Page 211 - A People Called Afrika

Ubuntu

fulness and an awareness of their own personal responsibility
throughout their life’s journey. They know, from a day-to-day
and moment-by-moment outlook, what it means to choose
what’s best in business, leadership, parenting, teaching, farm-
ing, cooking, dressing, speaking and relating because their de-
sire is that the other person and the entire community would
thrive because of them. Ubuntu encapsulates “do unto others
as you would have them do unto you” and “love thy neighbor
as thyself” and makes it tangible as a set of lifestyle choices.
Hypocrites do not make changes, they like unending debates

We have become too professionalism conscious, too technol-
ogy conscious, too white man’s way-of-life conscious, too an-
ti-Christianity conscious, too self-hating in our ways, such that
we have lost our Afrikan simplicity and humanity. No Afrikan
needs a degree in the white man’s university in order to treat
others with love, kindness and compassion. No Afrikan needs
to be ‘brain-washed’ by the ‘white man’s Christianity’ to live a
life of goodness, empathy and brotherliness. We do not need
to shame the so-called white man’s religion in order to make
ours look more appealing. That would be nothing but living
in denial about the fact that we have been irresponsible with
what we were given from time immemorial by our ancestors.

We must restore Ubuntu, it is our Afrikan heritage.

Therefore, if there is anything to be freed from first, it is to
be freed from the mindset, which says that we can talk about
how Christianity “damaged” our Afrikan way of life, cul-
ture, tradition etc. and not talk about how we are not even
trying to live the Ubuntu way of life, which we inherited
from our forefathers. We can’t keep fighting to regain our

186