Our Ubuntu: A Black feminist turn

abstract

Ubuntu has become a galvanising concept that brings African and Diasporic peoples into dialogue with one another and its aspirations for both. However, the space of the university and the prescriptions of academia often reflect colonial logics and engage in complex re-enactments or perpetuations of colonial erasure of Black female bodies, voices, and practices. Using our shared experiences of engaging Ubuntu at the Ubuntu Dialogues conference in Stellenbosch, South Africa, we experiment with the process of writing as a form of disruptive academic praxis of care work informed by spirituality, creative expression, and spatial embodiment. We engage in collective reflexiveness and writing on the exclusion of care practice in higher education and how Black feminists’ care subverts these subtle and overt forms of erasure of Black knowledge, contributions, work, practice, and intellectual thinking. Furthermore, a Black feminist ethics and poesis of care attends to the physical ableist heteronormative, patriarchal space that requires complicity in colonial violences. We show that inserting our voices and bodies into the work at the intersection of care, praxis, and knowledge generation is a collaborative act of care cultivation done by Black women for Black women and benefitting all peoples/bodies. Our reflective essay foregrounds care at the contours of a Black feminist conception of Ubuntu.

keywords:

• Ubuntu
• ethics
• poesis
• care
• praxis

Ubuntu Unconferenced

Ubuntu is an open source software operating system on Linux

It is a lifestyle brand and a family of fonts

Countless products, clothing, foodstuffs

It is the name of schools, nonprofits, and restaurants

There are songs, books, and babies even, called Ubuntu

No wonder it is the title of conferences, symposiums, and institutes

Ubuntu is the stuff academic imagination is made of

Giving plenty of folks plenty of reasons

for papers, sabbaticals, jobs even

Living and playing in the lofty realms of philosophies, principles, practices

Beliefs, ideologies, morals, maxims

Rules, attitudes, viewpoints, values … 

Because that’s what it’s really all about, ain’t it?

Value?

The questions posed for group consideration were

Centred on Ubuntu’s value

Clearly, it’s a marketing campaign dream

So much meaning in so few syllables

So many opportunities to feel heard and seen

So many occasions to make thoughtful hours billable

So they posed the questions to us folks … were we folks?

Or were we scholars or students or practitioners or funders

Or were we audience or speaker or learning or learned

Or were we supported or scorned or considered or ignored

Or were our hearts cold or were our tongues burning

Or were we locals or visitors or interlopers or internationals

Or were we listened to or talked at or spirit filled or spirit yearning

Or is Ubuntu’s value in allowing so many things to remain unnamed

Nebulous, so they may also remain unclaimed, perpetrators unblamed

But who’s really to blame

When Black students return to their rooms

After another long day of indoctrination

To find their belongings drenched

In the urine of their white dormmates

— for the third time that semester

Yet the big story on the news

And all anyone can talk about on campus

Is the need for better lighting because

Two drunk white kids drove off the road

It seems in some circumstances Ubuntu can be used as a filter

To separate what one says from what one means

For others, they must use it as a shield erected to

Protect their soft parts from those who wield it

As a blunt force object smashing into the dignity of others

And sometimes at an arts & crafts fair, on social media

At an interdisciplinary conference or other places

Where there is tendency to kumbaya concepts

Ubuntu hits smack dab into reality

Revealing the cavernous gulf

Between presenting Ubuntu and doing Ubuntu

I am because you are, is a romantic notion

Until it fills spaces with disruptions

When it wedges between people’s idea of themselves

And how they are experienced and perceived by others

When the deconstruction of a way of living

Is confronted with a way of being

When the studied is faced with the studier

And there is no one to blame, or is there?

And there are no answers, or are there?

For your deconstruction, your confrontations,

Your hyperbolic, in your face erasure

It can all be chalked up to the continuous violence

Black women are expected to bear

And no one expected to care but each other

And we were the only ones who cared

To ask the Black students on campus

If they wanted to attend the conference

If they cared to be part of the folks to

Ponder the value of Ubuntu

And we were the only ones who cared

To ensure our voices were inserted

Into all the places they were intentionally overlooked

We were the only ones who cared to acknowledge

The history in the walls and the horror beneath our feet

In all the spaces where Ancestors were screaming to be

Heard above the imperious voices and the lying signage

Which is why we can’t be faking

When it comes to freedom work

Because not Stellenbosch nor Lansing nor New Orleans

Nor Grenada nor London nor Sharm el-Sheikh are free

And not many at a conference, no matter what it is titled

Care to fill in the blanks with honesty

I am poor, because you are –?

