Ubuntu is one of the most frequently invoked concepts in contemporary South African discourse. Politicians use it in speeches. Corporations embed it in mission statements. Design thinking workshops reference it as a framework for empathy. And yet, for all its visibility, Ubuntu remains remarkably underexplored as an operational methodology — a way of actually doing research, making creative work, and building institutions.
This article asks what happens when we move Ubuntu from philosophy to practice. Not as a branding exercise, but as a genuine restructuring of how knowledge is produced, shared, and owned.
What Ubuntu Actually Means
The isiZulu/isiXhosa expression “umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu” — a person is a person through other people — is the most commonly cited articulation of Ubuntu. But this translation, while true, only scratches the surface. Ubuntu is not merely a statement about empathy or social connection. It is an ontological claim: that the self is constituted through relationships, that individuality is an abstraction, and that human flourishing is inherently collective.
“Ubuntu sits deeper than empathy. It is a claim about the nature of reality itself — that existence is relational.”
This distinction is worth sitting with. When Ubuntu is treated as a shorthand for empathy, it slots neatly into existing frameworks — a design principle, a corporate value, a feel-good slogan. But when you look at it as an ontological position — a different account of what it means to exist — you start to see why it calls for different structures altogether. That’s what drew our attention.
The Individualism of Western Research
Western research practice tends to be built on individual authorship. The single-author paper. The named researcher. The principal investigator. The intellectual property regime that assigns ownership of ideas to individuals. Even collaborative research is typically structured through clearly delineated individual contributions — who did what, who thought what first, who gets credit.
What we notice is that this framework carries a specific philosophical inheritance — one that assumes ideas originate in individual minds and are then shared with others. Ubuntu, as we encounter it in South African practice, suggests a different pattern: that knowledge emerges from the spaces between people, and that individual ownership of collectively produced insight may be missing the point.
Ubuntu as Research Methodology
What would Ubuntu-informed research actually look like in practice? Several principles emerge:
Shared authorship as default. Not as a generous gesture, but as an accurate reflection of how knowledge is produced. When a researcher enters a community and leaves with insights, those insights were co-produced. The community members who shared their knowledge are not “informants” or “participants” — they are co-authors.
Process over output. In an Ubuntu framework, the relationships built during research are as valuable as the research outputs. A project that strengthens community bonds but produces no publishable paper may be more successful, by Ubuntu standards, than one that generates high-impact publications but leaves the community unchanged or depleted.
Collective benefit as measure of rigour. Western research measures rigour through methodological precision, sample size, and peer review. Ubuntu-informed research might add a further criterion: does the research benefit the community from which it emerged? If knowledge is extracted but not returned, the research has failed — regardless of its methodological sophistication.
Creative Practice and Ubuntu
The implications for creative practice are worth paying attention to. Much of the Western art world is built around individual genius — the solitary artist whose unique vision produces original work. What we see in Ubuntu-informed practice is a different model: creative work as communal activity, where the artwork emerges from collective processes and belongs, in some meaningful sense, to the community that produced it.
This is not a theoretical abstraction. The Keiskamma Art Project in Hamburg, Eastern Cape, is a working example. Over 150 artists — predominantly women from the surrounding communities — produce large-scale communal tapestries and embroideries that no single person could have conceived or executed alone. The works carry collective memory: histories of illness, ecological change, and resilience stitched into fabric across months of shared labour. The resulting tapestries belong to a tradition of making that has no individual author and needs none. Esther Mahlangu, the Ndebele muralist who has painted her geometric designs on everything from BMW art cars to the walls of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, works within a tradition of mural painting passed between generations of Ndebele women — a tradition where the patterns encode clan identity, social status, and spiritual meaning that far predates any single practitioner. In Khayelitsha, the Philani Nutrition Centre’s craft programme trains women in beadwork, weaving, and sewing as both income generation and community building — creative practice structured not around individual expression but around collective survival and care.
The Challenge for Institutions
Moving Ubuntu from philosophy to practice would mean rethinking a lot — authorship policies, assessment criteria, intellectual property frameworks, how galleries attribute and compensate creative work, what research funders measure as success. These are big shifts, and we watch with interest as institutions begin to grapple with them.
For our part, we are trying to apply what we observe — experimenting with shared authorship, collective processes, and community-centred research in our own work. We are learning, adjusting, and trying again. Which, perhaps, is itself the most Ubuntu thing we can do.