This paper presents a comparative study of Russian and African thinkers on communitarian philosophy and ethics. The ideas of Ubuntism as an African philosophy of life are analysed through the philosophy of Russian obschina (the traditional peasant community), as reflected in the views of Khomyakov, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. The analysis shows that despite some historical and cultural differences there are notable similarities between the main features of ubuntu and obschina. These include a strong and rather special spirituality, collective consciousness, emphasis on the values of co-operation, sharing, participation, reciprocity, empathy, harmony with nature, and so on. The latter strongly suggests that the history and downfall of the Russian obschina and the Soviet collective could be of great theoretical and practical interest in contemporary Africa, even though the lessons it teaches could be seen as rather trivial: a) any concept if taken out of its historical, socio-economic, and cultural context could become open to idealisation, distortion, and abuse; b) in order to determine the viability of the concept in the current situation, its true meaning should be analysed from the perspective of its origins and socio-economic foundations; c) communalism for its own sake cannot and should not be the ultimate goal, since its value is determined by the nature of the community in question.

- Ubuntu as an African philosophy of life or an African world view occupies a special position and is usually opposed to Western individualism and socialist collectivism alike.

- Ubuntu as an African humanism is often defined as the distinctive collective consciousness of Africans.

- Most authors consider Ubuntism as inseparable from religious beliefs, and almost unanimously claim that Africans have religion of their own.

- As ‘profound spiritual/religious experience’, African humanism is described as being primarily emotional and as such is opposed to rationalism as the core of Western humanism.

- The ethical values and virtues of Ubuntism are plentiful and vary from author to author: but the most frequently mentioned are those of solidarity, respect, sharing, loyalty, co-operation, participation, reciprocating, sympathy and empathy.

- Ubuntu has its roots in traditional African (tribal) society. It had no written records in the past and was handed on by oral tradition. It has been revived and articulated by the academics and politicians in recent years, and is, therefore, open to different interpretations.

 

The latter attempted to substantiate the idea of an original, genuinely Russian way of social development, which would be totally different from that of the Western European. The originality of Russia was seen in the absence of class struggle in its history; in the Russian village commune (obschina) and, so called, artels; and in Orthodoxy, which was believed to be the only true form of Christianity. All Slavophils fanatically believed in the virtues of the common people, "folk principles" and the values of communal life. The greatest name among Slavophils was undoubtedly Khomyakov. He asserted that one-sided Western rationalism and individualism led to the loss of a person’s spiritual integrity (which, according to him, lay in the unity of reason, feeling and will, and was inseparable from faith). Against it, Khomyakov asserted what Russian Orthodoxy had, in sobornost, the authentic spirit of community in which there was a true freedom for the individual. According to him, the Orthodox Church alone knew true freedom and true community. Sobornost is a notion coined by Khomyakov from such Russian words as sobor (cathedral) and sobranie (gathering of fellow men) and encompasses the ideas of free unity, spirituality, and harmony, which according to him were the unique characteristics of the Russian spirit and were found in the traditional Russian rural commune – obschina.

This typical antithesis of European and Russian values is a recurrent theme of Dostoevsky’s writings. In the essay cycle, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863), based on his travels in Western Europe, Dostoevsky presented a critical view of capitalist civilisation, with its extreme rationalisation of life, the "colossal regimentation" and growing atomisation of society. In these essays Dostoevsky shows an unusually acute insight into the fact that it was the divisive power of bourgeois individualism that provided the driving force for Western civilisation. Individualism had created a powerful material force, but at the same time had isolated human beings, had brought them into conflict with nature and their fellow men. He emphasised the dehumanising power of bourgeois individualism and the negative character of bourgeois freedom, which resulted in a diminished personality.

Another attack on the individualism and mechanistic rationalism of Western capitalism could be found in Notes from the Underground. In the form of a satire Dostoevsky portrays the irrational ultra-individualism of the "underground man" who has rejected all social bonds and is an embodiment of a protest against any subordination of "what is most precious and most important to us, namely our personality and individuality." "Is the world to go to wrack and ruin or am I to have my cup of tea? Well, so far as I’m concerned, blow the world so long as I can have my cup of tea" (1864; 136) – is his motto in life.

It is worth noting that according to Dostoevsky, the rationalisation of the social bonds was common to both Western capitalism and socialism. "Shigalev’s system" in The Possessed is a gloomy version of a society based on absolute obedience and absolute depersonalisation and is a caricature version of what Dostoevsky called materialistic or revolutionary socialism.

