Mogobe B. Ramose

It was 1996, in South Africa.

A philosopher was coming home after long years of exile. He had a research post waiting at the University of Venda. He had a book in progress, begun in Europe, not yet finished.

His name was Mogobe Bernard Ramose.

It had all started, he says, with family stories. As a child, he listened to the tales of his people.

One day, he asked his mother a strange question. If she had chosen another man, what about the children who would never have been born?

It was already a philosophical question.

He studied in colonial and missionary schools, then in Catholic seminaries. He was taught Latin. He was taught the thought of Europe.

He excelled at Latin. But his mother tongue had no place at the university. It left him uneasy.

Under apartheid, he left South Africa. He became a political refugee in Belgium.

In 1983, he earned a doctorate in philosophy at the Catholic University of Leuven. He also studied international relations at the London School of Economics.

During his exile, he taught Western philosophy in Europe. He taught philosophy of law at Tilburg, in the Netherlands.

He taught in Africa too. He gave courses in African philosophy and ethics at the University of Zimbabwe, and in philosophy at Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia.

His political thinking owed much to Robert Sobukwe, the founder of the Pan Africanist Congress.

People said reason belonged to Western philosophy alone. He challenged that idea: Africa thinks too.

In 1999, his book came out in Harare, from Mond Books. It was called African Philosophy Through Ubuntu.

In it, Ramose took ubuntu seriously. Not as a pretty word. As a philosophy, able to think about justice and law.

He looked closely at the word. The stem -ntu, he explained, speaks of the process of life, the universe unfolding. Being is never frozen. It is in motion; it flows.

He also recalled a saying in Sotho, Motho ke motho ka batho: a person is a person through other people.

He drew a serious conclusion from this. Colonization and racism denied that shared humanity. The humanity of the colonized, and that of the colonizer too.

The book was reissued in 2005 and translated into Dutch.

Ramose became a professor in the philosophy department of the University of South Africa, UNISA, in Pretoria.

He stayed watchful. Ubuntu appeared in the preamble of the 1993 Interim Constitution. It vanished from the 1996 Constitution. Ramose saw in this a kind of "epistemic apartheid."

And yet, he said, ubuntu is still alive. In the villages. In everyday relationships. In African languages, on the radio, in the way the dead are buried.

He called his work Mothofatso: humanization.

In 2019, colleagues dedicated a book in his honour, The Tenacity of Truthfulness.

The child who asked his mother about the children never born had become that philosopher. For him, that is ubuntu: each of us becomes human with others, and never once and for all.

The boy who excelled at Latin had ended up thinking with the words of home.