Engagement: striving for 'ubuntu'

In South Africa, where I live and work a part of each year, there is a concept of community called ubuntu. It is best expressed by the Xhosa proverb: "People are people through other people"-which is to say that my humanity is bound up in yours. What dehumanizes you dehumanizes me. I belong to a greater whole, so I am diminished when others are diminished by oppression. It is not "I think, therefore I am." It is "I am human because I belong."

The highest praise that can be given anyone in South Africa is to say he or she has ubuntu, which means that they are generous, hospitable, friendly, caring and compassionate. And, of course, they are forgiving. You can, thus, understand why it would be both arrogant and wrong for anyone to approach voluntarism and civic engagement in places like South Africa as though it were a Western value rather than a shared value. The absence of a well-organized service movement does not necessarily mean the absence of a service ethic.

People around the world are now agreeing that a good society depends as much on the goodness of individuals as it does on the soundness of government and the fairness of laws. They are reclaiming responsibility for their lives through neighborhood associations in squatter settlements, farming cooperatives in rural areas, micro-enterprises in urban areas and various other self-help groups to improve local conditions. What they need is not charity, but assisted self-reliance, the kind of participatory development that civic engagement by Duke students and faculty should reflect and embody.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Robert Bellah and others painted wonderful pictures of what they described as "the habits of the heart" of the American people. Unfortunately, neither de Tocqueville nor Bellah included in their reporting and analysis the extent to which voluntary activity and civil society in racial minority communities served as a vehicle for self-help, social cohesion and positive group identity.

I spent 14 years as president of the Council on Foundations, where I was a spokesperson for benevolent wealth, and I cringed every time I heard some new guru on civil society speak of American voluntarism or American generosity as if it were somehow unique to those citizens who trace their ancestry back to Europe. Very disappointed in what I kept hearing, I began the research for the book I published in 1995 on the civic traditions of America's racial minorities. What I found were remarkable manifestations of civic feeling that in many instances pre-dated, but were consistent with, the civic habits practiced and the civic values affirmed by society at large.

As early as 1598, Latinos in the Southwest formed "mutualistas" and lay brotherhoods to assist members with their basic needs. Long before de Tocqueville, Benjamin Franklin became so enamored of the political and civic culture of the Native Americans that he advised delegates to the Albany Congress in 1754 to emulate the civic habits of the Iroquois.

Long before Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" or gave his "I Have a Dream" speech, African Americans in the 19th century formed so many voluntary groups and mutual aid societies that some Southern states banned black voluntary activity or charitable organizations. And long before Robert Putnam published his first article on social capital, Neo-Confucians in the Chinese community were teaching their children that a community without benevolence invites its own destruction.

It is has been my experience that when neighbors help neighbors, and even when strangers help strangers, both those who help and those who are helped experience a new sense of connectedness. Getting involved in the needs of the neighbor provides a new way of seeing ourselves and a new understanding of the purpose of the human journey. When that which was "their" problem becomes "our" problem, the transaction transforms a mere association into a relationship with the potential for new communities of meaning and belonging.