Tutuist Ubuntu and Just War

ABSTRACT

Archbishop Desmond Mpilo Tutu is renowned for promoting peace, harmony and reconciliation in ways that are now associated closely with the African moral philosophy of ubuntu. He won the Nobel Prize for Peace for his nonviolent role in the fight against apartheid. His conception of ubuntu has come to be widely referenced in debates and judgements related to the transformative democratic constitution of the new South Africa. Tutu articulates ubuntu, in tandem with his Christian beliefs, as a means for achieving reconciliation and harmony where critics call for radical transformative violence. Scholars have recognised how Tutu’s unique African Christian perspective shapes his version of ubuntu. This article adds to this literature by focusing on how Tutu’s Christian conception of ubuntu informs his judgement, practice and thinking regarding just war. Given that black people have been historically denied serious recognition, the recognition of Tutu’s unique contributions to ubuntu that this article pledges has important epistemological cum ontological and political significances.

Acknowledgement

I thank the editors and the reviewers for their very helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 This article will not enter into the discussion of what constitutes an African philosophy. Readers who are new to this discussion can start by reading Janz (2009).

2 Race has marked significance in South Africa with its history of apartheid. In this article, reference is to apartheid distinctions between black and white, which are farcically but with institutional force, problematically based on perceptions of difference that are themselves socially constructed.

3 While there in the interim constitution (The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa Act 200 of 1993) and then removed in the final constitution (The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996), legal scholars are widely of the view that ubuntu is the guiding value of the South African constitutional state (Mokgoro 1998).

4 Mugabe was purportedly responding to views Tutu expressed that were taken to be oppositional to the disorderly land reclamation process that Mugabe was leading and to decry human rights infringements that accompany Mugabe’s leadership of Zimbabwe.

5 The word strategy has etymological roots in the Greek stratēgia which means ‘generalship’. In this article, the interest is in how Tutu’s idea of ubuntu can be the basis for the kinds of generalship which is capable of giving guidance to political considerations (i.e. to considerations which relate to the distribution of deference, income and safety) in respect of just war.