Ubuntu

Ubuntu, a Bantu word which became the first term from an Indigenous language to enter a political constitution, is host to many meanings: ‘humanity’, ‘fraternity’, ‘compassion’ or even ‘forming a community’. According to Souleymane Bachir Diagne, all of these conceptions come together in the art of making the community better; in the understanding of humanity as a task to be fulfilled. Ubuntu dissolves tribalism, leaving in its stead an embrace of the plural within universality. In this book, Diagne recounts how Ubuntu become a dynamic philosophical concept whose humanist potential would rise to the urgent challenge of dismantling apartheid and healing its ravages.

It is also the opportunity for Diagne to retrace his own intellectual trajectory and venerable career from his childhood in Saint Louis to his present life in New York. He ranges over diverse topics such as postcolonialism, the defence of humanism, the rejection of identity politics, existentialism and African philosophies. An intellectual autobiography in the form of an engrossing conversation with the historian Françoise Blum, this slim volume is a fascinating portrait of one of our foremost contemporary philosophers and distinguished thinkers in Black and Africana Studies. Editor’s Note

Introduction: A sense of measure by Barbara Cassin

Ubuntu: Conversations with Françoise Blum

Notes Souleymane Bachir Diagne is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University.