chapter two

Frames of Ubuntu:
(Re)Framing an Ethical
Education
dalene swanson

This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, whose radical hope and
particular frame and embodiment of Ubuntu are his legacy to the world.

introduc tion: a history of violence

In 2009, South Africa, a nation of democratic post-apartheid natality (Arendt,
1958), still clinging to a fragile afterbirth of national reconciliation, saw a conflagration of xenophobia directed at African foreignersmigrants and refugeesto this
country. Despite Thabo Mbekis earlier attempts at catalyzing pan-Africanist unity
in the form of an African Renaissance (see Diop, 2000), colonially invested divisions
on the basis of nationalities and language difference, if not specifically race on this
occasion, became flash points for brutalization against a constructed Other. In the
mournful wake of this xenophobic violence that saw tens of people burnt alive, while
hundreds more were hacked and maimed with pangas, the question of what it meant
to be (South) African, to belong to a brotherhood or sisterhood that transcended
race, difference, and otherness, was brought urgently and brutally into question.
Attacked because they were considered foreign, migrants and refugees from conflicts
and war in Zimbabwe, Congo, Ethiopia, and Somalia, the South African utopia set
up by the new democratic post-apartheid dispensation, based on a moral fundamental of inclusiveness, collapsed in a cloud of dissenting smoke from fires of fury and
frustration. The nation-building project of Mandela and Tutu that underwrote an
indigenous philosophy of Ubuntu (see Swanson, 2007) and humanity to heal the

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wounds of the past, to forgive, and celebrate the rainbow nation as an act of reconciliation, forgiveness, and peace, split its prisms of light and hope to lay shattered in
despair and horror.
In August 2012, police shot and killed in cold blood 43 miners who were
protesting against low wages, as well as working and living conditions at the
Marikana Platinum Mine in South Africa. The incident was a regression to the
state-sanctioned violence of the repressive apartheid regime of the past. Such was
the outcry to the police response nationally and internationally, that it remains a
potent symbol of political abhorrence and an event around which those opposed
to the ruling party or at least opposed to those who hold sway in it may mobilize. Marikana also symbolized for many what is widely believed to be the ruling
African National Congresss (ANCs) economic and political abandonment of the
South African democracy project for which so many had so sacrificially fought,
in favour of nepotism, conspicuous consumption on the part of the ruling elite,
neotribalism, oligarchism, lack of will to address the dire conditions of mass poverty of the underclasses, and a fundamental failure to embody the democratic and
humanistic values espoused by former President Mandela and his partys founding fathers and mothers. The ideologico-religious paradigm of authoritarianism and brutality that marked the previous apartheid regimes strategies of war
against its Black underclass, hauntingly and ferociously rebirthed from beneath
the protective veil of constitutional reform and sociopolitical transformation.
In parallel to these incidences, the ruling political elite have attempted to
put in place the Protection of State Information Bill, a proposed act that has
now been forced through the South African parliament using the governments
majority. The bill, which has been the subject of extensive civil society protest,
will effectively sanction state censorship and severely restrict the flow of information in the public domain. The bill is another regressive step back to the harsh
sanctions imposed on the media by the former apartheid regime and a significant
blow to civil rights in South Africa. The bill will have the effect of muzzling the
local media and any whistleblowers attempts at exposing corruption, government
mis-expenditure, or fraud, and will open up the legal possibility of punishing
those that would bear the ethical courage for such an expos with prison terms
of up to 15 years or more. Heralded in by the act of legalizing the secrecy bill,
the vaunted progressive democratic constitution of the new South Africa would
become, in effect, vulnerable to being severely undermined and its lofty principles
of an open, equal, and transparent society eroded. All this comes only 19 years
after South Africas first democratic elections for whose realization so many shed
their blood and surrendered their freedoms.
This essay seeks to address this recent history in light of questions about
what it might mean to educate students in the new South Africa toward their
vulnerabilities, the nations wounds, the hope of transcendence against despair,