I am privileged, because you are –?

I am fractured, because you are –?

I am fulfilled, because you are –?

I am voiceless, because you are –?

I am victorious, because you are –?

Until we can

We can neither know nor practice Ubuntu

On 24 October 2022 African and African American scholars, cultural community leaders, artist-practitioners, healers, and students met for a five-day Ubuntu Dialogues conference outside of Cape Town in Stellenbosch, South Africa. The conference was the culmination of a partnership project between the Michigan State University (MSU) African Studies Center and the Stellenbosch University Museum. On paper, the setting of the conference in the stunningly beautiful wine valley of Stellenbosch with its picturesque mountains was ripe for nostalgic romanticisation of the ‘Motherland’, no doubt most recently encouraged by the Marvel movie Black Panther (Coogler 2018). Quite to the contrary, conference attendees reached their comfortable lodgings in the dark hours of Stage 4 load shedding, a statewide scheduling of power outages, nothing like the vibranium-powered Wakanda.

Most of the cohort from the United States of America (USA) were visiting South Africa for the first time, at a time when the Stellenbosch University students, administrators, and faculty were grappling with a case of a white student urinating on the belongings of a Black student in one of the campus residential housings. In a conference programme set within a historically wounding space that continues to create conditions for Black pain and dehumanisation, the context was fraught with deep-running tension and emotions. The conference was a series of breaks with and from typed-out programmes, enclosed and restrictive university walls, and scholarly norms, as such openings were created for care, vulnerability, joy, rest, community, and tears.

The time we shared together at Stellenbosch shaped our connection and collective resistance work. We have become a collective that bonds across time and place, who strengthen each other’s scholarship, who love each other in word and in deed. We discovered that there was hardly a word to capture our bond. There was (and remains) a constant inter/play in the space within which the ‘I’ becomes a liberated ‘we’ with a conscious awareness of the responsibility we have towards cultivating intentional relationships. If our piece blurs the ‘I’ and ‘we’, it is true to our ethos.

Ubuntu is itself a philosophy and praxis that insists on the individual understanding their being within complex and collective relation. Ubuntu is thus understood to be a moral philosophy and practice steeped in relationality. The well-rehearsed Nguni maxim, “umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu” can be best understood as: “a person is by virtue of their relational connections”.¹ Underpinning Ubuntu is the logic of personhood that is foundational to African paradigms (Ogude 2018). It finds resonance in Black feminist thinking such as M. Jacqui Alexander’s razanblaj (Ulysse 2015) and echoes the connections between African and African Diasporic feminist thinking, and practice that we embodied in our meeting and continue to cultivate beyond its parameters.

Through a reflexive practice of collaborative writing, we will share our reflections on the conference and turning points that marked a decided reclamation of Ubuntu as a philosophy and praxis of care. The writing itself, done through shared moments together, recalling, laughing, crying, and reminiscing on the space and connection we created together, is all a continuation of the care practice we initiated in South Africa and nurtured while in our respective spaces in the USA. We will do that same work here. At times we speak with a shared voice, at times our singular, narrative voices stand alone. We speak within a co-creative language of Ubuntu that emerges from our reflections on a moment of realisation that academic mistranslations of Ubuntu required our collective intervention. This awareness demanded a reckoning with the denial of our full humanness in this particular higher education setting, whose materialised colonial legacies undermine the core principles of Ubuntu philosophy and practice. We enacted a sisterhood in a moment fraught with contradictions about rethinking Ubuntu from a place (the Faculty of Theology) that has historically instrumentalised Ubuntu for the production of colonial subjects.

Events that preceded our time at our host campus offer important background for the conference that helped to foster this work. Poetry anchors this article and punctuates the movement of this reflexive exercise, speaking our language of Ubuntu as an intentional turn from heteronormative and patriarchal conceptions of Ubuntu in academic scholarship towards Our Ubuntu,² a multidisciplinary and transnational project that centres a Black feminist lens. The article, a meditative interplay of voices, proceeds by describing Our Ubuntu, which counters the violence of erasure and silencing of Black women. It recognises our humanity and restores care for the harm caused by our dissonant presence in colonial institutions. Our Ubuntu talks back as an act of inserting a poesis of care and is a dialogue with a Black feminist lens that, in turn, expansively incorporates poetics and the Sacred (Ulysse 2015). It responds to all we saw, heard, experienced, and felt and moves to a vision for a language of Ubuntu.

