GARETH VAN ONSELEN: Ubuntu: the death of an illusion
Ubuntu is a thing of myth imbued with forced hope and wonder, and you won’t find it in SA
One word you seem to hear less and less these days, to the extent that you hardly hear it at all, is ubuntu. Whatever happened to that great, uniquely South African idea? How it used to dance off the tongues of the politically correct. What a song they sang. It was, at the height of its power, not just an appealing sentiment, not even an orthodoxy but an entire philosophy; at least that was the claim. It was, we were told, the very bedrock on which our society rested and a foundational, even constitutional value. All and sundry seemed to fall under its spell. Look around, however, and there is precious little evidence it exists at all. What SA’s current condition has revealed is that ubuntu is a fiction; nothing more. Ubuntu: "A person is a person through other people." One of the many problems with this idea is that it is entirely amoral. It assumes benevolence a dominant force in the world. That, of course, is a mistake. "Other people" needn’t necessarily be good. Certainly, today...
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