minister of the Kwazulu homeland under the authority of the apartheid regime, Inkatha advocated continued trade with the South African apartheid state. It particularly called for investment in the tribal reservations that the apartheid regime called Bantustans or independent homelands. In fairness to Buthelezi and Inkatha, they were always clear that their call was for the peaceful overthrowing of the apartheid regime, and they always said that they took on the leadership of the Bantustan government after consulting the ANC and while taking into account the fact that some party was going to as163

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors sume the position: they figured it was better for a party to take power with an interest in emancipating the oppressed Black people of South Africa from the yoke of apartheid than to allow a lacky of the apartheid regime to take power (Buthelezi, 1990; Temkin, 1976). Buthelezi claimed to see no conflict between holding positions of traditional leadership under the apartheid state and fighting non-violently to end apartheid. To add to this, in the thinking of Buthelezi and his IFP, Kaunda had demonstrated the usefulness of this stance in fighting a successful and highly respected struggle against colonial rule. There was every reason to think, they argued, that the non-violent way would prevail while the way of radical militancy and economic boycotts would only bear the strange fruit of further suffering and torment for South Africa’s Black majority. In Buthelezi’s view, military and economic boycotts against apartheid were contrary to the Christian values he shared with Luthuli and Kaunda. For he argued that such actions would ultimately harm the poor Black majority that they claimed to be helping to achieve freedom. He argued that non-violence and the promotion of direct investment into poor Black areas would secure greater long-term developments that would, in the long run, help to end apartheid and its legacies more effectively. Buthelezi thus opposed boycotts of schools, for example, arguing that enabling oppressed children to get a good education would in the long run enable them to overcome barriers of racial oppression. Many of his arguments—certainly many of those having to do with the need to fight oppression in ways that minimize harm to current and future generations—had their merits, even if they were discon-

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Ubuntu for Kenneth Kaunda, Pacifism and War certingly echoed by sympathizers and officials of the apartheid regime. A great problem for Buthelezi is that there is evidence that his Inkatha took up arms to attack competing Black parties when negotiations to end apartheid were in full swing. According to both the Goldstone Commission of Enquiry (established in 1991 to investigate the role of security forces in a spike in armed violence that plagued the political transmission to end apartheid) and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (which was established to investigate apartheid-era crimes), at least in the early years of the transition, some elements of the armed forces of the apartheid state and some elements of Inkatha collaborated to attack individuals, communities, and political rivals. Stephen Ellis (1998) argues that it is important to think about the ways in which leading politicians on both sides of the anti-apartheid conflict may have used violence or the threat thereof to give direction to the negotiations. Ellis makes this argument with special interest in how the state security officials and National Party officials may have used illegal violence in alliance with Inkatha to promote their own interests in retaining some control, for example, of some aspects of the security apparatus after the formal end of apartheid. But it is reasonable to think that other political parties with the means to wage violence were also involved in using violence, planned or otherwise, to take the moral high ground or to gain strategic advantages in the negotiations. That Buthelezi’s rhetoric of non-violence does not square with the findings of independent investigators who found Inkatha to have been a proponent of political violence, at least in the transition from 165

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors apartheid, raises questions about the purposes of his statements on violence and pacificism. When politicians spell out their views clearly, this makes it easier to evaluate their actions. When a politician such as Buthelezi loudly proclaims lofty ideals while acting with seeming realism, this raises concerns about both the ideals and the realist actions. In contrast, consistently, Kaunda shows that each use of violence should be accompanied by uncertainty and care. Kaunda has theorized a realist idea of Zambian humanism/ubuntu that is given added depth and nuance by how he re-articulated it in his political and policy actions. Roundly, Kaunda shows that pacifism is possible when the ideal is clearly tempered by realism. He shows that this tempering, which seeks to domesticate violence, can be done using frameworks, principles, and practices of the African moral philosophy that is Zambian humanism/ubuntu. This is a moral philosophy which is open to growing, developing, and changing to meet new needs in the different situations people find themselves in. Through this lens, Zambian humanism/ubuntu is open to learning from and mixing with Christian, Gandhian, and other influences.

Endnotes 1

Kaunda’s notion of the ‘highest’ entails something like the self-actualization of a person – in such ways that the person does not live only for herself, but for others too. The highest form of human existence is one that manifests what he calls African humanism, and what is now more generally known as ubuntu.

2

Kaunda’s views on supporting the struggle against colonialism in Zimbabwe and South Africa coheres with values

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Ubuntu for Kenneth Kaunda, Pacifism and War expressed in the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights. This charter was adopted in 1981, and it entered into force in 1986. It is the only international legal charter that recognizes solidarity or group rights. Its articulation reflects the ubuntu system of thought, which places value in communities enabling individuals to become the most that they can be. In the Charter, specific reference is made to the duty to work to end apartheid, colonialism, and all forms of unjust discrimination. What was different about this charter is that it not only concerned itself with the quest for individual liberty, or with socio-economic equality: rather, it is a covenant that emphasizes fraternity or solidarity as both a duty and a right (Winks, 2011). The emphasis on solidarity reflects a unique African contribution to global thinking about justice, including the right to wage arms or to support armed struggle in solidarity with a group which is discriminated against. 3

Thus, in many cultures, war songs involve a systematic way of denying and mutilating the humanity of those who are deemed enemies. Among the Shona people, a favorite traditional war song that has many renditions recorded by contemporary artists says: Rava buka rina mavara. Yowe! Yowe! Baya wabaya! (It [the enemy] is now an animal with marks of an animal. Yay! Yay! Spear it! Just spear it!)

4

When Inkatha headed the government of the government of the KwaZulu “homeland”, they made sure to host annual events at the granite memorial built at the supposed site of his grave at KwaDukuza, to celebrate King Shaka’s legacy (Laband, 2017: 165–166).

5

Bongani Ngqulunga (2018) has written about how Buthelezi legitimated himself and his political party by claiming to be the heir of peaceful traditions of the ANC. Buthelezi has claimed to be the bearer of the moral and intellectual legacy of leaders such as Pixley ka Isaka Seme, who was the founding leader of the ANC, and Chief Albert Luthuli, who was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for championing a peaceful end to apartheid.

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7 Ubuntu for Steve Biko and the Envisioned Warrior: Conclusion “If I react sharply, equally and oppositely, to the first clap, they are not going to be able to systematically count the next four claps, you see. It’s a fight.” – Steve Bantu Biko –

T

he walk to freedom is long, as the title of Nelson Mandela’s famous autobiography tells us. That walk does not only have a past: it also has a present from which we prospectively look into the future. To mix metaphors: from this vantage point, we can envision ourselves walking to a future in which we give a more human face to the world in ways that express ubuntu (cf. Biko, 1987, 98; Pityana, 2008: 543). In some ways, this requires us to recall and take up the warrior tradition of ubuntu. Our quest for freedom demands that we “completely transform the system and… make of it what [we] wish… for we cannot be conscious of ourselves and yet remain in bondage. We want to attain the envisioned self which is a free self” (Biko, 1987: 49). This is a quest 169

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors that requires us to embody an ubuntu that challenges oppression in every quarter, as well as to overcome the ongoing force of colonial and apartheid brutality with strong minds and strong arms, depending on the specific circumstance. For this, we must regain the use of our cultural capacities. In particular, it is important to say here that there are some uses to the traditions of nation building and struggling for freedom that relate to the heroic figures of warriors who have expressed ubuntu. Let us therefore bewail that we Africans have lost use of our cultural heritages to such a degree that we even fail to see how ubuntu enjoins us to fight for human dignity and worth. And so we fail to learn from the long history of Black struggles for freedom from slavery, colonialism, apartheid, and the legacies of these systems. Alas, as Steve Bantu Biko understood, colonialism and apartheid denigrated and displaced native African cultures while also appropriating them as objects of Western scientific and administrative knowledge.1 See, then, how incisive Biko is when he says (quoted in Mangcu, 2017: 181): Not only have the whites been guilty of being on the offensive but, by some skillful maneuvers, they have managed to control the responses of the Blacks to the provocation. Not only have they kicked the Black but they have also told him how to react to the kick. For a long time the Black has been listening with patience to the advice he has been receiving on how best to respond to the kick. With painful slowness he is now beginning to show signs that it is his right and duty to respond to the kick in the way he sees fit. (Italics in original)

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Ubuntu for Steve Biko and the Envisioned Warrior The lament is that colonial and apartheid systems and practices continue to define how we relate to their legacies of violence. Just consider how we frequently and unquestioningly reduce ubuntu to the maxim umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu.2 In so doing, we fail to critically consider how this maxim has been usages, translations, and definitions which instruct that oppressed Black masses are to seek harmony and reconciliation while forgiving their oppressors (see Gade 2011 & 2012). By being reduced to an uncritical acceptance of an ubuntu which is levelled down to a narrow, oppressive idea of harmony, forgiveness, and reconciliation, we unwisely let go of useful practices, lessons, and gains associated with the warrior tradition. All that is learned from studying our histories and practices goes towards establishing our alienation from generations of moral traditions that should enable us to negotiate both everyday and exceptional circumstances, even in dislocating modern colonial times. The point is not that we should not learn from Western experiences. Neither is the intention to say that we should mindlessly repeat past practices as though heritages are not to be discerningly drawn upon.3 It is useful to recall here an oft repeated nugget of wisdom from the first great classic novel of Western modernity, Don Quixote: in chiding his squire, Sancho, Don Quixote of La Mancha says: “I have told thee already that proverbs are short maxims drawn from the experience and observation of our wise men of old; but the proverb that is not to the purpose is a piece of nonsense and not a maxim” (de Cervantes Saavedra, 1885: 568). Recalling this insight from that fictional and frequently delusional but insightful figure of Spanish literature, I

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Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors make the point that reducing one’s culture to a single proverb is a fool’s errand. Principally, here, I am contending that it is appropriate to speak of the errantry of the warriors whose ubuntu we can learn from. The word “errant” derives from the Latin word iter (to go). Today, errantry refers to the roving of people who often engage in or seek chivalrous engagements. In this sense, errantry is an expression of human freedom. Here, freedom can be understood as that ability to “define oneself with one’s possibilities held back not by the power of other people over one but only by one’s relationship to God and to natural surroundings. I say this to stoutly assert the errantry of black folk. To reference Biko, (Biko, 2017: 101): on his own the black man wishes to explore his surroundings and test his possibilities—in other words to make his freedom real by whatever means he deems fit”. Otherwise, “the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is mind of the oppressed” (Biko’s, 2017: 101) for too often the oppressed is led to follow invented and perverted traditions, to forget and refuse to take up traditions of freedom and resistance, including the warrior tradition. Where de Cervantes’s Squire Sancho made a fool of himself by schematizing life according to myriad proverbs, I have been concerned about how reducing ubuntu to umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu fosters erasure of the warrior tradition. Where Don Quixote made a madman of himself by trying to live out mythical ideals of chivalry and by giving credence to fictions of enchantment, I have argued against the enchantment of an ubuntu that turns its followers to cosmic orders and mythical sources characterized by an implausible harmony. 172