We question who has access to spaces of knowledge production and who can name, translate, and practice rest, repair, and liberation. Furthermore, an Ubuntu language of Black feminist praxis makes our words actionable and our theory accessible for practice by academics and everyday knowers. Our Ubuntu is not concerned with shaming, but necessarily names to disrupt harm.

Our Ubuntu: A poesis of care

I am because you are, is a romantic notion

Until it fills spaces with disruptions

When it wedges between people’s idea of themselves

And how they are experienced and perceived by others

When the deconstruction of a way of living

Is confronted with a way of being

When the studied is faced with the studier

And there is no one to blame, or is there?

And there are no answers, or are there?

Our Ubuntu is a Black feminist reclamation of our humanity as scholars whose activities weave Ubuntu into two different contexts of racialised, gendered violence in the USA and in South Africa. In this sense, our reclamation of Ubuntu foregrounds a preoccupation with the ethics and politics of a Black feminist approach to restorative justice in settler colonial contexts. We are pondering the question: How do Black women reimagine and practice repair when personhood continues to be negated by race and permeated by class and sexuality, religion, immigration status, etc.? Our enunciation of this question originates in a shared interest in the potential for togetherness among Black women across the African Diaspora to carve out political spaces for creative expression that articulate and document idioms for combatting anti-Blackness globally.

I, in honouring and insisting on the individual specificities of a liberating ‘we’, wrestle with this idea of togetherness as a cisgender dark-skinned Black woman and polio survivor with a physical disability that conditions my relationship to space and its occupants. I have internalised, through layers of racing and gendering disability, that my needs for accessibility create discomfort for others. And, therefore, to make myself strong and small in a normative, ableist system, I want to reflect through Ubuntu on how to access and enact care in academia and across the communities that shape who I become.

If Ubuntu is a philosophy of humanness that offers a pathway toward conceptualising restorative justice, in ways that deeply engage individual and collective acts of reckoning with violence and erasure, how does it allow Black women living with a disability to grapple with the processes that refrain us from demanding care, especially when we have been the ones forced to give care? More specifically, what are the processes that kept me from making my needs for an accessible building known before the conference? This question begs another, which is: Within the architecture of knowledge production in academic research and teaching, how does Ubuntu equip us with a language capable of shining light on the blind spots of a self-righteous ethics and politics of care that sometimes perpetrate harm?

If care is a non-charitable revolutionary relationality that extends beyond the anthropocene (Piepzna-Samarasinha 2018, p. 1), can Ubuntu collect and recollect a global Black feminist approach at the crossroads of African and American Black Feminist Thought to interrogate its relationship to power, especially the racist patriarchal values it tends to reinforce by equating care with femininity? Black South African feminist scholars who theorise Ubuntu’s potential for gender justice have contended that when Ubuntu is seen through the lens of caregiving in various African contexts, it tends to perceive care as a feminine act (Mangena 2009; Chisale 2018). This framing of Ubuntu therefore persists in reducing Black women’s personhood to demands of love rooted in what Patricia McFadden (2018, p. 417) calls “hetero-impunity”. Therefore, Our Ubuntu rethinks care (whether through accessibility, childcare, and many more), to rupture the gendered and racialised contours of Ubuntu that exclude Black women from the intersubjective dynamic that foregrounds Ubuntu’s relational conception of the human.

For your deconstruction, your confrontations,

Your hyperbolic, in your face erasure

It can all be chalked up to the continuous violence

Black women are expected to bear

And no one expected to care but each other

Our Ubuntu shifts our ideas of care by recalibrating the ethical principle of relationality to turn it inside out, so as to confront the violence that can be perpetrated when interconnectedness is mediated by relations of power. It morphs and mutates in reflexive writing. By doing this we can reach Ubuntu’s capacity to link care work to repair. Our Ubuntu is therefore a symbolic site that disrupts the deep legacies of colonialism in higher education. It is first and foremost a poesis of care: a way of co-creating and narrating our own way of mattering within an ableist space that insists on disciplining Black women’s bodies. A poesis that grounds itself in Our Ubuntu imagines care as a language that gathers, assembles, and forms through intimate reckoning circles on the outskirts of the main conference sessions. It is full of stories that are so familiar in Black feminist activists’ circles, but at risk of fading away because the conventional protocols of academic writing do not always give room to documenting what exists at the margins of conference proceedings.