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and to foster possibility beneath and beyond historical legacies of violence of

so many forms. In the new neoliberal globalizing spread that overlays new,
higher, and school-based education curricula and dispensations, the violences
of injustice, inequality, and past history mutate into both material and symbolic
violences that, I argue, perpetuate structures and mentalities of the past. The
question thus evoked is this: How do we take hold of these vulnerabilities
to think deeply, mournfully, and human(e)ly, with an authentic Ubuntu, to
capture and sustain imaginative possibilities of radical and rhizomatic hope for
the future?
arendt and butler: on violence
Andre Venter (2006) speaks of an African Renaissance as requiring a radical
change in the systems of thinking that would provide imaginative alternatives
beyond limit-experiences. These limit-experiences are exemplified in how Africans
might define themselves in response to how they are dominantly defined in the
social sphere as determined by the inferiorities, oppressions, essentialisms, deficits,
and human and spiritual disinvestments (de)structured by historical colonialism
of their continent. Such subaltern-reproducing systems of deficit thinking accord
with a governmentality (Burchell, Gordon, & Miller, 1991) that is informed by the
destructive power of colonization and its discontents. To perform the thinking of
an African Renaissance of renewal and hope is the niggling question that lies in
the shadow of utopianisms. But to think beyond the limits of limit-experience and
to understand the metacognitive discursive of how the system of thinking thinks
and is operationalized through discursive practices and embodiments would be to
understand the effects of the structuring of that thinking as a violence on possibilities. The self-defeatism enables and is enabled through self-defeatism. It draws
the net of possibility and of thinking alternatives into being ever tighter. It acts
as symbolic violence (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992) on possibility and the hope
of possibility itself. The proximity and concomitant relationship between material
and psycho-social violence, and the discursive and performative acts of symbolic
violence, are at the nexus of understanding the same effects on the possibilities and
enactments of hope.
Hannah Arendt (1970), in defining notions of strength, power, and authority
as distinct from violence, draws a correlation between the diminishment of power
and the increase in violence. For Arendt, strength is not increased through violence, but violence is a mark of a turn in the strength of a power base or authority.
While not denouncing violence entirely, Arendt highlights the ethical dilemma of
the possibility of violence overwhelming the end of a cause that claims to justify
it. In this regard, she avers:

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Violence, being instrumental by nature, is rational to the extent that it is effective in reaching the end that must justify it. And since when we act we never know with any certainty
the eventual consequences of what we are doing, violence can remain rational only if it
pursues short-term goals. Violence does not promote causes, neither history nor revolution,
neither progress nor reaction; but it can serve to dramatize grievances and bring them to
public attention . And indeed, violence, contrary to what its prophets try to tell us, is
more the weapon of reform than of revolution . No doubt, violence pays, but the trouble is that it pays indiscriminately . (p. 79)

The incontrollable and indiscriminate nature of violence testifies to the injustices

that are cemented or burgeoned by such violence, begetting further violence and
normalizing such violence within contexts of their (re)production while silting it
within associated social institutions and practices. For Arendt, violence in itself
cannot enable and should not stand for or be confused with strength.
Moreover, the danger of violence, even if it moves consciously within a non-extremist framework of short-term goals, will always be that the means overwhelm the end. If goals are not
achieved rapidly, the result will be not merely defeat but the introduction of the practice of
violence into the whole body politic. Action is irreversible, and a return to the status quo in
case of defeat is always unlikely. The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world,
but the most probable change is to a more violent world. (pp. 7980)

The evidence of a more violent world is nowhere more visible than in the
imperialist assaults on the Middle East and Pakistan by the military industrial
complex of the United States of America. Rather than achieve or maintain a
moral high ground in the cause of the violent action to eliminate a perceived
threat or evil, the ongoing violence that is perpetuated and sustained, if not
burgeoned, always overwhelms the end. This violence settles within institutional
structures that then rhetoricalize the need for the violence in order to normalize
its existence, rationally and psycho-socially, within domestic structures and the
quotidian. The effect, while discursively sustained, becomes insidious so that its
practices are rendered invisible and rationality opaque.
This cyclical effect is never more evident than in the newly neoliberalized
world order that has normalized violence and invasive surveillance in the name
of national security. This violence is not only directed outwardly to the nation
state but circulates internally as well. In the United States, one example of the
manifestation of this effect is the attitude on guns by rightwing lobby groups via a
stoical belief in absolute individualism. Here, military assault weapons are justified
by the NRA (National Rifle Association) in the name of individual human rights
and the right to self-defense, thereby maintaining and normalizing violence in
domestic institutions of the American home and public spaces of everyday life.
Thus, the symbolic violence of an aggressive and authoritarian neoliberal
economic and social order is realized materially. Neoliberal policies and practices