A modified and nobler version of Shigalev’s system is presented in the famous Legend of the Grand Inquisitor. The Legend was intended to be a parable of the just kingdom the socialists were trying to establish on earth. The Grand Inquisitor exchanges freedom for bread, and takes away freedom in order to bestow happiness on his "pitiful children." However, an indispensable condition of this happiness is total and herdlike depersonalisation. Knowing that men are weak, the Inquisitor relieves them from the burden of freedom, conscience, and personal responsibility; he replaces freedom by authority, "free unity" by a "unity based on compulsion". The Church, transformed into State, unites "all in one unanimous and harmonious ant heap."

According to Andrzej Walicki (1980: 319), the notion that there was an organic relationship between Catholicism and socialism, emphasised in the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, was one of Dostoevsky’s favourite and most obsessive theories. He called socialism, as protest against individualism and anarchy, a secularised form of the Catholic "unity through compulsion" (Valicki: 319). Dostoevsky uses the term "Russian socialism" to describe the ideals he attributed to Russian people – "the ideals of the state as church (in opposition to the Catholic ideal of the church as state), of universal brotherhood, and the free unity of mankind." By the state he definitely meant the Russian nation, and the latter for him was synonymous with common people of peasant obschina. Therefore, the cornerstone of Dostoevsky’s Orthodox utopia was the idea of a return to the people, to the "native soil," to the free unity and traditions of Russian communal life.

Tolstoy’s philosophical ideas revolve around and evolve from the existential and moral crisis he experienced at the peak of his creative genius. During the crisis he went through a period of severe cynicism and depression, and seriously contemplated suicide. Analysing the roots of the crisis he realised that they were in the system of values he shared with the Russian aristocracy. In his Confession he pointed out that the whole system was based on hypocrisy and extreme individualism and resulted in life devoid of any meaning. From the perspective of individualistic morality, the inevitability of death made life a total absurdity, a cruel and stupid joke played on humanity. The meaning of life and death was of utmost interest and importance for Tolstoy, an obsession that was a torment of his life. It was personal, it was of a great empirical interest for him as a novelist, observing and depicting life, and at the same time purely theoretical. In the story Three Deaths we already find the characteristic Tolstoyan contrast between the fear of death felt by the "upper classes" and the peaceful resignation of the simple people as they face the end. Condemnation of individualism runs as a continuous motif through War and Peace, where individualism is contrasted again and again with the instinctive "truth" of the common people. In the most condensed and graphic manner two opposite value systems, two ways of life, and two attitudes towards death are presented in the Death of Ivan Ilyich. In the Confession Tolstoy concludes that from the point of view of the individual clinging to the idea of personal survival, human existence must be summed up in the words "vanity of vanities, all is vanity." The time- and space-bound individual cannot escape discovering his life being totally absurd; the way to salvation lies, consequently, in overcoming "the principle of individuation."

The best exposition of Tolstoy’s philosophy of life can be found in his treatise On Life. "The true life of man," he writes, "is the aspiration toward goodness, which is achieved by submitting one’s individuality to the law of reason" (1894: 86). It is time and space that lie at the roots of the "principle of individuation." It follows from this that to renounce individual welfare is not an act of exceptional merit, but a necessary law of life. In order to live a true life – not a life of animal instincts – it is necessary to be reborn and become a "reasonable consciousness," to transcend individuality by identifying one’s own welfare with the welfare of others. Whoever achieves this finds that death no longer holds any terror and perceives the world as a reasonable whole, subject to a single law. Individual life is not a true life. Individuality is evil, an illusion that cuts man from his true nature, imprisons him in the world of phenomena and condemns him to suffering and death. The way to transcend individuality is through love – love not as an emotional impulse, but as a total submission to the tranquil clarity of the "reasonable consciousness" that enjoins men to renounce their individual welfare. The renunciation of "individual welfare" does not mean the renunciation of personality as such. True personality as a sense of identity, according to Tolstoy, could not be found in individual consciousness. One can become a true person only through others.

The Tolstoyan philosophy of life is rather extreme in its ethical implications. It postulates not only such values as empathy (ability to feel for others), non-violent resistance to evil, and love of one’s fellow men, but also calls for ascetic resignation from the world. In practice it led him to the idealisation of the collective consciousness at the pre-individuation stage, to a cult of simplicity and to a condemnation of civilisation. Following his own call for humility in the face of the "people’s truth" and total immersion in the "masses", Tolstoy chose to live a life of Russian obschina.

