Ubuntu: A Comparative Study of an African Concept of Justice - Softcover

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Paul Nnodim is a professor of philosophy at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.

Austin Okigbo is an associate professor of ethnomusicology, African Studies, and global health at the University of Colorado Boulder.

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Ubuntu is an African philosophical tradition that embodies the ability of one human being to empathize with another. It is the quintessence of African humanism, communalism, and belonging. As the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu anticipated, Ubuntu resonated with the moral intuition of the majority of black South Africans in the 1990s. As a result, it became the foundational ethical basis for articulating a new post-apartheid era of reconciliation and forgiveness in the face of a history marked by brutal racial violence. Yet Ubuntu, as a philosophy or ethical practice which has arguably come to represent African humanism and communalism, has not been sufficiently assimilated into contemporary philosophical scholarship.

This anthology weaves interdisciplinary perspectives into the discourse on African relational ethics in dialogue with Western normative ideals across a wide range of issues, including justice, sustainable development, musical culture, journalism, and peace. It explains the philosophy of Ubuntu to both African and non-African scholars. Comprehensively written, this book will appeal to a broad audience of academic and non-academic readers.

Paul Nnodim is a professor of philosophy at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.
Austin Okigbo is an associate professor of ethnomusicology, African Studies, and global health at the University of Colorado Boulder.

‘Ubuntu’, as propounded in this book, significantly contributes to the decolonization of knowledge production by centering an alternative epistemic register to the dominant Western philosophies in scholarship.
Geoffrey Lugano, Kenyatta University