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ineffectualize public capacity for collective action that fosters democratic possibilities, and theseas forms of symbolic violencework concomitantly with psychosocial and material violence present in the world and in our institutions. The
symbolic violence of discrimination, greed, authoritarianism, poverty, inequality,
difference, self-interested opportunism, and other forms of global injustice accords
with the existence of material violence among individuals, groups, institutions, and
nations, whether it be domestic gender violence, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty
Organization), or United Nations decrees of military force or trade embargoes and
sanctions against a nation state or military imperialism of one nation or ethnic
group against another. Forms of symbolic violence root in places where public
action and the possibility of public action to renew the world in Arendts sense
(1970) are weakened and diminished. In this sense, Patrick Hayden (2009) recruits
the work of Arendt to aver that the symbolic violence of neoliberalism in our
globalizing world acts asin Arendts termsa political evil. He notes:
Even as globalization shapes the horizon of current political thought and action, it does so at
the risk of drawing that horizon ever tighter; it is less certain that the concept of globalization continues to express transformative potentials rather than functioning as a token of the
very effacement of the political. Globalization has become not only the political foundation
of the present, but also the suspect guardian of the future of the political itself . I argue
that neoliberal economic globalization is a form of political evil. (p. 92)

The main contemporary effect of the social in the guise of neoliberal globalization
is to naturalize all political-economic relations and thereby normalize the appearance of private interests in the public realm. The political evil of neoliberalism is to
depoliticize human affairs, and as such, render the worldly spaces between people
apolitical and devoid of care (Hayden, 2009, p. 93). Consequently, the socioeconomic pragmatic inevitability that is produced by all-pervasive neoliberalism as
a form of realpolitik of the current, renders the politicalin the form of grassroots
political actionsuperfluous (Swanson, 2012a).
Just as neoliberalism in its global effect normalizes some of the severe widespread wrongs within the global political-economic ordernamely extreme
global poverty and statelessness as forms of political evil in the Arendtian sense
(Hayden, 2009, p. 92), so these effects manifest in individuals and groups lives
as an experience of precarity. In effect, precarity is the subjectivity structured in
relation to the neoliberal state or institution whereby the individual or group is
positioned subordinately, is vulnerized, marginalized, and dehumanized by neoliberal state ideology intersubjectively in, and in relation to, its specific geo-political
contexts. Concomitantly, these individuals are disafforded opportunities for selfactualization, well-being, and personal and social freedom. Thus, the precarity of
their lives is a symbolic violence that is realized in material oppressions and normalized inequality. The capitalist state shifts the burden of responsibility onto the

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citizen while employees, in an ever burgeoning private-interested sector, shoulder

the risk of corporations withdrawing their benefits and contractual guarantees. This
neoliberal governmentality renders the ideal citizen as self-sufficient and independent of state support, and any individual or disenfranchised group requiring
support as a drain and irresponsible. The ongoing Euro crisis is a good example
of how the failures of the capitalist economic system globally have manifested in
the increased precarity of citizens in indebted European states (also derogatorily
referred to as The Pigs), who have been ostracized as pariahs and made to bear the
burden of widespread neoliberal economic austerity.
In this very sense, the global financial crisis since 2008 and the too big to fail
phenomenon of the international banking system that sought national federal/
government interventions to attempt to prevent a global depression, was foreshadowed by Arendts (1958) words written with respect to the superpowers of
the Cold War:
Bigness is afflicted with vulnerability; cracks in the power structure of all but the small
countries are opening and widening. And while no one can say with assurance where and
when the breaking point has been reached, we can observe, almost measure, how strength
and resiliency are insidiously destroyed, leaking, as it were, drop by drop from our institutions. (p. 84)

This notion of leaking acts as a strong metaphor for the enclosing of the public
space for resistance against oppressions in the new globalized neoliberal era and
the diminishment of democratic possibilities. The leaking, as it were, drop by
drop from our institutions harkens a troubling trend of increasing managerialism
and authoritarianism in our institutions, and in this case, the higher education
sector is not exempt. Peters (2007) highlights this in the following words:
Neoliberal universities, with little self-reflection, have been harnessed in service to the new
economy under conditions of knowledge capitalism that raises issues of intellectual capital,
the ownership of the means of production, and depends upon the encouragement of all
forms of capitalization of the self. (p. 7)

Its presence in South African higher education is evident in the number and
absolute influence of management agencies that have been struck post-1994 and are
designed to control it. After the first democratic elections, bodies such as HEQF
(Higher Education Qualifications Framework) and SAQA (South African Qualifications Association) were instituted in synchrony with the forward thrust of the
New Knowledge Economy in the South African industrial sector. At the same time,
academic labour became subsumed within the corporate and industrial economy of
the state and its economic interests. It is ironic that at the very moment that political possibilities were opened up post-apartheid for this emerging democracy, institutionally and educationally these possibilities became drastically reduced through

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the advent of neoliberal managerialist institutionalism. Impositional pedagogies and

practices closed the intellectual spaces and suppressed the latitude academics had
been previously afforded. Because of the critical importance of a robust intellectualism, such developments, it can be argued, are a threat to the vitality of democracy
within these higher education institutions, but also, concomitantly, to the nation
state itself. In its threat to a robust public intellectual sphere, it can be argued that it
serves as an Arendtian political evil and a violence against democracy itself.
And, so I look to the work of Butler (2009) in her understanding of these
impositional pedagogies and practices that this mentality, the authoritarian paradigm within which these practices of symbolic violence are operationalized, can be
understood as frames of war. She alerts us in the following words:
In the same way that Althusser once argued that there can be different modalities of materiality, there can surely be, different modalities of violence and of the material instrumentalities
of violence. How do we understand the frame as itself part of the materiality of war and the
efficacy of its violence? The frame does not simply exhibit reality, but actively participates
in a strategy of containment, selectively producing and enforcing what will count as reality. It
tries to do this, and its efforts are a powerful wager this means the frame is always throwing something away, always keeping something out, always de-realizing and de-legitimating
alternative versions of reality, discarded negatives of the official version. (p. xiii)

This de-legitimating is a dehumanizing frame of war, which then begs the question,
as Butler notes in reflecting on the precariousness of life, when is life grievable?
The dispensing act questions the loss by asking this: Can this life only be made
valuable in a form of death, of a dispensing of life, or never at all?
For Butler (2010), the frame depends upon successful conscription of the public. Our responsibility to resist war depends in part on how well we resist that daily
effort at conscription (p. xiv). And herein lies the nub: What alternate frame may
be possible that may serve as a means of strength to resist that conscription? How
do we make the frame of war visible in order to name it and articulate a frame of
resistance? What dispositions and sensibilities would be required? What needs cultivation toward capacity for resistance and whose ethical responsibility is this? What
should/might be imagined? What might be initiated to stop the leak of resiliency
from our institutions? How might we reverse the tide of a violent worldview and
instantiate a robust democracy? How might we work together with conviction and
courage to pry open the possibilities of a resilient public sphere? What initiators are
necessary to exact this movement in the form of courageous human action?
frames of ubuntu
One of the effects of neoliberal economic globalization and the various forms
of symbolic violence it produces has been to undermine indigenous thought,

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epistemology, and ways of being in various local contexts of the worlds ecosystems. Yet, while resistance has always been there, there has been an upsurge of
collective resistance by indigenous peoples recently, the latest of which can be
witnessed through the Idle No More movement in Canada. Arguably, much can
be offered by indigenous peoples ways of hereditary knowing derived from their
ancient history that might offer possibilities for resisting the political evils of
neoliberal globalization and associated violences and injustices. This is not to
appropriate indigenous thought with the purpose of commodification into the
existing order but rather working in respectful communion with indigenous peoples to assist in mutualism in trying to solve the pressing issues of our time that
affect us all. This would include, at the core, the fundamental ethical attention to
the injustices that render indigenous thought and peoples marginal or obsolete.
In other words, the nature of the relationship is crucial and would necessitate a
reflexivity and thoughtfulness of engagement that commit to what I have previously referred to as a humble togetherness (Swanson, 2007).
In this endeavour, I offer an entree into the indigenous thought and way of
being, Ubuntu, an African epistemology from Sub-Saharan Africa. Similarly to
many other forms of indigenous thought, I assert that Ubuntu offers an important
contribution to resisting the frames of war encountered in our global economic
and political condition, and, instead, to offering frames of peace and justice via the
collective human embrace of frames of Ubuntu.

Ubuntu
Ubuntu is short for an isiXhosa proverb in Southern Africa. It comes from Umuntu
ngumuntu ngabantu: a person is a person through his or her relationship to others.
Ubuntu is recognized as the African philosophy of humanism, linking the individual to the collective through brotherhood or sisterhood. It makes a fundamental contribution to indigenous ways of knowing and being. With differing
historical emphasis and (re)contextualization over time and place, it is considered
a spiritual way of being in the broader sociopolitical context of Southern Africa.
This approach is not only an expression of a spiritual philosophy in its theological
and theoretical sense but as an expression of daily living, that is, a way of knowing
that fosters a journey toward becoming human (Vanier, 1998) or which renders
us human (Tutu, 1999), or, in its collectivist sense, a greater humanity that transcends alterity of any form (Swanson, 2007, 2012b).
Desmond Tutu (1999) describes the African worldview of Ubuntu as the
very essence of being human:
It is not, I think therefore I am. It says rather: I am human because I belong. I participate,
I share. A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does

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not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she belongs in a greater whole
and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or
oppressed, or treated as if they were less than who they are. (p. 31)

I now introduce a narrative abbreviated and excerpted from Swanson (2009) that
offers an example of Ubuntu as part of my own lived experience. While living
in Canada and on a visit back to South Africa, it narrates an experience of lived
Ubuntu in my return to a school as one of the sites of my research there. The
narrative sets the scene for engaging with the worldview of Ubuntu and in understanding its contribution to frames of peace and global justice. It offers a way of
spiritual being in the world that resonates with the radical hope that Lear (2006)
attests to as being more than mere optimism but a collective embrace of courage
and commitment to the active hope of democratic possibilities.

In the Spirit of Joseph

I had been very excited to revisit one of the schools in which I had engaged in my
research (Swanson, 2004) years ago and in which I had dreamed, wished, aimed to
go back and give back for so long now. Even a quick visit would suffice, at least for
now! And here I was, finally standing in front of the main entrance of the school,
and it was empty! The whole school was steeped in the silence of absence. The
thoughts of what I had wanted to say when I greeted the principal again, who I
had admired so much, and the teachers and the people and the humanity within
the community herein, were now lying as splintered shards of discarded possibility
on the ground, and the fragments disintegrated and seeped into the red dust like
playful demons of failed intent.
There was a nationwide public sector strike on. I knew that many schools had
closed their doors in sympathy and in safety to their community. Now, I was in the
country for only10 days before I had to move on and return to Canada. I had hoped
beyond hope that there would at least be some staff present that I had known before
in the school, characters that I had written into my narratives. Even if the school
were closed for classes, perhaps they would still be there bustling about.
Goeie middag, mevrou! Kan ek mevrou miskien help met iets?1 I turn
to look at him perplexed. I had not seen him appearing from the wings into the
vision of this scene of absent presence. He is wearing the blue overalls that designate
workmen and women in South Africa, but in contradiction to this class referent,
he is carrying a black leather report folder under his arm. His face is wrinkled from
years of sunburn and his hair shows hints of grey. He smiles, turning his head to
one side deferentially, and I see his mixed-race heritage with the signs of Khoi-San
descent in his facial structure. I extend my hand to shake his, and I reply to his greeting: Goeie middage, meneer! Ek wou kom kuier. Ek was lank gelede hier.2

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He nods his head as I explain that a few years back I had come home from
Canada to engage in my doctoral research in this school (Swanson, 2004). He
sees the resignation in my face and responds sympathetically, with an ag, shame,
mevrou.3 I tell him that I had come back for a conference and a quick visit to
South Africa and had hoped to visit the school, the principal, and teachers that I
had befriended here before.
It is then that he began to share his story. At first I was still caught up with
my own disappointment, but I soon realized that I was being given something very
precious. My senses initiated a shift of consciousness that opened me to humbly
receiving what was to be one of the most sacred gifts of humanity, the sharing
of an important narrative, the telling of a precious life story, full of reverberating
meanings and wisdoms that the telling entailed.
I am Joseph Hendriks, that same Joseph Hendriks that was in all the newspapers. I am the one, he says with a hint of pride, and realizing that I probably
have no idea of what he is talking about as I would not have had access to local
provincial papers in Canada, he continues:
I am the caretaker at this school, but on Sundays I am the community pastor. Over the
last few years I have become increasingly involved with the school, because I am concerned
about our youth here. I pray for them on Sundays and I try to take care of them during the
week. It is because of our youth that it happened. They tried to get rid of me because I was
speaking up for our youth.

I look perplexed and he continued his narration carefully and slowly, undeterred:
You see, the skollies4 and the drug dealers, they are damaging our youth, corrupting them
and ruining their lives before they have a chance for anything in life, and I was trying to
stop them. They come here because our community is poor and our kids are so vulnerable.
There are no prospects for them because there is no fish in the harbour. No fish! Where
have all the fishes gone? They have been plundered, the big boats come from elsewhere, and
the fishermen have ransacked the seas, so there are no fish. They did not stop until the fish
were all gone. And as you know, this is a fishing village that has grown around this harbour.
It has been our way of life for many, many decades.

He continued, meticulous in his explanation:

So the fathers of the kids, they have no work. There is terribly high unemployment and the
fathers just lie about and drink. So the kids get neglected. And then we have other social problems here, the violence with the gangs, and domestic violence and rape . The kids have no
prospects, so they get involved with drugs. And for the drug dealers, this is easy money because
there are so many kids they can get their hands on. So our community suffers and we cant get
out of this vicious cycle. We are dependent on the fish. The fish is our hope and there is no fish.
That is why they plotted to get me, those skollie drug-dealers, because I tried to stop them
and I kept on telling the police. So they tricked me. One day, I was driving in my old car

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and at the stop street, a car pulls up next to me and a youngster turns down the window
and asks me, if I am the pastor, and I say yes, and he says he has good, cheap parts for
my car and I must follow him and he will take me to the place where I can get the parts
cheap-cheap. I followed him because I thought they were being kind to me because I was
the pastor and next thing I am on a lonely road towards one of the beaches here and the
youngster stops the car. As he does so, three men jump into my car and hold a gun at my
head and tell me to drive. They tell me where to go and the next thing we are driving
towards The Strand.5 They hold the gun below the level of the window and tell me not
to try any tricks. I try to flick my lights and drive onto the wrong side of the road to get
the attention of passing cars, but they threaten me that they will kill me if I try that
again . Then at a place that is very remote they make me stop along the road and they
force me out of the car and shove me in the boot,6 and then they drive again, and I know
they are driving towards The Strand.

He paused again and I imagined his flood of memories, his own fear, the difficulty
of reliving it:
I prayed. I cannot tell you how much I prayed in the boot of my car, because I knew what
they were going to do with me. And you know, The Lord was with me because I decided
to flip the boot open, but I just happened to do it at exactly the time when the car came to
a stop at an intersection, and because of that, I managed to jump out and I ran and I ran as
fast as I could. They tried to come after me and they were shouting and shooting but they
did not get me, and I managed to get away. I kept on running until I eventually got to a
roadside store. I went in there and the people helped me phone the police and they came
right away. They sent out a squad to look for the skollies but they could not find them, and
they took me home and made sure I was safe with my family. It was a terrible thing and the
whole community was badly shocked. Everyone was in fear, but they were very supportive
and ready to protect me.

I tried to take in the full horror of his story and imagine his situation. I commented
about how sorry I was. The story was shocking! He continued:
I realized that this was not the way. I could not keep on living like that in fear and that
I wasnt helping anyone. So I changed my approach. I started to get out into the community again. I spoke up for our youth in church again. And I realized that working against
the drug-dealers like that wasnt the right way. It wasnt going to work. So I actually
approached them. I arranged to meet with them and I invited them to talk with me.
I showed them I wasnt afraid and that I had changed my approach. And many of them
agreed to speak with me, and slowly I befriended them and asked them, please, look
what you are doing to our youth! You are destroying these young peoples lives. This is
not right! And I appealed to them to please change their ways, and some of them came
over to the right side, and they stopped their drug dealings with the youth here. Some of
them even came to our church. So now I am back in the community and I continue to
help our youth. Recently we started a job training centre for the unemployed youth here
to try to find them other work because there is no fish. I am praying it will help a lot.
I pray for our youth every day.