A poesis of care also amplifies the audaciously disruptive stories dwelling in the networks of care that have existed among Black women across space and time. Amidst racist xenophobia directed toward Black and Brown students and faculty in higher education, a poesis of care posits reflexive writing as a mode of preserving queer stories of resistance and creative imagination that do not often get counted as ground for theoretical production, and may not have thought of themselves as care poetics but still theorise with care. Reflexive writing is a core part of Black feminist praxis and the work of building anti-racist worlds.

A poesis of care through Ubuntu moves and can be moved. As we grappled with Ubuntu within the enduring legacies of colonial violence during the Ubuntu Dialogues conference, our physical movement from the confines of a university building to its exterior has shown that we stand at the crossroads, between both the constraints of colonial knowledge systems – through which we unfortunately learn to anchor ourselves as scholars – and the emotionally taxing and inevitable work of dismantling these systems. We can keep imagining futurity by weaving disruptive care work in our institutions. When speaking of Ubuntu in conceptualising restorative justice in Burundi, Jeanine Ntihirageza (2022) rightfully pointed out that the process of articulating alternative futures capable of promoting, not suppressing, just, peaceful, and inclusive notions of the human does not have to be mediated by a perfect language of Ubuntu. However, a language of Ubuntu must thrive for an aesthetic that shakes off colonial imaginaries that compound our disability, our traumas, our pain.

Our Ubuntu: A language of care praxis

This is for us by us and for everyone who seeks to forge a poesis of care into everyday praxis. This section demonstrates how a poesis of care actualises a language of care praxis. The latter flows through dialogue and I enter as a Blackfeminist, one word – no space, pause, or break in-between. More specifically, my focus is Black feminisms in the USA – which is an important context as I proceed. I was invited to offer a response to a talk titled ‘Revisiting, Rethinking, Reimagining feminism, and gender equality in an Ubuntu vocabulary’ as an act of performative disruption to the keynote address to be delivered by a South African white woman academic and the original response by an American white man in senior leadership, harkening to the seminal work of Akasha Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (1982).

So much meaning in so few syllables

So many opportunities to feel heard and seen

Given this context, we were unable and simply unready to reimagine or rethink feminism and gender equity that had yet to think about or imagine Black women. The invitation that was extended to Emilie Diouf and myself was an act of disruption and advocacy of an ally.

My response comes only after – and in deference to Diouf – and is informed by the need to intervene to prevent further harm of erasure and silencing. I believe Black feminisms are an integral framework of understanding for reflections on Ubuntu. If Black feminisms are indeed recognised in this space (this remains an open question, as this appears to be an oversight of this session) it is typical that American Black feminists are given the only space and platforms to speak. Yet, it is not lost on me that we were in South Africa, rich with some of the most profound Black feminists, among them Patricia McFadden and Pumla Gqola, whose work grounds African and transnational Black feminist thought. In that moment that placed us centrally in the act of disruption, it was imperative to call their voices into the space, to amplify their work, and to celebrate and honour them.

And we were the only ones who cared

To ensure our voices were inserted

Into all the places they were intentionally overlooked

My relationship to this conference solidified because of my work with members of Decoloniality Dialogues, some of whom encouraged me to attend, to further consider how Ubuntu questions: What are the things we must disrupt? Thus, I am working not to replicate, but to disrupt the practice of Black feminists from the USA being given the only rare platform from which Black feminist intellectual AND practical contributions are made.

It is common practice during conferences in the hallowed halls of academia to pepper attendees with high theory (read, that which is acceptable to colonial canons) to justify one’s presence as a scholar deserving of this forum. However, I will depart from this tradition of defending academic worthiness. Mine is an embodied response in word and application. My aim is to connect a conceptual understanding of what Ubuntu is to a practical understanding of what Ubuntu does.

Let us consider the word. In the academy, the written word is sacred. Faculty are chided to publish or perish, often to their social and emotional peril. “The literature”³ is cherished and weaponised, depending on your positionality – the ability to critique it, challenge it, locate oneself within it, contribute to it – and conveys an ability to master the language of academy. However, we were convened to reflect on Ubuntu. Our aim is ever to construct purposeful, intentional, meaningful, sustainable dialogues – which calls for different use of language in service of authentic empathy and recognition of others’ humanity. Thus, we embarked on the task of considering the value of Ubuntu while holding to a loose framework of the academy.

Who is included and erased in Ubuntu?

Among the first words spoken in the keynote presentation were these: “Women aren’t captured in the concept of ‘personhood’.” As I listened, I was compelled to review the printed programme, which listed the speakers selected for the morning’s keynote. Hortense Spillers’ Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book (1987) seemed a more precise description of the experience. Spillers asserts that the [American] lexicon is so incapable of recognising Black women as persons, it has yet to create a word that fully and sufficiently detects or honours Black women’s humanity. Even in this South African intellectual context, the presence and contributions of Black women in the hallmark intellectual spaces of spoken and performative language was rendered undetectable.

And there are no answers, or are there?

For your deconstruction, your confrontations,

Your hyperbolic, in your face erasure

It can all be chalked up to the continuous violence

Black women are expected to bear

These were the conditions ripe for a disruptive turn because we were present. We are present, still. Ubuntu is central to who we are, what we study, and how we approach our work within and outside of the academy. Thus, Jeanine Ntihirageza’s (2022) reflections during the panel discussion, ‘Ubuntu’s conversation with transformational justice’, which eloquently contemplated a language of Ubuntu, serves as an important starting point for our work. Our Ubuntu offers a Blackfeminist dialect, a mother tongue with theoretical and practical inflections.

Our Ubuntu: A language of care, a language as care

Without question, language is important to a conference centred on dialogue. If we consider dialogue as a written or spoken conversational exchange or the act of engaging with another to resolve an issue, our Ubuntu appreciates that dialogue is more than talking. This Ubuntu language of Blackfeminist praxis connects high theory with practice that speaks to the circumstances of our lives, in real time. Our Ubuntu engages a language of Black feminist praxis of care as the basis for dialogue that is demonstrative of our embodied knowledge of what Ubuntu is and what it does.

And no one expected to care

but

each other … 

An Ubuntu language of Blackfeminist praxis is emergent and multi-layered. Care took many forms in our forged sisterhood. In some moments, care occurred in social spaces – meeting with students where we found them and centring them in our dialogues. We divided our time between conference activities and connecting with students one on one and in small groups, to support their professional and academic development as emerging scholars.

And we were the only ones who cared

To ask the Black students on campus

If they wanted to attend the conference

If they cared to be part of the folks to

Ponder the value of Ubuntu

Other moments called for physical care. As a diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice professional, accessibility is at the core of my understanding of Ubuntu. Navigating the conference site was particularly difficult for one of my sister-friends with a physical disability. Each of us accepted responsibility for her care and wellbeing throughout each day.

Care is also restorative. Precious Simba asked a powerful question during her panel session: “Are there relationships that heal?” As an Associate Dean in a college of osteopathic medicine, I am very much concerned with:

• how we understand and practice health and wellness,

• how we think about care for the most vulnerable in our communities, and

• how to do so through a social justice lens.

Returning to Simba’s (2022) question, we assert that an Ubuntu language of Blackfeminist praxis is concerned with healing. In my discipline and profession, healing is no insignificant matter. A keynote session on feminism and gender equity absent of Black women caused some of us to feel a sense of dis/ease. In this case, healing was necessarily disruptive. We purposefully transgressed the colonised framework offered to us that caused harm to the community of scholars and practitioners and called ourselves into a space of care and repair. The keynote session that provides the case study for this article began with an important turn of disruptive healing: asking how could the harm be healed?

An Ubuntu language of Blackfeminist praxis holds space for joy. In our circle of sisterhood, joy is kinetic and collective. It is vigorous conversations, speaking the same words at the same time. It is dinners that last into the wee hours, ending only as the staff lock the doors. It is long walks through gorgeous naturescapes and stolen moments of adventure. It is singular and reflexive. It is an indescribable vocabulary of words unspoken … and fluency is gained through sisterhood. It is what Black Feminist epistemologist, Kristie Dotson (2013) calls “knowing in space.”

