Hmmm… I wonder how Samantha Burns would handle this one… maybe not a “Crazy Rant” but a fashion show? *heh* (I really do wanna know, Sam :-))
ubuntu, noun. Humanity or fellow feeling; kindness
I’ve been having some fun and frustration recently playing around with the latest “not quite ready for Aunt Tilly*” Linux GUI distros from Ubuntu. Yeh, I’ve waxed rather rhaphsodic about Puppy Linux for “Aunt Tilly” in the past, and I’m still high on that distro for the pure novice user, but it has a few more built in limitations than the Ubuntu distros that might constrict “Aunt Tilly” when she decides hse wants to do more.
But this post isn’t about Ubuntu Linux or computer use, except peripherally.
I was browsing around on an Ubuntu blog (titled, strangely enough, “The Ubuntu Blog” *heh*) and saw this post: Ubuntu Thong Spotted on BBC website – Oh, and Bill Clinton talks about Ubuntu.
So, naturally I had to read the referenced article.
What struck me about the article was that both the remarks quoting Bill Clinton–Rhodes Scholar, former President, etc.–and Desmond Tutu–Nobel Prize winner, and all that etc.–were rather vapid and showed a remarkable lack of historical perspective and cultural knowledge.
Here’s Bill on “ubuntu”–
“If we were the most beautiful, the most intelligent, the most wealthy, the most powerful person – and then found all of a sudden that we were alone on the planet, it wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans…”
Nice enough sentiment, I suppose. Of course, the royal “we” kinda ruins the down-home simplicity, but we’ll let that slide. *heh*
Then Desmond Tutu is cited to lend weight to this “unique” African concept, one which is presented as a desperate lack in Western Civilization… a concept which, well, let’s let Dezzie speak:
“Ubuntu is very difficult to render into a Western language… It is to say, ‘My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in what is yours.'”
Yep. Remarkably difficult to render in a Western language. So foreign, so anti-Western… Or, as John Donne put it in the early 17th Century,
“All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated…As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all: but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness….No man is an island, entire of itself…any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
I guess Donne wasn’t covered at Oxford or the University of South Africa, although I recall being required to memorize that passage, among others when I was 13.
“Ubuntu” is not some unique concept brought to us by our wiser, “noble savage” brethren from the Dark Continent. A Bantu word caught up by the Zulu (the Zulu are a branch of Bantu) expressing the brotherhood of mankind (noticed that? No PC futzing around with “man and womankind” crap).. Now there’s a picture… The history–such as it is–of the Zulu is one largely of savage atrocities toward their fellow man. Ubuntu, indeed, cousin Desmond.
But of course, our “noble savage” brethren have much to teach us Western brutes about humane treatment of others. Why! We’ve never heard the like before! Except… except the concept wasn’t exactly new when a Carpenter from Nazareth restated it a couple of thousand years ago:
“Therefore, whatever you want men to do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.” (Mt 7:12)
Or again,
This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you. John 15:17
Will just two do?
All this hoohaw over a jonny-come-lately Bantu-Zulu word/concept that says nothing new and whose adoption is due solely to a couple of convergent trends: a desire to pump up the image of backward people groups and a severe cultural subliteracy in the West.
But I guess I can give Bill and Cousin Desmond a pass on this. Surely they just don’t know any better.
Oh, and the Ubuntu thong?
Gotcha.
Notes:
*”Aunt Tilly”–a mythic sweet lil old lady computer newbie who’s mildly compuphobic, majorly UNmechanical or logic oriented, and perhaps a bit edging toward the left side of the Bell Curve. IOW, the typical person who’s avoided touching a computer up until now, but who’s decided to keep in touch with her great nephews and nieces via this new-fangled “electronic mail” stuff, or some such.
Oh, and yeh, this post was done on a Kubuntu (Ubuntu with a KDE GUI) comp I’m edging toward making a file server on our network.
I think what
Desmond Tutu
was trying to say, was that you’ve got to use a bunch of words
in english to explain what Ubuntu means.
Then it would have better served him to have said that. And it might even better serve the idea he says “ubuntu” embodies if it were to come from a culture where saying it meant, urm, what it said.
“Ubuntu”–this from a people who think “necklacing” those who differ from them politically, tribally or in just about any other way is a cool way of expressing their humanity. Frankly, “ubuntu” in its cultural context means what Tutu says it means to just about exactly the degree Islam means “peace” in its cultiural context–only from the perspective of relations with those who agree with you. It’s a nice ideal which has very, very little connection to the culture that supposedly spawned it.
And it’s a johnnie-come-lately, “No new word” idea. Older than the hills, but much, much less seen, much MUCH less valued in the culture we are supposed to learn this great lesson from than in the West, where at the least it’s been incorporated into law, ethics and religion in an advancing degree for a couple of thousand years. The Zulu culture that this word/concept come from for “introduction” to the West is more like three thousand years behind the times in actually making the concept a part of its weltanschaung.
Is the idea fully incorporated into Western cultures? Of course not. But is the concept more fully developed, more a part of our “background radiation” as it were? Of course it is! Saying as Cousin Desmond does, that the idea is “very difficult to render into a Western language” (not “word” but “language”) doesn’t make it so. All it does is claim without any support some greater qualities for the word while at the same time revealing Cousin Desmond’s ignorance.
That’s certainly OK by me. I know my own ignorance is massive. (I know very little about particle physics, for example.) But just because it’s difficult for Cousin Desmond to “render into a Western language” or because it’s a dazzlingly new concept to Cousin Billy doesn’t mean it’s difficult to “render into a Western language” or that it’s new to the West.
And just because Cousin Desmond took a celebrated stand against apartheid or Cousin Billy stained a blue dress, their thus-attained “moral authority” doesn’t necessarily extend to making “authoritative,” uninformed, ignorant-of-the-facts pronouncements.