Ubuntu for Steve Biko and the Envisioned Warrior We must go beyond the enchanted folly of an ubuntu whose call for kindness is abused and turned against those whose cultures it frames (cf. Biko 2017: 95). The call to recall the warrior tradition accords with the insistence that we give attention to our histories, and particularly to our sometimes forgotten and perpetually distorted heroes who fought against colonialism and apartheid (cf. Biko 2017: 105). Much “has to be revealed, and stress has to be laid on the successful nation-building attempts of men such as Shaka, Moshoeshoe and Hintsa” (Biko, 2017: 105). What is offensive about an ubuntu that does not overcome colonial and apartheid enchantments is that it undervalues and undermines the cultures of the people it purports to humanize. I say this from the perspective that “culture is essentially [a] society’s composite answer to the varied problems of life” (Biko, 2017: 107). From this stance, it can be seen that an ubuntu that is shorn of credible traditions of warriorship can only give rise to cultures that do not have the requisite variety of responses to address enemies that are determined to act with violent force. Without the warrior tradition, we Africans are hamstrung in our attempts to resist the violent might of apartheid and colonialism and other such violent and misanthropic projects. Disavowals of the warrior tradition involve denying the everyday violence and errantry that mark African lives. In this regard, one cannot err in seeing how Édourd Glissant (1997) observes that slavery, colonialism, and apartheid work by simultaneously uprooting victims and depriving them of the agency of errantry. Another way to express is this is to say that slavery, colonialism, and apartheid function by defining who and what their victims stand for. It serves the interests 173

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors of these oppressive arrangements to define ubuntu in ways that extinguish the errantry of the warrior tradition and its potential for resistance. This is ghastly because, as observed by Biko’s fellow founder of Black consciousness, Barney Pityana, it can reasonably be said that resistance is “the most humanizing response to oppression” (2008: 407). We do well to disenchant ourselves. It is, for example, charming but problematic to imaginatively assert that South Africa is a rainbow nation that achieved peaceful transformation from apartheid rule under the influence of the moral philosophy of ubuntu. As already noted in previous chapters, the 1990s transition from apartheid to democracy was marked by mainly Black-on-Black violence, which was shaped in some part by the third-force influences of the apartheid regime. As another example, it is also magical thinking and untrue to see South Africa today as a country that embodies harmonious existence. Instead, South Africa is fraught with violence. In this context, the idea of disenchanting ourselves is not that we should cease to be idealists. Rather, we should reconnect to the kinds of ubuntu that lead us to struggle—against all odds—for freedom (Pityana, 2008: 543), nurturing others to be similarly courageous in pursuit of greater justice. So, in an ironic sense, we should re-enchant ourselves with an ubuntu that enables us to live cultural lives that both express and enable freedom. In this respect, when we describe our ubuntu, the words we use matter: they can marginalize or realize vital traditions such as those of warriorship.4 Nothing of what is being said in favor of retaining the warrior tradition of ubuntu denies, negates, or subtracts from other traditions of ubuntu. As a case in 174

Ubuntu for Steve Biko and the Envisioned Warrior point, it turns out that warrior traditions of struggle against apartheid have been key to the successes and prospects of nation building in the post-apartheid era (Chipkin, 2007).5 I am speaking in favor of myriad notions of ubuntu. I am saying that if we are to be enchanted by moral ideals, let us be enchanted by a requisite variety of ideas of ubuntu that are capable of addressing our hard experiences. Let us be caught up in the errantry of an ubuntu that reminds us that Africans, like all humanity, have historically been migrants. Errant bodies are mobile; they exercise their agency and freedom to resist domination, to enter and exit situations in a vast number of ways that manifest multiple and complex cultural formations. In this regard, there is value in seeing how ubuntu appears differently in different conditions if it is to survive and thrive. To speak in this way, in favor of a rich and capacious understanding of ubuntu, is to go against the idea that only one version of ubuntu is the right version for all occasions throughout all history. We need to embrace the idea that cultures must and do change, and the ubuntu that will have lasting value is one that is open to both expressing and guiding the necessary processes of change and adaptation. To be sure, this will necessarily demand that questions be raised about the extent and limits of change, of the quality and nature of the essence of ubuntu. For now, I am not taking up these analytical, philosophical, and cultural questions. For now, too, I merely insist on not being driven to prematurely and unjustly pick one ideal of ubuntu over others. I do this while being aware that, roughly speaking, modernist Western scientific, philosophical, axiological, and juridical 175

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors methods promote the trumping of one offering by another in pursuit of the ‘winning option’. The South African experience of working to a negotiated end to formal apartheid, on the back of a local and international struggle against apartheid, indicates that there may be something to combining available methods of seeking just war and peace (cf. Scheid, 2015: 99–101). This indicates that instead of seeking to “knock out” contending African moral forms of thinking about war and peace until only one stands victorious, there is much to be gained in advancing a wide array of considerations, tactics, and strategies for thinking about just war and peace. Without exhausting the matter, to prematurely kill off one version of ubuntu could, in any case, lead to the death of all notions of ubuntu. For there are deep and complex connections between seemingly divergent notions of ubuntu. The ubuntu that concerns itself with advancing peace and harmony co-exists with the ubuntu that is for warriors. Indeed, …when you study the cultural history of the continent carefully, a number of things come to the fore in terms of how African societies have constituted themselves and how they operated. First, they constituted themselves through circulation and mobility. When you look at African myths of origin, migration occupies a central role in all of them. There is not one single ethnic group in Africa that can seriously claim to have never moved. Their histories are always histories of migration, meaning people going from one place to the other, and in the process amalgamating with many other people. So circulation and amalgamation, you compile the gods, you conquer one ethnic group, you defeat them militarily, and you take their gods as

