Essential building blocks of the Ubuntu debate; or: I write what I must

Abstract

This article is in part a response to Matolino and Kwindingwi’s “The end of Ubuntu” and Metz’s response “Just the beginning for ubuntu: reply to Matolino and Kwindingwi”, both of which appeared in the South African Journal of Philosophy. My contribution also stands alone as an outline of the basic minimum of conceptual moves any Ubuntu theorist has to make in order for their text to avoid the twin seductions of being either a contemporary variant of an outdated ethnophilosophy, or an ahistorical analysis of Ubuntu that remains oblivious to the historicity of the concept. The obvious fact that Ubuntu has had a complicated history, first as pre-colonial praxis and then as abstract postcolonial philosophical construct, demands of the postcolonial theorist to pay attention to the epistemic shifts that have historically determined how Ubuntu interacted with various hegemonic, that is, Western-dominated, theoretical discourses.