About the concept of Ubuntu

As an ideology, Afrocentrism provides a vital reference to black political thought in the United States; but in this, it can reproduce the same defects as Eurocentrism, thereby losing its own meaning. This is a problem of transcendentalism in general, as a nature of the idealist tradition, which funds modern philosophy; and which determination is serious, as hermeneutical, because of this reproduction of the defects that gave rise to it.

In this sense, the so-called African or Africanist thought only has its object in Africa, but not its nature; given in the interpretation of African traditions, but with the ideological instruments of that idealist tradition. That is the problem, because it distorts the original meaning of these African phenomena and objects, in a Western sense; perpetuating relations of cultural subordination, such as Christianity, in that function of political ideology.

In short, if Christianity served the objects of economic domination, ideology is the new capital; which in its political nature, allows the manipulation of the popular masses, subordinating them to the social structure. As an illustration of this, there would be the elaborations that interpret the concept of Ubuntu in a humanistic sense; a term of Bantu origin, restricted here to its ideological connotation, as political and social, not properly ontological.

That is the difference, since in its original context, the concept of Ubuntu is a complete ontological category; whose connotation is the social projection of the individual, but which is only possible for him as an individual. As a concept, Ubuntu can be traced through the mystical tradition of the Congo culture, in the dikenga; the cosmogram that synthesizes Bantu cosmology, and in which it functions as a category of human excellence.

However, the concept is problematic there, as part of a parallel tradition to imperial absolutism; which it justifies, in that same transcendentalist sense of European idealism, with which he coincides functionally. This is what is interesting, because these imperial formations are not natural to African tribalism; no matter how much the scholars brandish it, mimicking Western political structuralism, because of its identity complexes.

Like Congo imperialism, there was also that of Mali, Oyó and Dahomey, all equally transcendentalist; founded on a supremacy of the state, which emulates European absolutism, of the Richelieu-Mazarin doctrine. In the face of African imperialism, there is the greater naturalness of its tribalism, in a geronto-democratic model; more efficient than that of Western democracy, avoiding the oligarchic character of the latter, based on wealth.

That is what changes in the transition to postmodernity, with the transformation of capital, from financial to political; with the importance of the intellectual specialization of the middle class, in the justification of its class interests. This would be what lies behind the supposed political leadership of Afrocentrism, made up of an academic elite; that is, a specialized middle class, which seeks to define the interests of the popular class, without participating in it.

It is this elitism what can afford the luxury of transcendentalist elaborations, which ultimately defend its interests; which are of class, in the same type of determinism of which they accuse the bourgeoisie, with which they compete. Hence elaborations such as this one, which reproduce that distortion of transcendentalism, typical of the West; focusing political expression on a transcendent idea, such as that of the Common Good (Kant), rather than on an immanence.

As proof, the new boom in the ideological use of this concept comes from Monsignor Desmond Tutu; who in the Anglican tradition —not the African— responds to Christian Humanism, which is the foundation of the entire crisis of the West. We should remember that Anglicanism inherits the Christian exegetic tradition, as a science specialized in doctrinal interpretation; that justifies the political object in its transcendence —hence transcendentalism— with the reference to tradition.

From Tutu's undeniable —but Westernist— teaching, there are countless scholars given to these elaborations; but all of them come from European institutions, although they brandish African objects for their own justification. The difficulty responds to the hermeneutical nature of its contradiction, in the development of Idealism; by its subjection to the successive dichotomies of dialectics, which are nevertheless fallacious and unnecessary in their artificiality.