Event · Self · proverb; 1990s writing
A Person Through Persons
A Nguni proverb says a person is a person through other persons. Twentieth-century writers make a philosophy of it. The proverb is older than the seminars.
- Southern Africa, on the tongue and then on the page
- Nguni speech, and late twentieth-century Southern African writing
Plate · Generated interpretation
A proverb is not a person. What with were you already using?
Listen · Eve
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Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. A Nguni proverb. Desmond Tutu uses ubuntu in No Future Without Forgiveness (1999) around the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Mogobe Ramose writes philosophy. The Constitutional Court of South Africa invokes ubuntu in jurisprudence. These are later offices. The proverb is not a theory of phenomenal consciousness.
Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness. New York: Doubleday, 1999. Ramose, African Philosophy through Ubuntu (1999). Wiredu’s Akan conceptual decolonization is another West African project, not this proverb.
The house’s own title is to know with. It would be a theft to claim the Nguni proverb as our etymology. It would also be a refusal to notice a rhyme. Rhyme is not identity. Buber’s I and You is another grammar of with. Not one with.
To flatten all African thought into ubuntu is a later market. The proverb is specific. Personhood here is ethical and social before it is a Cartesian interior.
Whether a person can be at all, alone, is a moral claim that may or may not be a claim about experience.
Distant echoes
Echo
Late twentieth-century Ghana · Legon, and on the page
Okra and the English inner
Wiredu asks what English inner hides. Ubuntu asks what a person is without persons. Not one Africa.
Echo
Interwar Europe · Germany and later Jerusalem, on the page
I and You
Buber’s with is a word between two. Ubuntu’s with is a making of a person. Keep the difference.
One question remains
Self · Who or what is having the experience?
If a person is a person through persons, is the inner life a late luxury, a real privacy, or a way of forgetting the through?