How our lived ubuntu experience can widen our dreams: an indigenous narrative

Abstract

Like many African Indigenous children born in the 70s, I was born into the African Indigenous liberation struggle across Southern Africa. Our political leaders then and now continue to tell us to unite under our communal Indigenous knowledges, which for us from Southern Africa has found currency and expression in the overarching philosophical theories of Ubuntu. Yet, to assume the power structures of colonial white supremacy, regardless of gender, our leaders have become the embodiment of white men in black bodies. As they intimidate and manipulate us under the structures of colonial governance, our social fear becomes our actions of accumulating colonial dreams. In the power structures of colonial governance, our Indigenous Ubuntu governance dreams are fragmented. Sisters and brothers, those dreams, will die in fragmented isolation and we will forget what it is to be relational with all our diverse relations. Conversely, we could nurture our own Indigenous governance by centring the communal health of all our relations, inclusive of our environments by critically centring our fragmented knowledges. This paper highlights a personal orature about how Ubuntu women used critical feminist Ubuntu knowledge to nurture my life across cultural boarders.

Keywords: Ubuntu, communal parenting, decolonisation, Indigenous governance, Indigenous African feminism