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Ubuntu for Steve Biko and the Envisioned Warrior yours, or you take their women as your wives, and therefore they become your parents. (Mbembe, 2015)

To some degree, it is necessary even for pacifists to face up to violence, to use it well in the service of peace seeking and peace building. Kaunda, a pacifist in Zambia, realized that even pacifists live in a world that is violent. He recognized that maintaining peace can come with a terrible toll of violence and death, while war can reduce the burden of pain and needless death. He also understood that even those who claim to use non-violent means are often drawing on the uses of violence by others to legitimate themselves as negotiators. It is worthwhile to emphasize Mandela’s (1995: 321) view, inspired by von Clausewitz, “that war [is] a continuation of diplomacy by other means.” Mandela understood that war should be used, as a last resort, to communicate with adversaries about the need to get back to negotiations that involve lower costs (Hyslop, 2014). He realized that war applied as a last resort is a valuable tool for pursuing diplomatic relations with people who, while suffering untenable costs, still fail to agree on a viable way to live justly with each other. In essence, Mandela knew that the violence of war is partially justified by how it is used in the pursuit of just peace. Societies that exclude war from their cultural toolkits for achieving, maintaining and restoring justice and peace are liable to prematurely thinning the range of methods available to them for attaining those very ends. This can hamper those societies’ future efforts to adapt to different challenges that come along. In particular, premature narrowing can do this by inflaming how societies engage with those who hold different views and opinions. 177

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors As they pursue justice and peace by utopian and unbridled means of communication, societies that seek to pay no heed to war will invariably find that human systems, procedures, and practices are inherently mired in exclusions and struggles for hegemonic consensus (Mouffe, 2000). Being open to the possibilities of using war for the purposes of seeking, making, elaborating and restoring justice and peace can extend the zone of careful and caring action. It can reduce untenable costs of war and violence that societies otherwise face. Thinking from a requisite variety of rigorous moral traditions about multiple manifestation of violence and war is important. It can foster a wide range of institutions, procedures, and practices that reduce the likelihood that societies will pursue the chimera of absolute war. Where we cannot attain absolute peace, there is some advantage to having available a wide range of war options that minimize the harms of war. For this reason, Africans do well to explore largely lost traditions of ubuntu, such as the warrior tradition, recovering these in order to enrich the intellectual resources available for learning how to build peace or wage war to serve the end of establishing more just ways of living. Doing this entails seeing war and peace as intricately related expressions of human vital forces. War and peace can both enable individuals to become the most that they can be. If balancing options of war and peace is an art, then wisdom involves knowing how to use these options in ways that enable people to become the most they can be. Humans share basic concerns about war and peace, root and branch. The idea of balancing war and peace 178

Ubuntu for Steve Biko and the Envisioned Warrior has been taken up in interesting ways in Confucian theories of harmony as the central concern of that value system (Li, 2006). This is interesting, because harmony is, as noted earlier in this book, strongly valued by thinkers on ubuntu. Tutu (1999: 29) has gone so far as to say that the value of harmony encapsulates the greatest good for those who walk the path of ubuntu. Though all humans are of the same tree of life, the simple coincidence of interest in harmony here does not indicate that harmony is conceptualized under ubuntu in the same way that it is theorized in Confucianism. It is interesting to note how Wang Yuan-kang (2011) finds that China, whose state policies are framed as being guided by Confucian thought, has tended to aggress when it has been strong and to be defensive when it has been weak. I will not attempt to critique Yuan-kang’s findings. I simply draw attention to them here because they fall in line with the broad arguments of this book, which sway towards the view that valuing ubuntu and harmony does not deter people from engaging in war. I take this as a suggestion that there is some utility in promoting research on how ubuntu as a value system directs policies to do with war and violence against others when compared with realpolitik concerns about national interests. We should not simply take it for granted that peoples who profess to value the harmony of ubuntu will turn successfully towards peace making when confronted with questions about the merits of starting, engaging-in, or ending war at certain times and places. This is most definitely a concern for thinking about national foreign policies and other such macro-level questions. It is vital to think about ubuntu when disharmony grinds into the core of our shared humanities. It is 179

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors surely more urgently relevant in such settings than it is wherever harmony holds sway. Ubuntu as a moral philosophy is concerned with how individuals can achieve harmony with others, in their otherness. It does not prescribe that individuals should be shaped and reshaped until they lose their unique individuality. A Shona aphorism with rather ghastly imagery is profitable to recall here. It says: Chara chimwe hachitswanye inda, “One finger on its own cannot crush lice.” The obviously unpleasant but good violence of rooting lice out of an infested bush of hair demands the use of more than one finger! As a rule of thumb, among humans, harmonious cooperation is as necessary for the business of pursuing wars effectively as it is for the benefits of peaceful productive cooperation. The benefits of the harmony that ubuntu advances include forms of cooperation that, in the interests of the communal body and those of its individual members, crush and expel parasitic vermin while preventing harmful assaults. I have remained within a semantic field that makes it seem reasonable to label people that are marked to be removed from certain communities as parasites and vermin. But such metaphoric usages guide people’s thinking and ways of living in the world (cf. Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). As such, a cautionary note is needed here: The idea of crushing and expelling parasitic vermin – even if gentler language is used, is tied to dehumanizing, xenophobic, genocidal, homophobic and other forms of unjust violence that claim legitimacy on the basis of perverted notions of cleansing or otherwise protecting communities. As discussed elsewhere in this book, proponents of ubuntu should be wary about how attempts to foster good 180