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It is often difficult to grasp the full impact of a narration and to understand what has
been given, the preciousness of the gift. From disappointment, I was given an unexpected gift of learning. He had given me so many gifts of wisdom, the meanings from
this tale and from its telling unfold in layers and across time and offer moments of
insight and sagacity in each pondering and remembering, in each epiphany it evoked,
and in each recasting of the narration in my mind and spiritual communion with it.
This Joseph, like his biblical counterpart, forgives his brothers that sell him
off. He, like his counterpart, wears a coat of many colours, but he has given this as
a gift of himself to his community and through the telling of his story. The interrelated lessons of this tale are many and each holds importance and position in how
we engage with our lives, of its purpose, of education, of approaches to community
engagement and research, of society, ideology, justice, and our earth. It gives us
more than any of this. It gives us hope.
One of the foremost lessons I gained from Josephs story and which, for me, is
manifest in daily other revelations, is the understanding of how social justice cannot
be slathered off from the larger ecological concerns that impact issues of poverty,
opportunity, and cultural epistemic access and affirmation. They work together as
a whole, and like other binaries of Western thought, their separation is ideologically problematic. The particular and the universal, the local and the global, require
being understood as multi-articulate, reciprocal, concomitant, and intermeshed. The
subjugation of people, their way of life, their knowledge systems and wisdoms, their
socioeconomic, political, and cultural aspirations, are part of a broader global historical discourse of subjugation that marks the land and people in localized ways
through geographies of difference, and it enacts its violence across time and space.
Where are all the fishes gone?7 Joseph asks, delineating the relationship among the
devastation of the seas, the denial of a communitys livelihood and historical way of
life, and the drug addiction and despair suffered by the youth of this community.
Just as holism and a larger vision of humanity and ecology as being everinterrelated8 is nurtured back into life through Josephs story, so the appreciation
of that which Joseph was expressing in his actions of care, compassion, forgiveness,
and an expansive inclusivity, was, in fact, Ubuntu! It was (with) Ubuntu that he
gave back to his community and cared for its youth. He modeled Ubuntu for these
youth. It was with Ubuntu that he shared his story with me, and he gave Ubuntu
in its telling and in the lessons I received from the giving. Josephs story was the
spiritual gift of Ubuntu.

frames of peace
Ubuntu offers a contribution to an ethic of engagement with the Other. It provides a lens that helps foreground existing positions of dominance and deficit in

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discourses in ways that open up opportunities for resisting them. It offers a frame
of engaging with the other respectfully and with the world courageously as a form
of committed and lived hope. It offers the possibility of dialogue about the nature of
transformation and transcendence beyond personal, political paradoxes informed
by neoliberalism and neocolonialism. It creates a rootedness with the daily, local,
and lived. A disposition of Ubuntu facilitates the exploration of less objectifying
ways of being in the world, through the inclusion of the self and the self s role in
achieving humble togetherness with the Other. It offers hope of engendering pedagogies of possibility away from dichotomous discourses and forms of inequality and
injustice. By confronting our colonizing ways of seeing, a transcendent spirituality
may be found through humble togetherness. Ubuntu, therefore, contributes to
decolonizing hegemonic meanings, heralding the opportunity for renewal and personal transformation and thus the possibility of human action to renew the world
(Arendt, 1970). It offers guidance in terms of our responsibilities and obligations to
egalitarianism and human dignity. It affords a way of knowing that helps us learn
to become human.
In so doing, it offers an alternate frame of reference for dealing with the
multitude of economic, political, and ecological crises devastating the vulnerable,
marginalized, and the precariat, both human and nonhuman. It offers possibilities for resistance to the various forms of symbolic violence globally that manifest
in a multitude of material and psycho-social violence on a global scale. It offers
democratic hope against political evil such as ideological violence in the form of
neoliberal economic globalization and militarization, and it does so with a heartfulness and collective spirituality that heralds the radical hope for global peace.
endnotes
1. Afrikaans for Good Afternoon, (Mrs.) Maam. Can I perhaps help you (madam) with something? [This is the polite way of addressing a stranger. The use of you would be considered
impolite.] Many of the mixed-race communities in the Cape Province of South Africa speak a
dialect of Afrikaans as their mother tongue.
2. Afrikaans for Good Afternoon, (Mr.) Sir. I wanted to come and visit. I was here a long time
ago.
3. Oh, what a shame, Maam: The Anglicization of Afrikaans is commonplace in these communities, so that a mix of English and Afrikaans in the same sentence is often heard.
4. Skollie: from the Afrikaans, a common street criminal; someone up to no good; a deviant person.
5. The Strand: A remote stretch of beach with white ancient-marine sand, where many murders of
this nature have taken place over the years. The beach has a reputation for this. Strand means
beach in Afrikaans.
6. Boot: South African and British English for trunk of a car.
7. Where have all the fishes gone? acts as a double entendre in particular reference to the famous
song, Where have all the flowers gone? Like the original antiwar folk song written by Pete

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fr ames of ubuntu

Seeger and Joe Hickerson, it reminds us of the lyrics in the chorus, specifically the line that asks,
Oh, when will they ever learn? In respect of the global responsibility of environmental devastation suffered within local communities, reinforcing oppressive social and political relationships
within and between them, perhaps we also need to ask, when will they ever learn? or more
inclusively of the global community, when will we ever learn?
8. It is a web of glocal interrelations; an ever-interdependent global mesh of influence and effect
that impacts local communities.

references
Arendt, H. (1958). The human condition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Arendt, H. (1970). On violence. San Diego, CA: Harvest Books.
Bourdieu, P., & Wacquant, L. J. D. (1992). An invitation to reflexive sociology. Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press.
Burchell, G., Gordon C., & Miller, P. (1991). The Foucault effect. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Butler, J. (2009). Frames of war. When is life grievable? London, UK: Verso.
Diop, C. A. (2000). Towards the African renaissance: Essays in African culture and development. Trenton,
NJ: Red Sea Press.
Hayden, P. (2009). Political evil in a global age: Hannah Arendt and international theory. London: Routledge.
Lear, J. (2006). Radical hope: Ethics in the face of cultural devastation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Peters, M. (2007). Knowledge economy, development and the future of higher education. Rotterdam, the
Netherlands: Sense Publishers.
Swanson, D. M. (2004). Voices in the silence: Narratives of disadvantage, social context and school
mathematics in postapartheid South Africa (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University
of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. Retrieved from https://circle.ubc.ca/bitstream/
id/57579/ubc_2005-995593.pdf
Swanson, D. M. (2007). Ubuntu: An African contribution to (re)search for/with a humble togetherness [University of Alberta, Special Edition on African Worldviews]. The Journal of Contemporary Issues in Education, 2(2), 5367. Retrieved from http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.
php/JCIE/issue/view/56
Swanson, D. M. (2009, August). Where have all the fishes gone?: Living Ubuntu as an ethics of
research and pedagogical engagement. In. D. Caracciolo & A. Mungai (Eds.), In the spirit of
Ubuntu: Stories of teaching and research (pp. 321). Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Sense Publishers.
Swanson, D. M. (2012a). The owl spreads its wings: Global and international education within the
local from critical perspectives. In Y. Hbert & A. Abdi (Eds.), Critical perspectives on international
education (pp. 333348). Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Sense Publishers.
Swanson, D. M (2012b). Ubuntu, African epistemology and development: Contributions, tensions,
contradictions and possibilities. In H. K Wright & A.A. Abdi (Eds.), The dialectics of African
education and western discourses: Appropriation, ambivalence and alternatives (pp. 2752). New York,
NY: Peter Lang.
Tutu, D. (1999). No future without forgiveness. New York, NY: Doubleday.
Vanier, J. (1998). Becoming human. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Anansi (CBC).
Venter, A. (2006). I Ching for the African renaissance. Johannesburg, South Africa: Nomadic
Exploration Press.

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Questions for Further Conversation

In Swansons terms, radical hope is integral to seeing the person as a human being who is
embedded in webs of regard and responsibility with and for others. How is such a view integral
to questions of curriculum and pedagogy?
In her discussion of a worldview suggested by the term Ubuntu, Swanson argues that social
justice cannot be ignored from ecological concerns that impact issues of poverty, opportunity and
building possibilities for understanding. She contrasts what in Butlers term is a frame of war
with Ubuntu; Ubuntu, as an ethical construal of relationships, requires a deep regard for the
person within his or her local situations. How does this help to conceptualize and realize a frame
of peace and a possible aspect of students experiences in school?
What possibilities does Swanson point to for peace education as both a resistance to violence
experienced as precarity to building alternative possibilities, as she asks, How might we work
together with conviction and courage to prize open the possibilities of a resilient public sphere?
What initiators are necessary to exact this movement in the form of courageous human action?