The character who best exemplifies the "people’s truth" is Karataev in War and Peace – a simple peasant who is only a small part of the anonymous crowd and feels that he has no separate existence. Pierre Bezukhov longs to experience Karataev’s truth: "To be a soldier, simply a soldier," he muses before going to sleep. "To enter with all one’s being this general life, to adopt the qualities that made them what they are. But how to throw off everything superfluous, demonic, this burden of the pseudo-man?" So, what are those qualities so much admired by Pierre in Karataev, which Tolstoy could not find in his aristocratic milieu. They are the universal wisdom preserved by tradition, a simple and at the same time extraordinary spirituality of folk faith in God, empathy and great tolerance, patience in the face of misfortune and sympathetic understanding of the needy, the quiet acceptance of life without despair and death without terror. To achieve them one has to forget one’s own individuality, to abolish the barriers between the self and the other, and immerse in universal unity of love for one’s fellow men.

Sometimes Tolstoy’s philosophy of life is defined as metaphysical impersonalism (Zenkovsky, 1953: 387), with which I strongly disagree. I would have called it a philosophy of anti-individualism, which merges with communitarianism in its ethics. The reason (apart from its content speaking for itself) is that Tolstoy found inspiration for, and a confirmation of, his theories in Russian obschina, in the communal way of life based on patriarchal links, in the culture and social consciousness of Russian peasantry, who were still at the pre-individuation stage. Lenin called it a "shift to the position of the patriarchal peasantry" and maintained that Tolstoy’s ideas should be treated "not as something individual, not as a caprice or a fad, but as the ideology of the conditions of life under which millions and millions actually found themselves for a certain period of time," as an ideology of Russian obschina, of "an Oriental, an Asiatic order."(Lenin, 1967: 66-67)

Tolstoy did not limit his praise of obschina only to its philosophy of life and ethics. He went further to an idealisation of its natural economy based on communal property and relations before the division of labour. In his infatuation with obschina Tolstoy rejected Western capitalism, revolutionary socialism, civilisation in general, and the culture of individualism as completely incompatible with the spiritual needs of humanity. In this wholesale condemnation he included contemporary science as well. The role of science, he wrote is to satisfy artificial needs and to create the means of control over the people. It is totally immoral, for it has lost sight of the only truly important issue – understanding the nature of man’s vocation and the essence of virtue.

In his articles on Tolstoy, Lenin perceptively summed up that philosophy. As a thinker, he wrote, Tolstoy is great because his ideology is a reflection of the "great human ocean [of Russian peasantry], . . . with all its weaknesses and all its strong features" (Lenin, 1967: 63). At the same time he stressed that the Tolstoyan doctrine was certainly utopian and reactionary in its content. As an exponent of the feelings and aspirations of the patriarchal peasantry, Tolstoy looked backward rather than forward; he wanted to re-establish an archaic and pre-industrial way of life and openly proclaimed that "the ideal of our times is behind us."

I hope that even this very brief summary shows the striking similarities between the ideas of Russian obschina and those of Ubuntu. It is clear that obschina was a way of life based on a particular form of social and economic relationships, which produced a particular world view and code of ethics. Its values were outlined in oral tradition and embodied in the customs which regulated social behaviour. Russian so-called intelligentsia (intellectuals of all kinds, like historians, literary critics, writers, and philosophers) have articulated its philosophy. And as you have seen from the above, each of them gave to it his own interpretation depending on his personal agenda, but all of them in a way expressed the sentiments, psychology, and philosophy of patriarchal peasantry. It was a standpoint of protest against advancing capitalism, its values, disorder and destruction of the traditional peasant life, and the impoverishment of the masses of peasants, who were uprooted, dispossessed of their land, and were rapidly losing their sense of identity in the face of alien values. An uncritical and inevitably idealised perception of the past tradition was a natural outcome of that protest. Andrzej Walicki describes it as "romantic nostalgia for a lost ideal" and goes even further to define Slavophile philosophy, in particular, as a conservative utopianism, which had "a strongly compensatory element, for dreams of a lost harmonious world always conceal some sense of alienation and deprivation"(1980: 107).

Lenin maintained that the socialist revolution would liberate obschina from all the negative characteristics, while the socialist collective would take over all the positive ones. Communism was considered as the only social organisation where the free development of each individual was a condition for the free development of all (Engels). It would be difficult to summarise even briefly the extensive research and publications produced by Soviet philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, and educationalists on the problems of collectivity and the person. At this point. it would suffice to mention only that their major concern was to promote the ethical values of collectivism and to ensure that the socialist collective would generate a person with fully realised human potential. In reality it often led to conformism, indifference, lack of creativity, and depersonalisation. But the problems of the socialist collective are a matter of special analysis, while the main points of Marxist analysis of Russian obschina could find their application in the analysis of Ubuntu and its roots.

