Inkatha neButho: Linguistically Situating Ubuntu and Its Theorisation

Abstract

I come to the reading of Ubuntu for Warriors by Colin Chasi as a native speaker of the isiZulu language and an Indigene of South Africa, who appreciates the challenges inaugurated by the arbitrary borders instituted on the continent by colonial greed and imposition. Moreover, I come to this book plagued by anxiety, owing to the disclaimer given below. On a theoretical level, I often am confronted by the question of whether I can claim to own ubuntu, seeing as it has been theorised in ways that I cannot understand, or more pragmatically, that are foreign to me. This alienation from a concept that is rooted in the language of my ancestors began in 2016, reading for a course on ubuntu with Leonhard Praeg—as he was teaching his Report on Ubuntu (2014). Having engaged the course and developed a paper that used African intellectuals and sought to think through the concept from my ontological position, I was given a grade of 50% by my professor. In my paper, aptly titled Contestations of Ontologies: An Aporia of Juridical Adjudication, the comments given to me read as follows: