This article defends an alternative account of ubuntu, and makes a novel proposition about African morality and ethics. In doing so, it refutes the normative account of ubuntu premised on the aphorism umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu (persons are persons through other persons).According to this "greatest harmony" account, Africans are harmonic collectivists and sharers, linked together by community-defining conveyor-belts of moral and ethical goodwill "gifts". It is assumed that an African theory of right action produces harmony and reduces discord. I aver, however, that such a prima facie interpretation, notwithstanding its intuitive appeal, is still open to some rather strong doubt.

This keynote address is about the supply, maintenance and allocation of fungible, vulnerable human bodies—what American President Donald Trump would categorize as the shitholes of the world. Underlying our modern times is a large, unsolved problem about what is really going on in the world. I use the novel theoretical lens of Apartheid Studies to appreciate how we have neglected to read, recognize and call out the persistent circuits of apartheid that are at the heart of global capitalist modernity. Our contemporary age, built on interoperable digital networks, tends to reinforce global forms of apartheid. Apartheid Studies is a new field of studies that makes it possible to expose these circuits. Whereas human beings are human because we all possess a kind of strongly encrypted password which we reserve to give or not to give—so that we feel relatively protected and free to be what we want—this password protection has been eroded by institutions and powerful elites. Modernity itself, by its very nature, emerges when we start to share our passwords with strangers. Passing on the control of the passwords of our being to strangers causes global apartheid. Global capitalist modernity, expressed in invasive technology, generally undermines human beings’ sense of self, immunity, inviolability, indivisibility, and replaces it with social media and an internet of things which are predicated on sharing our privacy with strangers. I propose new emphases on restorative forensics and literacies that are appropriate to the task of generating a scholarship of the future that is ethical and opposed to systemic injustice, that exposes global exploitation, racism, deception, and corruption, and that promotes just worlds.

Literacy in the context of cultural studies (CS) in Africa concerns less the ability to read and write than the quotidian practice of doing. This intervention argues that CS as taught and as its texts are imagined, in general terms, is the source of a continuing institutionalized limitation. CS for Africans is first and foremost a lived practice, before it is a discipline or ready-for-study academic subject. We discuss the notion of lived CS to confront a pedagogical issue: how much of CS should be text, and how much 'doing'?At the beginning of this academic year, I was walking one day from the English Department to a parking lot. It was a fine autumn morning such as encouraged friendliness to passing strangers. Brisk youngsters were hurrying in all directions, many of them obviously freshmen in their first flush of enthusiasm. An older man going the same way as I turned and remarked to me how very young they came these days. I agreed. Then he asked me if I was a student too. I said no, I was a teacher. What did I teach? African literature. Now that was funny, he said, because he knew a fellow who also taught the same thing, or perhaps it was African history, in a certain community college not far from here. It always surprised him, he went on to say, because he never had thought of Africa as having that kind of stuff, you know. (Achebe, 1978: 1)

This article defends an alternative account of ubuntu, and makes a novel proposition about African morality and ethics. In doing so, it refutes the normative account of ubuntu premised on the aphorism umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu (persons are persons through other persons).According to this "greatest harmony" account, Africans are harmonic collectivists and sharers, linked together by community-defining conveyor-belts of moral and ethical goodwill "gifts". It is assumed that an African theory of right action produces harmony and reduces discord. I aver, however, that such a prima facie interpretation, notwithstanding its intuitive appeal, is still open to some rather strong doubt.

No abstract