I call myself into our Ubuntu. Our Ubuntu lives in Emilie, whose care sustains us. Unifier, the consummate healer and dream weaver. In Greta, who reminds us that part of our healing and Ubuntu is found in our joy, rest, and play. And in Asali, my sister for whom there are barely words to capture all she is and has been to me – possibly best described by Toni Morrison’s words, “We was girls together … ”

Our Ubuntu: Care res(e)t

It seems in some circumstances Ubuntu can be used as a filter

To separate what one says from what one means

Envisioning poesis and negotiating a language of Ubuntu were prerequisites for how we reset the space to enact rest as care. Our work happened alongside racial harms on the ground. On 22 October 2022, days before the Ubuntu Dialogues conference in the Western Cape, South Africa, a white student urinated on two Black students’ belongings in Enedrag Residence on the Stellenbosch University campus. In this moment, umuntu’s⁴ Ubuntu was intimately eroded. In response to the racism, the university administration turned to the student code of conduct and State law to suspend the white student,⁵ and cast euphemistic and palatable language over the display of harm by calling it an ‘incident.’⁶

While maintaining order and rule of law overshadowed that the white student lacked any show of Ubuntu or angana Ubuntu, the unsettling question of where the consideration of the humanness or ubumuntu of the harmed students was, remained. Where was Ubuntu in these and other moments like it?

Ubuntu hits smack dab into reality

Revealing the cavernous gulf

Between presenting Ubuntu and doing Ubuntu

Ubuntu would arrive in the form of a conference on 24 October 2022 while Stellenbosch University students were writing final examinations and could thus not attend. The backdrop of anti-Black un-Ubuntu and racially motivated acts of white students would not remain quietly under the veil of ambiguous language. The moment, and others like it, would inform a first day of the conference which had a palpable absence of Stellenbosch students, panel disruptions by students challenging the hierarchical value given to scholarship over their own voices and experiences, and a rest-less-ness from audience delegates who charged the room with a buzz that reverberated through the Theology Faculty building walls. The defragmented word rest-less refers to ‘lack of rest’ or the ‘need for rest’, and the prefix -ness indicating ‘measure of being’ or ‘placement’.

In the instance of the Ubuntu Dialogues conference, what quickly became evident to those of us who were generative disruptors, was that despite how much Black women have written on Ubuntu, they were placed on the periphery in relation to knowledge or scholarship on Ubuntu. By lunchtime on the first day, we were looking with trepidation at our programme for the next day’s keynote address on feminism and Ubuntu vocabulary, which would be given by a white philosophy professor. In present-day South Africa, this spoke to the erasure of Black women’s knowledge, praxis, and experiences. It said that even when speaking on Ubuntu, a concept steeped in abantu’s philosophy and praxis, Black and African women are placed on the periphery as observers of what white academics have to say about a philosophy they do not practice, much less acknowledge is situated in isintu.⁷

And we were the only ones who cared

Seeing the coming harm, African and Black women and nonbinary feminists leaned into the disquiet and disrupted the silencing so our voices and stories could be heard. Responding to the keynote address, Emilie Diouf from Senegal and Marita Gilbert from New Orleans, USA, took to the stage and shared their knowledge which decentred whiteness, named the African and Black women who inspired them, moved thinking on Ubuntu further away from the scholarship-praxis divide and towards the relational-healing-praxis of care that Ubuntu more closely resembles, and created space for engagement with those who had done harm rather than dismissing or blaming them. From the generative disruption and care work, an invitation could emerge that was steeped in the Sacred and an ancestral-healer lineage, showing that the work of healing is never done in isolation.