In order to avoid a romantic and idealised view of Ubuntu as an African way of life and African world view, it must be analysed in the context of the social organisation from which it has originated and its so-called universal values have to be related to the customs and traditions from which they have been born or reflect.

According to Winifred Hoernle (Shapera, 1966: 67), despite linguistic and cultural differences, the Bantu peoples shared more or less similar social organisations of the tribe or chiefdom. Apart from political reasons, the unity of the tribe was cemented by the communal ownership of the land and natural resources. The communal psychology of the Bantu was inherent in the communal use of land and the need for a joint effort in any undertaking. The social structure of Bantu society was constituted in the framework of relationships between the members of a community. This was manifested in an ordered group life, with reciprocal rights and duties, privileges and obligations, determining behaviour patterns for each individual member towards other members, and of moulding of feelings, thoughts, and conduct of members according to this pattern. Only in and through them can the individual achieve personal self-realisation and participate in the satisfactions offered by the life of his or her community.

I believe that the system of Bantu social and ethical values answered perfectly all the requirements of its social structure and organisation. It assured the formation of a person who could become a suitable member of the Bantu community, would "honour the chief and tribal custom, respect those older than himself, value those things which are of value to the society, and observe tribal taboos" (Krige, 1966: 106) It is not surprising that "the ubuntu practise stipulates that the person is expected to surrender to the cultural norms set forth in society. This is a package deal." (Maseko, 2000: 15)

This was a kind of unity that thrives on the subsistence level and is founded on its particular socio-economic relationships. How many native South Africans gradually would disregard their kin provided all their requirements would be supplied by the neutral agencies? Would not the bonds of kinship become redundant as the self-contained capsulized individual became more and more established through modern technology, encouraged by capitalism?

Elaborate social structure, hierarchy, and the precise determination of conduct were designed in order to fuse a plurality of forces and interests into a close unit. They projected the totality of life style upon the individual and claimed him entirely. There was possibly a feeling of harmony and stability within such social structure, as it created the kind of organic self-sufficiency by virtue of which the same stream of life and consciousness flowed through all community members. The only condition was that every person knew his or her place and abided by the rules.

Though the Bantu "communal system" based on kinship produced many positive features (which usually could be found in other communities all over the world), a number of features are particular (probably, unique) to Bantu society, like hlonipa (Sesotho, "respect"). I do not argue with their propriety in the old days, but it is clear that in the new social and economic conditions they become dangerous anachronisms. Critical assessment and re-evaluation of tradition is called for, whereby tradition is viewed not simply as the passive acceptance of values inherited from the previous generations, but as the creative shaping of the heritage from the perspective of ethical ideals in view of what people of South Africa want to become in the future.

When promoting the values and norms of Ubuntism it is necessary to define clearly in what sense such concepts as solidarity, reciprocity, respect, loyalty and so on are used. The authors writing on Ubuntu, while referring to the named values as traditional, view them from broader humanistic, but inevitably Eurocentric, perspective.

The confusion and misunderstanding seem to be unavoidable, considering that the majority of the people who continue the traditional way of living are native speakers. A contemporary Ubuntist would say "to respect" means to treat with consideration, avoid interfering with, harming, degrading, and insulting, whereas a traditionalist would think hlonepo with all its implications. One would say loyalty refers to loyalty to ideals of truth, justice and reconciliation; the other would refer it to allegiance to a chief or group loyalty, and so on.

There is another danger in values being used in their initial sense, as is the general tendency because kinship and clan mentalities are very much alive in Africa, namely, that in application to the changed social, economic and cultural context they are open to distortion and abuse. Recent and contemporary African history is full of examples of how clan solidarity produces xenophobia and feeds racial prejudice; from being an ethical value respect, turns into blind submission to authority and corruption of power and by power; uncritical loyalty to a leader results in a totalitarian regime; and the demand of kinship reciprocity breeds nepotism. As values are context-relevant, in order not only to survive but also to be able to promote its most important characteristics tradition has to keep pace with time. The Bantu "communal system" and the corresponding philosophy of Ubuntu carry a great potential for development, but also the seeds of self-destruction. The uncritical idealisation of Obschina to be found in Tolstoy and others might be taken as a lesson for the future debate on Ubuntu as an ethical ideal.

