Ubuntu
Ubuntu is an idea from the Southern African region which means literally "human-ness", and is often translated as "humanity towards others". Ubuntu is used in a philosophical sense to mean "all humanity is connected through a universal bond of sharing".Ubuntu is a philosophy that holds values of collective consciousness and social awareness. Ubuntu as political philosophy has aspects of socialism and/or contributionism, propagating the redistribution of wealth. [1]
In Southern Africa, it has come to be used as a term for a kind of humanist philosophy, ethic or ideology, also known as Ubuntuism or Hunhuism (the latter after the corresponding Shona term) propagated in the Africanisation (transition to majority rule) process of these countries during the 1980s and 1990s.
According to Michael Onyebuchi Eze, the core of ubuntu can best be summarised as follows:
“ A person is a person through other people' strikes an affirmation of one’s humanity through recognition of an ‘other’ in his or her uniqueness and difference. It is a demand for a creative intersubjective formation in which the ‘other’ becomes a mirror (but only a mirror) for my subjectivity. This idealism suggests to us that humanity is not embedded in my person solely as an individual; my humanity is co-substantively bestowed upon the other and me. Humanity is a quality we owe to each other. We create each other and need to sustain this otherness creation. And if we belong to each other, we participate in our creations: we are because you are, and since you are, definitely I am. The ‘I am’ is not a rigid subject, but a dynamic self-constitution dependent on this otherness creation of relation and distance."
Ubuntu Party
The Ubuntu Party is a South African political party founded by the author and songwriter Michael Tellinger based on the principles of Ubuntu Contributionism. The party aims to introduce 100% employment by closing down the South African Reserve Bank and replacing it with a People's Bank that will grant interest-free homeloans and fund massive public works campaign, as well as to provide free electricity as Eskom, the state-owned electricity utility, is owned by the people of South Africa. [2]
Fundamental Human Needs
If socially and culturally we do not support Fundamental Human Needs as a basic human right for all peoples of the earth, all humanitarian objectives to co-create a more benevolent and peaceful world, a world without war and tyrannical oppression, will fail.
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