Res(e)t in rest-less-ness

Until we can

We can neither know nor practice Ubuntu

To rest we must reset, and do so collectively. Feeling held by the feminist care practice of giving language to harm, I entered my own panel knowing space was carved out for me to do the necessary work. Despite the scholarly setup, the moderator and I, both healers in Bungoma, took our shoes off – a common gesture that allows us to anchor ourselves to the land and connect with idlozi⁸ when conducting our work. Because centring energies requires feeling into the space, I requested not to be called to speak first. When I finally spoke, it was through an altered tonality to my voice which gradually rose, and with that a message by the ancestral-healer I work through, saying that we all had to rest in the rest-less-ness of what was emerging from each of our scholastic and experiential engagements with Ubuntu. Gathered for a conference on Ubuntu, we were told that what made Ubuntu inaccessible to us in all its complexity was not that it fell on the scholarly binary between a solution to societal ills or a failed ideal. Rather, it was that when engaging scholarly discourses, we had become incapable and unwilling to listen deeply to Ubuntu, a philosophy that could only be engaged with fully when we rested into what unsettled us and listened to the messages that surfaced through dreams, meditation, and rest. The call was that collective rest, imagination, and dreaming were the only things that had the potential to liberate us and our desires for renewed relations to flourish.

Because a message from an ancestral voice carries weight, sharing it with the audience is both a relief and takes a toll on the emotional body. Collectively, we had journeyed through our imagination, beyond the walls of the building, and returning to the room required a transitional practice. Sister Asali asked that we be led through breath. With my voice more elevated in this practice, we took three collective breaths that centred around calling ourselves back into relation with self. The practice calmed and led us into a question-and-answer session, which I received like I would a consultation with patients. When there is generative disruption informed by care work which includes rest, the academy is altered so that it must hold the shared stories that lodge themselves in our bodies. I honour all those who in that moment rested in rest-less-ness and showed vulnerability.

The invitation to rest was taken on by students and honoured the following day when my panel moderator and I were asked to facilitate the closing session in place of Deans from MSU and Stellenbosch University. There was no space in the colonial-old Theology Faculty building (opened in 1859) that could hold what we had been carrying over the past week. We poured out of the building and into the garden to finally settle under the tallest and possibly oldest tree on campus, a monkey puzzle or pine tree. Here we greeted one another sitting in a circle that was held by the earth beneath us, resting into it with shoes off, leaning on bags and warm grass, eyes squinting at the sun, open or closed. We reflected on a week that had moved some deeply, left others with lingering, unresolved feelings, and yet others witnessing the seams of academia unsettlingly coming undone. To bring to a close a session mediated by ancestral spirits and led by two healers, we called on more than dialogue to move us beyond what the delegates had shared. We asked sister and poet Asali Ecclesiastes to the centre of the circle to evoke the liberatory spirit of spoken word. As she recited the gift that is Chasm (Ecclesiastes n.d.), what followed: a breaking, an opening, a release, a sigh salting our faces.

We left Stellenbosch with a deep knowing that the perpetuating binary between the romanticisation of Ubuntu and the disillusionment with the ongoing forms of harms against Black women and Black dignity will persist until we deeply listen to what Ubuntu entails from a space of stillness, silence, rest, and dreaming, to create what King, Navarro and Smith (2020) call “otherwise worlds”. We understood that nothing can be done with any success until we address this stirring feeling that dizzies us every time we are hurt or hear that someone who we relate to has been harmed.

Similarly, no story about the Ubuntu Dialogues conference can be initiated without acknowledging the context within which it was held, even if it was not the reason for us meeting. While being in sisterhood at the conference opened possibilities of naming, generatively disrupting, challenging, transitioning, and practising rest outside the walls of higher education, this is not something that was afforded the students of Stellenbosch at Huis Marais and Enedrag residence. And still, what holds true is that rest in rest-less-ness is the care practice at the turn of an Ubuntu that we reclaim as Ours. It is rest, as resistance to the drive towards linear resolutions and neoliberal scholarly productiveness that we insist upon. With this, we continue to ponder the value of Ubuntu.

Our Ubuntu, a decolonial feminist way of being in academia and community, has the names Unifier, Marita, Emilie, Asali, Greta, Janine, Precious, Ndiphile, and Khumo. It is also the space where all those names fold into each other, where the overlapping practices of Ubuntu demand we be responsible for a kind of healing that empowers justice. The kind of justice we are speaking of is one that allows us to infuse Ubuntu into private or individual practice and public or collective spaces. Imagination, that pours out through poetic lyricism, and which is a quality of life, is indicative of how far we have gone. Beyond imagination, we must enact Ubuntu to those who have been consistently placed on the margins. Our Ubuntu creatively and intentionally forges a discursive space where art, practice, and scholarship merge to perform restorative praxis that encourages and enables care as an ongoing process. It infuses intentionality into the inclusive practices of care that we demand higher education includes and grounds our action in joy.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Emilie Diouf