Against these critical alternatives the notion of the self as an essentially private individual has proven astonishingly persistent. It is not hard to understand why resistance to the social mentality has persisted. For one thing, there were good reasons for the rise of individualism against various excessive forms of conformism. Secondly, capitalism as a prevailing form of social organisation is not very conducive to the formation of a collectivist mentality. And last but not the least, as some philosophers pointed out, it is a paradox of the human condition to be torn by two opposite drives: a striving to be an individual, free and unique, and a desire to belong, to share, to be supported, and to transcend the limitations of a finite individuality (Koestler, 1978). The problem left to be resolved is how to create a perfect community that would promote the development and self-realisation of the free and integral individual. Holding the values of communitarianism close to my heart, I have hope that the people of Africa will find the way.

NOTES

 

2. Despite the etymology of the word Slavophilism ("love of Slavs"), the actual meaning it conveyed was not of solidarity and brotherhood among all the Slavs. Its main purpose was to promote and cultivate the traditional native features in the social and cultural life of ancient Russia.

4. Compare with the following statement: "At the centre of Ubuntu is the idea that Umuntu Ngumuntu Ngabantu, persons depend on persons to be persons. This is our hidden secret. This is something we can now reveal to the world. This is something the world needs. It can become our special product." (Shutte; 2); "Africans have this thing called Ubuntu: . . . the essence of being human, it is a part of the gift that Africa will give the world." (Desmond Tutu, in Mulemfo, 2000: 57). "Africa has a big role to play in helping [Western] societies rediscover the meaning and essence of human life." (Mulemfo, 2000: 56)

5. Compare with Ruel Khoza’s idea of encompassing values such as universal brotherhood for Africans as an expression of African collective consciousness.

6. Compare this with the following: "It is by belonging to the community that we become ourselves. The community is not opposed to the individual, nor does it simply swallow the individual up; it enables each individual to become a unique centre of shared life." (Shutte: 3).

7. Compare with the following: "God’s existence in Isintu is highly esteemed and acknowledged. God is intuitively known, i.e. is a knowledge, not so much concerned with details, as in science of reality but one that through the vision of totality that starts from intuitive axiom that an overall order must exist and it provides the protective shell within which the person’s existence may blossom. Hence, God is left shrouded in mystery yet loved and honoured as such" (Maseko, 2001: 17).

8. It could be of interest to know that attempts to idealise and revive the traditions of such communities are not that uncommon. For example, James Ogilvy (1977) maintains that the only opposition to both extreme individualism and extreme collectivism could be what he calls "a philosophy and democracy of some". The best example of the latter, according to him, is a traditional Scottish clan. I took the pains of reading the history of Scotland and found out not only that the Scottish clan had a lot in common with the organisation of Russian obshina and the African tribe but also that it was torn apart by internal conflicts, and feuds, arising from its very nature. It started when the chiefs drifted from the patriarchal ideal to a belief in their absolute power over people. Since then the history of the Scottish clan is a history of continuous fighting, cruelty, atrocity upon atrocity, piracy, disorder, betrayal, corruption, assassination, massacre, cattle-rustling, wife-exposing, and bloodshed (John Macleod, 1997).

9. As an example of racial prejudice I could name the pogroms (discrimination and extermination of Jews), the movement that was initiated within Russian obschina and was a result of exclusivity of the so-called Slavic solidarity. Another example of extreme chauvinism was presented by the Slavophile doctrine providing a whole range of arguments for the justification of the most harsh and cruel repression of the Polish uprising in 1863.

10. For example, "This vision is rooted in the history of Africa and is at the centre of the culture of most South Africans". (Shutte: 1); "Let us also note that there is no school where Ubuntu could be studied. It cannot be read in a book but it is rather a lived attentive experience." (Maseko, : 16).

11. Compare the different expressions of this central idea. Shutte: ‘Persons depend on persons to be persons.’ Maseko: ‘We are people through other people.’ Makhudu: ‘I am, because you are.’ Desmond Tutu: ‘A person is a person through another person, my humanity is caught up, bound up and inextricable yours.’

13. A. W. Hoernle, for example, describing the life of an average umzi (household) of Southern Nguni tribes, says that though co-wives of a polygamist may have a strong fellow-feeling for one another and usually co-operate, beneath this co-operation there is a conflict, because each mother aims to further the interests of her own children first and foremost. There is, therefore, an underlying tension and strain between the families of an umzi, which often reveals itself in mutual accusations of sorcery and witchcraft. (1966: 77)

14. "There are societies, in which firmly integrated personalities realise their ‘selves’, inasmuch as they fulfil the expectations they have of themselves according to the nomos they acknowledge – but a nomos which can be called their own only if one sees them, as one might see the members of a beehive, as manifestations of an organic social personality whose collective requirements are so homogeneous and so unshakably introjected that the individual would not know how to set about making the nomos his own by working through it critically and creatively. Traditional tribal societies are usually taken to exemplify such cultures" (Benn, 1988: 205).