Ubuntu

There is a question your language has already answered, so quietly that you may not know it was asked. What is a person? The answer your culture most likely gave you, through its grammar, its stories, its legal systems, goes something like this: a person is a self. Bounded, individual, prior to others. You are born into the world as a distinct entity, and then you form relationships — with family, with friends, with communities. Those relationships are things you have, connections that extend outward from the core of who you already are. If you leave them, you are still you. The self persists alone. This is such a common answer in the modern West that it can feel less like an answer and more like plain fact. But it is not the only answer. And a different answer changes almost everything. In many Southern African communities, there is a philosophical concept that has been translated many ways, none of them quite adequate. It is often rendered as "I am because we are." Ubuntu.