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Don’t look for Ubuntu here, modern lifestyles eroded it

Friday April 20 2018
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If you believe in obuntu bulamu, you imagine elderly people who are no longer able to earn a living or construct some kind of livelihood and fend for themselves being looked after by members of their extended families as a matter of course. This, however, is not so for large numbers of elderly people out there. FILE PHOTO | NATION

By FREDRICK GOLOOBA-MUTEBI

There are a number of myths that Africans are holding on to, and proudly believe only they have these qualities.

One of them is the philosophy of Ubuntu, a term common to southern Africa’s Nguni languages. In its various iterations in other Bantu languages it means “being humane.”

In Uganda’s Buganda kingdom, the equivalent is obuntu bulamu. If anyone tells you that you have obuntu bulamu, it means you are a good person and also selfless in the deepest sense of the term humane.

Many of us like to think that we have obuntu bulamu. And when it comes to comparing ourselves collectively to other societies, especially the individualistic societies of the Western world, we tend to believe that they lost their obuntu bulamu a long time ago.

And when we travel to these countries and see that by and large society is organised around family of just husband, wife and children, and we contrast that with the African set up where family includes first, second, third and even fourth cousins, we feel vindicated in the belief that their obuntu bulamu is dead.

Truth be told, this view of ourselves is largely delusional and is becoming more so as our societies modernise. We only need to look carefully around ourselves, at how we lead our day-to-day lives, to appreciate this.

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Recently thoughts about this came flooding into my mind as I trudged up and down some rural places and engaged in conversations about how people there experience life.

Lives of elderly people

I was interested, especially in the lives of elderly people living in the countryside, those who have never had a formal job and therefore had no pensions of any sort.

Where and how do they live? Whom do they live with and how do they survive? There is a nice, heart-warming idea about how elderly people live in rural settings in societies such as ours where families are often organised communally, with relatives living close to each other and looking out for one another.

The idea fits the meaning of ubuntu in its southern African formulation: “I am, because we are.” It conveys the sense that one is part of a larger whole whose wellbeing depends on every member’s wellbeing.

If you believe this, you imagine elderly people who are no longer able to earn a living or construct some kind of livelihood and fend for themselves being looked after by members of their extended families as a matter of course. This, however, is not so for large numbers of elderly people out there.

It is hardly uncommon to find old and frail senior citizens fending or trying to fend for themselves with minimal or no support. Nor is it uncommon to find some fending for their grandchildren, again with minimal or no support.

The story of elderly people with young children goes like this. Their own children would have migrated to some distant place, usually a town or city, in search of work.

The unlucky ones never quite find the work they are looking for. The lucky ones may find work but that which pays just about enough for them to survive on.

In some cases they would have left the children behind, in the expectation that, once they start earning an income, they will send money home to cater for the kids’ needs and those of their grandparents.

In some cases the children are born in the city and then taken to the village where the cost of living is low.

Unable to find work or make enough money to live on and also save, the migrants neither return home regularly, nor send assistance. It gets worse for those who do not have young children to look after but who, as a result, spend their old age living alone.

Extended families

What of the extended families and their famed Ubuntu? It is not unusual to find them struggling too, enduring the same poverty that those they ought to help live in.

But why this poverty and hardship in rural contexts where under normal circumstances land is plentiful and self-sustenance therefore possible even through simple subsistence farming?

It’s all rather complicated, but I loved a story by a local sage in one place I visited. He saw poverty as “modern”.

He was certain that modernity breeds laziness and leads to hunger: “In the past the chief would come and ask you for your food garden and your granary. His persistence would force you to grow enough food to eat and some to keep in reserve. It was for your food security. But today if anyone forces people to do that, they say ‘we are being harassed’.

If an elected leader does that, they will say ‘I am not going to vote for you’. This modern elected leader then fears being voted out of office. But it is these same people who do not want to be harassed to grow food who will soon be crying to the same leader about having nothing to eat.

Now you see how modernity leads to poverty and hunger”. He should as well have added: “And destroys social connections or obuntu bulamu”.

Frederick Golooba-Mutebi is a Kampala- and Kigali-based researcher and writer on politics and public affairs. E-mail: [email protected]

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