Ubuntu for Steve Biko and the Envisioned Warrior communities can justify and produce unjust violence against those who are marked apart by language that dehumanizes – in the manner that speaking of ‘parasitic vermin’ can. Ubuntu is heuristic to the extent that it provides rich avenues for societies to advance towards meeting denizens’ needs. It is also heuristic insofar as it offers means for the defense of societies, including when offense is seen as the best means of defense. Societies gain from the knowledge that how just war and just peace are thought about reflects the range of options available to individuals, even in private matters. When I think about this, I notice how South Africa has quite a two-faced reputation. It is known at once for being the land of “miraculous peace” and for leading the world in the use of deadly civil violence during ostensible times of peace. My conjecture is that to the extent that South Africans have been lulled by discourses of ubuntu that deny the role of war or violence in peace making, the country and its societies and individuals have lost a wide span of interventions and engagements that arise between the paradise of harmony and the hell of nihilistic war. Having lived in the country for over twenty years, I have often marveled at how South Africans seem to avoid shouting at each other, insulting one another, or exchanging fisticuffs—but also move quite swiftly from playing at peace to pulling out guns. Systematic analysis and research into patterns of interaction that lead to extreme violence in South Africa may well reveal that unbalanced emphasis on peace together with unmitigated opposition to uses of violence have eroded the space for multiple, less harmful interventions that would avoid the extreme and deadly violence 181

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors that characterizes South Africa today. It is surely better for people to be taught to dialogue peacefully, to be enabled to skillfully excoriate and pillory one another, to insult one another, and if need be to exchange fisticuffs—all at the pain of facing relevant legal sanctions—than for people to pull out knives and guns and kill one another. For this education to happen, there should be further investments in richer ways to talk about war and peace that allow for the wide expanse of peace-seeking practices that can be found between dialoguing with and killing each other.6 To emphasize and restate the above points: it appears to me to be intuitively true to say that one-sided talk of harmony and peace can have the effect of hardening the lines between parties. At the same time, allowing for constructive uses of violence and even of war can increase the zones of engagement before lethal aggression becomes the only outlet for expressions of disagreement. If I am right, states and individuals, South Africa and the world, have much to learn to creatively, appropriately and justly use both just war and just peace from the South African struggle against apartheid. At the very least, this will require the elaboration of discursive environments that make the requisite wide gamut of action-options available to enable successful engagements with others (who may be malevolent bearers of violence and harms) in turbulent, risky, violent and circumstances. Ubuntu, with its emphasis on people being people through relating with others, is capacious enough to express various, competing, and seemingly contradictory motivations to war and peace. The challenge to our creativity is to sustainably align actions of war and peace in the service of justice and democracy. This 182

Ubuntu for Steve Biko and the Envisioned Warrior challenge is particularly acute when the target of talk of violence, peace and harmony are women. A key lesson from our thinking of the life and times of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela is that we need to do better in the work of recognizing and honoring how women, in particular, contribute heroically as warriors in their societies. I emphasize: if we cannot recognize Winnie’s prominent contributions to the struggle against apartheid, surely it is immensely unlikely that we may do a respectable job of honoring the everyday heroic roles played by women in less conspicuous settings. We cannot creatively think about war and peace unless we have insights into the practices that constitute both. Thinking about Winnie, we saw that humanizing praxes on ubuntu and war are forestalled to the extent that societies and their members fail to learn to make women (in all their intersectional involvements) visible, audible, and valuable. To this end, we ought to give our words greater vitality, to bring in new words where these are necessary, and to build new branches for our theories and moralities so that we can learn to give honor to the women and men who fight our wars and make our peace. I have sketched out some thoughts on what we may learn about just war and peace, considering biographical insights from some keystone Africans throughout. I have sought to demonstrate, albeit in an adumbrated manner, that different views on ubuntu, socially shaped by different factors, are articulated in different circumstances—with consequences for how we may think about war and peace.7 In other words, it is important to value in context, including historical context, the life projects that people articulate.

183

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors Scholars who work on the idea of ubuntu should make the most of the great gifts of fluidity, adaptability, and variety that the situational openness of ubuntu permits. They can do this by documenting the practices and moral insights that Africans are daily articulating, or that are discernible elsewhere in the historical record. The Africans discussed in this book have not only reflected existing traditions, but they have also produced new traditions of thought that manifest, inspire and demand yet better articulations of ubuntu. Seeing this challenges how Africans are stereotyped, as Mbembe (2001: 167) notes, as terminally displaying irresponsibility, powerlessness, suffering, “duplicity and servile repetition.” Ubuntu, I have argued—and as the biographical notes grafted into this book have been read to show— is capacious enough to produce requisite ranges of approaches to warring and to peace making, to secure justice in the Africa of today and beyond. For ubuntu is fluid and negotiated in ways that can make it an adaptable moral compass for finding peace in fast and greatly changing world circumstances, in which polarities shift and are complex to read. A dividend of peace, harmony, and productivity is sought by people when they partake in wars. War drives people to think about the nature of societies that should be formed, and how goods and services, rights and obligations, opportunities and limitations shall be shared and distributed. Thinking about both just and unjust war and just and unjust peace becomes an occasion for people to participate in making desirably just societies. So, in some part, these questions become occasions for enabling the marginalized to be recognized

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Ubuntu for Steve Biko and the Envisioned Warrior and dignified in matters that concern how their life projects are chosen and acted out. Ubuntu must account for how human efforts to form peaceful co-existence involve the formation of modes of belonging that are inextricable, sometimes, from questions that relate to the use of violence.8 It is likely that the ends of justice are well-served, in war and peace, when individuals are acknowledged to have “privileged ontological status as creator[s], maintainer[s] and destroyer[s] of worlds… in [a] fundamental way that is beyond our intention, human…” (Christians, 1997: 13). Knowing the potentials of humanity, to create and/or to destroy, offers palpable reasons for individuals and communities to invest heavily in actions, thoughts, and resources that are needed to secure justice—before, when entering into, while engaged in, and when ending war. Knowing that other humans are capable of acting selfishly or destructively, and knowing that we can nevertheless form altruistic alliances, is the basis for the formation of thick relations by and in which people build up social capital and trust with which to act productively together. The genius of human cultural evolution has been that it has involved layering human altruistic motives atop selfish motives related to bare survival (Tomasello, 2009 & 2010). Ubuntu is a credit to this human cultural genius, because it too recognizes how the individual’s unique individuality deserves to be efficaciously advanced and guarded through the establishment and maintenance of right relations with others. On this view, when thinking of just war and peace, it makes sense to recognize and value the ever-increasing proximity of people, in the world today. Seeking a theory of just war and peace becomes a quest of think185

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors ing about how to live with a cosmos of neighbors in a metaphorically shrinking world. The ubuntu of the future should be concerned with how communities and their members can relate to others who may or may not value harmony. It should articulate how just war should be fought and how just peace should be made with enemies within, and with enemies who are strangers. In reading this work, readers will have done well to not only have looked for a single penetrating line of insight. I hope that while my intention has been to strike hard at existing scholarship, I have simultaneously been able to reach into the literature that scholars have produced, to pick out and use valuable ideas that are found there . In so doing, I hope to have realized a rhizomic authorship praxis that produces fractures, fissures, fragments, holes, and gaps within the extant body of scholarship—in myriad directions, dimensions, and combinations. There is space for thinking about the warrior tradition as a worthy member of the plant of life that is ubuntu thought. The various branches of thought in the family of ubuntu thought reach out from a common stem of rooted historical knowledges. Plant analogies do not capture the whole picture of how ubuntu has legions of appearances in the world. But plant analogies do capture something of how the various traditions of ubuntu produce and reproduce each other in subterranean ways that are co-existent with its over-the-surface shoots. Plant analogies do not, for example, capture the ways in which ubuntu is a humanism that creates new realities. Ubuntu enables us to cooperatively build individual capabilities. So Francis Nyamnjoh (2002: 186

Ubuntu for Steve Biko and the Envisioned Warrior 111–112) is right to see that, even as we find ourselves in relations with “prickly” others, human cooperative communion, which he labels conviviality, is the basis for human creativity and productivity. This communing even makes dreams possible, for even dreams cannot be dreamt without the facility of shared language that one gets from processes of socialization! As a result, dreams come within the fold of shared realities which productively and recursively open new vistas for dreaming. We would do well to invest in producing a good and sufficiently broad pool of varieties of ubuntu that can withstand, survive, and flourish in different environments as well as in different social, cultural, economic, and political soils. Where we furnish such good ground, in a fitting climate, and with the right practices, we can think and practice war and violence in ways that can sprout desired new growth.9 To break down the hard and heavy masses of extant knowledge that keep people from real encounters with shared humanity is necessary for human development. For freedom is the stuff of development (see Sen, 2013). Freedom is a real concern for ubuntu as we seek to enable each person to be the most they can be. In searching for freedom and development, may we recall that the selfhood that ubuntu develops is only realizable in streams of relational living. Yet when relational life is shattered by colonial and apartheid “apartnesses,” the fundamental incompleteness of being is accentuated (cf. Gordon, 2008: 84) in ways that should compel us to forms of consciousness under which we can envision ourselves (cf. Biko, 1987: 49, Ndebele, 2017) politically—as freedom fighters (cf. Biko in Arnold, 2017: 164). In this way, ubuntu is polit187

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors ical. For this reason ubuntu challenges us to use all our possibilities to advance our freedom in ways that also gift freedom to others. As Biko (1987: 98) says, We have set out on a quest for true humanity, and somewhere on the distant horizon we can see the glittering prize. Let us march forth with courage and determination drawing strength from our common plight and our brotherhood. In time we shall be in a position to bestow upon South Africa the greatest possible gift—a more human face.

Let’s make no mistake. The African moral thought of ubuntu was developed from time immemorial to address how people live with others. This involves, without a doubt, developing values that guide trade practices, how we form loving relationships, how we play sport… the judgment is clear. Say what I may now, this book narrowly focused on people who operate in spheres of politics without deeply questioning the ways in which politics should address economic questions of who gets what, from whom, where, why, when, and how. It has not addressed the innumerable ordinary lives which express heroic ubuntu amidst daily struggles. But to be fair, this errant book has gone in search for an ubuntu that is not whimsical and dreamy in how it addresses the hard clashes that warriorship calls to mind. With this in mind, it has prized the idea that ubuntu involves the pursuit of a way of being under which individuals are able, in community, to mature and become the most that they can be. I have dipped a fair bit into biographical materials to show that different people, sometimes speaking to the same concerns, make contradictory and even seemingly incommensurable contributions to traditions of 188

Ubuntu for Steve Biko and the Envisioned Warrior ubuntu. In doing so I have shown that an important intellectual challenge of our times is to engage with the complexity of ubuntu in a way that does not oversimplify it by eliminating meritorious variations, deviations, and contradictions. I have shown this while arguing for the recognition and valuation of the warrior tradition of ubuntu. Before concluding, let me acknowledge the fact that giving much stock to the biographies of selected great Africans, as is done in this book, is not without problems. Chief among these is perhaps that such an approach can easily contribute to horrid ongoing movements of personality politics, cult worship, or “big man politics” that have terribly afflicted many postcolonial African attempts at prosperous statehood and other forms of cooperative productive relations. The interest in life projects that I am putting forward invites further thinking about the relationship between the individual life and the stream of history in which it is found. On my approach, one who merely looks at an individual personality or at a “big” individual is simply not doing the necessary work of reading life projects in historical context. Further, what is being advocated for is a politics that values life projects, and therefore considers history by taking lessons from it that attractively reflect lived experiences while also, where appropriate, gathering and projecting desirable means and ends that relate to the future. I do not think it arrogant to say that this book offers some grounds on which to call for new work towards an African just war and peace perspective. We have much to learn from the errant goings-on of our children. There is much to gain from thinking about how we are entangled with others`—often as warriors. 189

Ubuntu for King Shaka and Warriors

Endnotes 1

See Oliphant (2008: 216).