EMILIE DIOUF is an Assistant Professor of English, African American and African Studies, Women and Gender Studies at Brandeis University. Her research focuses on African women’s traumatic experiences of civil war and genocide to understand the gendered impact of violence and forced displacement within the often complex sociopolitical, cultural, and economic conditions that cause conflict. Through analysis of survivor testimonies and artistic representations of African women’s experiences of violence, forced displacement, and humanitarian intervention, Diouf has highlighted that women’s experiences of trauma are crucial to understanding and transforming socioeconomic and political crises on the African continent and the international community’s responses to them. She is also a feminist activist, particularly in her own context of Senegal, where she is part of a feminist collective. Email: [email protected]

Unifier Dyer

UNIFIER DYER is a certified healer-practitioner (Maine/IzaNgoma) from South Africa. They are a doctoral candidate in the Department of African Cultural Studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison research focused on the healer and healing in African and African Diasporic women’s postcolonial novels, biomythographies, and speculative fiction. They are a 2021–2022 Andrew Mellon Public Humanities Fellow with the Foundation for Black Women’s Wellness. Unifier is editor of Ubuntu and the Everyday (2019) and has published on women’s contribution to Ubuntu. Email: [email protected]

Asali Ecclesiastes

ASALI DEVAN ECCLESIASTES is a mother, daughter, educator, organiser, author, event producer, performance artist, and community servant. Most know her by her many pursuits, but the way this writer knows herself and the world around her, is through her exploration of the word. Embedded in the cultural soil of New Orleans and watered by the writings of her literary idols, Kalamu ya Salaam, Sonia Sanchez, and Toni Morrison, Asali has grown to bask in the sun of her literary heritage – from the sages who transformed pharaoh to God in Ancient Khemet to the Spy Boys who chant the way clear for Big Chiefs on Carnival Day. She brings her deep roots in New Orleans’ indigenous culture to her work as the new Executive Director of Efforts of Grace and Ashé Cultural Arts Center. Email: [email protected]

Marita Gilbert

MARITA GILBERT is the Associate Dean of Diversity & Campus Inclusion of the College of Osteopathic Medicine at Michigan State University. Gilbert has dedicated her life to advocacy for the most marginalised and vulnerable populations through leadership, scholarship, and practice. She oversees diversity efforts across campuses and works directly with the Dean over areas of college climate, including faculty mentoring in the areas of equity and inclusion leading, oversight of elections for college and university committees, advising the College Reappointment, Promotion and Tenure process, developing cohesive and visible community partnerships and engaging in local outreach efforts. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 This is our translation of the maxim. For other translations see Schutte (2001).

2 We capitalise Our Ubuntu here in the context of our embodied experiences as Black women/womxn scholars, practitioners, artists, healers at a higher education conference that necessitates reclaiming space, voice, praxis, and knowledge generation in a way that acknowledges it holistically.

3 This colloquialism speaks to dominant, Eurocentric knowledge, epistemology, and frameworks. Despite our familiarity with this phrase, Ubuntu problematises the idea of disciplinary and professional canons that prioritise the written word, published in academic texts mostly accessible to intellectual elites as the sole site of knowledge. Further, this concept of ‘the literature’ renders ways of knowing that result from oral and aural traditions, like those found in Diasporically Black communities, illegible.

4 An Nguni word for person/human recognised as such by and in their community.

5 Several months earlier, on 15 May 2022, a different student urinated on a fellow Black student’s books and laptop. This racism by white student Theuns du Toit who urinated on Babalo Ndwayana's property in Huis Marais residence, led to Du Toit's expulsion on 21 July 2022, after he was found in violation of the disciplinary code for students.

6 Couching a racially motivated and misogynistic attack as an “incident” overlooks how racism is part of an institutional culture that is dependent on the subjugation and dehumanisation and humiliation of Black bodies. See Ahmed (2012).

7 Isintu is Nguni for that which emerges from the knowledge of being situated in custom, culture, ritual, ceremony, aesthetics, language, and philosophy of abantu.

8 An Nguni term for a personal ancestral guide, in this case one who was a healer in their lifetime.