Ubuntu: Conversations with Françoise Blum

Translated by Andrew Brown

Ubuntu, a Bantu word that became the first term from an Indigenous language to enter a political constitution, is host to many meanings: 'humanity', 'fraternity', 'compassion', and even ‘'forming a community'. According to Souleymane Bachir Diagne, all these conceptions come together in the art of making the community better and in the understanding of humanity as a task to be fulfilled. Ubuntu dissolves tribalism, leaving in its stead an embrace of the plural within universality. In this book Diagne recounts how Ubuntu became a dynamic philosophical concept whose humanist potential would rise to the urgent challenge of dismantling apartheid and healing its ravages.

This theme is also an opportunity for Diagne to retrace his own intellectual trajectory and venerable career, from his childhood in Saint-Louis in West Africa to his present life in New York. The discussion ranges over diverse topics such as postcolonialism, the defence of humanism, the rejection of identity politics, existentialism, and African philosophies. An intellectual autobiography in the form of an engrossing conversation with the historian Françoise Blum, this slim volume is a fascinating portrait of one of our foremost contemporary philosophers and distinguished thinkers in black or Africana studies.