2

Translated frequently as saying a person is a person through other people—or that Africans are not capable of forming individual goals and values without other people giving them the necessary personal identity, goals, and values.

3

The point is that we ought to learn from our own histories, culture and traditions—as well as from those of others.

4

Words matter. Thomas Moriaty (2003), for example, wrote that finding the right words, or the right rhetoric, shaped the transition from apartheid. But on its own, no amount of chanting is enough to magically change the conditions that make worlds or countries violent and unjust. We must therefore be interested in how contemporary manifestations of violent xenophobia and anti-Black and -Indigenous racisms challenge the presentation of ubuntu as a magical shibboleth by which South Africans are able to achieve reconciliation of differences without addressing the economic and material conditions that produce, reproduce, or support unjust social and political discriminations associated with colonialism and apartheid.

5

The ideal of unity among South Africans has been a concern at least since the early days of the Union of South Africa, which later became the Republic of South Africa—to the extent that only whites were understood as citizens of the imagined nation of South Africa. Only via “b(l)ack” doors, and on a sliding scale of dehumanizing recognition, were Blacks and foreign Blacks allowed into territory of the republic as it was demarcated by apartheid regimes (Mbembe, 2019). On the coat of arms of South Africa, introduced on Freedom Day, April 27, 2000, is inscribed a motto in the Khoisan language of the ǀXam. It says ǃke e꞉ ǀxarra ǁke, “diverse people unite.” This motto simultaneously departs from and aligns with the 1910 colonial motto. Granted to the then Union of South Africa by the royal decree of British King George V, that first motto, in Latin, read Ex Unitate Vires. It was translated as “Union is Strength” until 1961. Thereafter it was translated as “Unity is Strength.” The point to be made here is that the history of calls for unity is

190

Ubuntu for Steve Biko and the Envisioned Warrior neither simple nor clean. To associate ubuntu too strongly with calls for unity can come with crude xenophobic and other violent outcomes. 6

To state what I hope is by now glaringly obvious: I abhor violence and nothing here is intended to promote it in any unjust way.

7

To “each epoch and even to each individual the world looks different. To the particular profile of our personal project, circumstance answers with another definite profile of facilities and difficulties” (Ortega y Gasset, 2001: 114).

8

This is a point expounded in Agamben’s essay Stasis (2015), which explores how people form communities, including cities and states, with families as units that secure and provide desired wellbeing for members in a world that is otherwise characterized by deadly violence.

9

The skill of culturing desired growth in ideas uses the requisite variety of methods to propagate and cultivate a good variety of what a species of thought has to offer. When too narrow a selection of cultivars is chosen, adaptation to future conditions will suffer. When too large a selection is made, even bad seeds are taken along.

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Index A Afer, Publius Terentius 62, 96 African National Congress (ANC) 39, 49, 50, 51, 59, 60, 90, 103, 104, 105, 115, 116, 123, 158, 163, 167, 201, 209 African philosophy 4, 21 apartheid xi, 7, 9, 15, 17, 31, 34, 39, 41, 42, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 58, 62, 65, 67, 68, 71, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 97, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 109, 110, 111, 112, 115, 116, 117, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 127, 128, 129, 131, 132, 133, 136, 137, 138, 140, 145, 149, 158, 160, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 170, 171, 173, 174, 175, 176, 182, 183, 187, 190 Austria 11

B Bantu xi, 1, 3, 5, 8, 12, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 127, 131, 169, 170, 208 Big Man rule 6

Biko, Steve Bantu v, xi, xiii, 18, 54, 75, 133, 137, 169, 170, 172, 173, 174, 187, 188, 194, 199, 202, 206 Boumedienne, Houari 60 Buthelezi, Mangosuthu 35, 144, 145, 149, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 195, 205, 208

C Carlyle, Thomas 4 Cetshwayo, King 34 Chan, Stephen 148 Chasi, Colin vii, x, xii, xiii, xiv, 62, 195 China 179 Christianity 5, 68, 72, 73, 81, 154, 196, 202 colonialism xiii, 5, 6, 7, 9, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 56, 58, 65, 68, 72, 75, 80, 87, 88, 91, 99, 100, 124, 137, 143, 145, 149, 150, 151, 154, 155, 158, 164, 170, 171, 173, 187, 190 Confucianism 179 Conrad, Joseph 118, 127 Crompton, Samuel 76

213

Ubuntu for Warriors

D Derrida, Jacques 77 Don Quixote 171, 172, 197 Dorfman, Ariel 55

E

Inkatha Freedom Front 35, 144, 161 Inkatha Yenkululeko Yesizwe 161 Isitha (2017) 40 isiZulu 2, 15, 74, 161 Italy 11

Ellis, Stephen 165

F Farewell, Francis 30 Faure, Bill 30 First, Ruth 100, 203 Freedom Charter 52, 209 Freud, Sigmud 37, 198 Front de Liberation Nationale 60

