The Lessons of Ubuntu

January 1, 2018
South Africa–born Mathabane (Kaffir Boy) examines race relations in the United States through the lens of racial healing principles employed in Mandela’s postapartheid South Africa in this fervent plea for a better future. He espouses the philosophy of ubuntu, a renewed commitment to common humanity, empathy, forgiveness, and love, for American culture and politics. Using his own story as a backdrop, Mathabane highlights commonalities between the South African and American experiences, discussing obstacles faced in both societies. He connects the hatred he felt for South African ghetto police to that felt by rioters after the Rodney King case. More provocatively, he recalls forced segregation and the “pass books” (akin to internal passports) required for blacks to enter into white-only areas, and aligns these experiences with the self-segregation of “safe spaces” on American campuses, saying the latter is “well-meant... oftentimes undermines the benefits of diversity.” In the second half of the book Mathabane elaborates on the principles of ubuntu through quotes from leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., Desmond Tutu, Mandela, and philosophers, yet is light on logistics when applying them to America today. Instead he relies on hopes that “President Trump will embrace and champion the inclusive and humanizing principles of ubuntu in the same way that Mandela embraced and championed them.” For many readers, this might seem like wishful thinking.

January 1, 2018
Applied with transcendent skill by Nelson Mandela in the reconciliation of post-apartheid South Africa, ubuntu is a philosophy of resolvingor, better, warding offinterpersonal conflict through the embrace of our own and others' humanity. Raised in abject poverty and under a police state in the suburbs of Johannesburg by a mother whose life seems the embodiment of ubuntu, Mathabane (Kaffir Boy, 1986) lays out nine concepts by which one can apply this philosophy to daily life: empathy, compromise, learning, nonviolence, change, forgiveness, restorative justice, love, and spirituality. If these concepts sound vague, Mathabane gives them saliency and specificity in the diverse examples he offersin the chapter on change, for instance, he relates profound, humanizing about-faces experienced by Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, and Afrikaner Beyers Naude. For anyone willing to invest the time and effort, this makes for a deeply effective how-to manual.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)