Augustine Shutte

It was 1958, in Stellenbosch, South Africa.

At a meet between universities, a Cape Town student took part in the pole vault. He cleared thirteen feet, just over 3.9 metres. It was a record for the University of Cape Town.

His name was Augustine Shutte. He had been born in 1938.

At university, he studied philosophy under Martin Versfeld. As a young man, he called himself an atheist. A "questing" atheist, he said. The questing never left him.

He then went to Oxford to study theology. He wanted to become an Anglican clergyman. But along the way, he turned to the Catholic Church.

He joined the Dominicans, in a monastery in Stellenbosch. He stayed six years.

Then, in his thirties, he left the monastery. He wanted to marry, to have children, to teach.

From 1972, he taught philosophy at the University of Cape Town. A colleague later described him as an effective and much-loved teacher.

His doctoral thesis was about spirituality and intersubjectivity: what happens between persons.

South Africa was living under apartheid. Rather than strident speeches against apartheid, Shutte chose a practical approach.

He asked himself a question. What could African culture bring to philosophy? And what could it learn from it?

In African thought, he found insights into the person and the community.

In 1993 his book Philosophy for Africa appeared. In 2001 came the sequel: Ubuntu: An Ethic for a New South Africa.

In it he offered a new reading of the moral idea at the heart of African thought: ubuntu.

For him, ubuntu did not stand against the individual freedom so dear to Europe. It completed it.

He then applied this ethic to everyday life. Relations between men and women. School. Health care. Work. Politics. Religion.

The country was leaving apartheid behind. Shutte offered it a shared ethic.

In 2016, a colleague still said it: the book remained a landmark.

Shutte did not only write. He worshipped in a township congregation, and he took full part in its life.

In December 2003, at sixty-five, he was finally able to watch his children receive their degrees, at the university where he taught.

"I'm incredibly pleased," he said.

He retired at the end of that year. But he kept searching, as a research associate, on the links between religion and science. In 2005, he edited a book on the quest for humanity in science and religion.

In retirement, he became a poet. He also wrote a novel, Conversion, set in the Dominican priory in Stellenbosch.

His faith kept searching too. It opened itself to all religious traditions.

Late in life, he served as a priest in the Roman Catholic Women Priests movement, which the Church has excommunicated. He also campaigned for the reform of his Church.

Augustine Shutte died of cancer on 23 May 2016, at seventy-eight.

A month later, at the philosophy department's prize-giving, a colleague paid tribute to him. He was given a special award for a lifetime's work.

All his life, he had searched for what makes a person. In ubuntu, he had found a way of thinking about the person and the community.

In 1958, the young man had cleared a bar, high above the ground.

He then spent his life clearing other bars: between churches, between philosophies, between the worlds of a single country.