G Gade, Christian 2 Gandhi, Mahatma 154, 155, 203 Gelfand, Michael 15 Gertrude, Nomathamsanqa 98, 99 Glissant, Édourd 173 Goffman, Erving 120 Gwala, Harry 103

J Jabavu, John Tengo 33 Japanese samurai 38 Jesus Christ x, 74, 76 Johannesburg 100, 107, 112, 194, 195, 196, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 207, 208, 210 Johnsen, Mark 4 Jones, William 85

K Kaunda, Kenneth v, 17, 18, 37, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 163, 164, 166, 177, 196, 200, 201, 210 Khoza, Reuel 153 Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye 109, 153, 201 King, James Saunders 29 Krog, Antjie 130

H Hamilton, Carolyn 27 Hellenic democracy 53

I India 27, 32, 155

L Lakoff, George 4 Lenshina, Alice 157 Luganda 3 Luthuli, Albert 163

214

Index

M Madikizela, Columbus 99, 106 Madikizela-Mandela, Winnie v, xi, xiii, 18, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 183, 201, 202, 204, 205, 206, 210, 211 Maine, Henry 27, 28 Malema, Julius 55 Mampati, Ruth 100 Mandela v, xi, xiii, 17, 18, 37, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 106, 107, 109, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 122, 123, 124, 125, 129, 130, 131, 133, 136, 137, 138, 139, 163, 169, 177, 183, 195, 197, 198, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 210, 211 Mandela, Nelson v, xi, xiii, 17, 37, 47, 48, 51, 101, 102, 103, 106, 111, 116, 123, 133, 169, 195, 197, 200, 202, 203, 205 Marxism 148 Mazrui, Ali 152 Mbeki, Thabo 68, 158, 199, 207 Mbizana 99 Metz, Thad 77 Moerane Commission of Enquiry 39, 40, 204 Moffat, Robert 91

Mokgoro, Yvonne 78 Morocco 60 Mouffe, Chantel 38 Mpofu, Dali 102 Mugabe, Robert 9, 23, 56, 80, 81, 93, 195, 211

N Natal 28, 32, 33, 39, 161, 195, 204, 207, 210 Ndebele, Njabulo 23, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 137, 138, 139, 187, 201, 205 Nehru, Jawaharlal 155 neo-Afrocentrists 65 Nobel Peace Prize 72, 146, 147, 167, 196, 210 Nongoma District 42 Nyakasikana, Nehanda Charwe 133 Nyamnjoh, Francis 186 Nyerere, Julius 60, 149 Nzo, Alfred 104

O Obama, Barack 59, 206 Odysseus 111 Odyssey 111 Oxford University 14, 194, 197, 198, 199, 201, 206, 209

P Patel, Shailja 124 Pohlandt-McCormick, Helena

215

Ubuntu for Warriors 115 Pondoland 99

154, 157, 158, 160, 161, 164, 166, 174, 181, 182, 188, 190, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 200, 204, 206, 207, 208, 209 Span, Makhulu 41, 42, 94 Swanepoel, Theunis 107, 113, 114

Q Qwabe 38, 46

R

T

racism 6, 80, 98 Rhodes, Cecil John 14, 15, 207 Rhodesia. See Zimbabwe Rittel, Horst 89 Roman–Dutch 31, 42

S Samkange, Stanlake 9 Samkange, Tommie-Marrie 9 Sartre, Jean-Paul 108, 144, 151 Satyagraha 154, 155 Sexwale, Tokyo 83 Shaka, King v, xi, xii, xiii, 18, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 39, 40, 45, 46, 47, 161, 167, 173, 198, 199, 201, 202, 210 Sharpville Township 49 Shepstone, Theophilus 25 Shona 15, 16, 133, 167, 180, 199 Shope, Mark 17 Sisulu, Albertina 84, 93, 100 Sisulu, Walter 49, 84, 93, 100 Smuts, Jan 13, 14, 15, 208 Sontag, Susan 123 South Africa xi, xiii, 8, 11, 13, 17, 28, 31, 39, 40, 41, 48, 49, 50, 52, 53, 57, 58, 59, 62, 65, 71, 77, 78, 79, 86, 91, 93, 94, 98, 101, 104, 116, 125, 126, 129, 131, 133, 136, 150, 151,

Tambo, Oliver 90, 103, 104, 208 Taylor, Ian 148 Tempels, Placide F. 5, 22, 74, 208 Thiong’o, Ngugi wa 6 Tomasello, Michael 12, 20 Truth and Reconciliation Commission xi, 72, 77, 78, 79, 81, 87, 122, 123, 140, 165 Tsukudu, Adelaide 100 Tutu, Desmond v, x, xi, xiii, 18, 19, 37, 67, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95, 122, 123, 125, 139, 179, 194, 197, 202, 205, 209, 211

U ubuntu v, x, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 25, 26, 31, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 59, 60, 61, 63, 66, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 82, 86, 87, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 124, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 141, 143, 145, 147, 149, 150, 153, 160,

216

Index 161, 163, 166, 167, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 194, 195, 199, 200, 203, 204, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210 Ujamaa 149, 206 uMkhonto we Sizwe 49, 115, 116, 121, 203 USA 59

201, 202, 208 Zwelithini, King Goodwill 34, 35, 42

V Venda 53

W Webber, Melvin 89 Woldrin, Klaas 148 World War I 14

X Xhosa 53, 98, 99, 100

Y Yuan-kang, Wang 179

Z Zambia 146, 147, 148, 150, 151, 154, 155, 157, 177, 201, 208 Zimbabwe 9, 80, 93, 133, 150, 154, 157, 158, 166, 203, 207, 208 Zulu xi, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 34, 35, 38, 39, 40, 42, 46, 47, 53, 161, 162, 198, 199,

217