Ubuntu and the More-Than-Human: Lessons from African and African Diaspora Feminists

Abstract: The maxim most closely associated with the African philosophy of ubuntu, "umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu," is attendant to human-to-human relations especially in the fields of African and African Diaspora Feminisms. More pertinent to my research is the larger relationality embedded in ubuntu and which considers the interconnections and interdependence between the living, the ancestors and the unborn, on the one hand, and between the human and other living beings and organisms on the other. To that extent, I engage with ubuntu as an embodied practice grounded both in spirit and in ecology. This paper engages with M. Jacqui Alexander's notion of the Sacred , Patricia McFadden's contemporary feminism , and Mary Kinyanjui's utu feminism to establish how these Africana feminist scholars who acknowledge and work within embodied practices of the Sacred, ecofeminist care, and utu adopt a relationality that resembles the expansive posture of what ubuntu encompasses. They are the forbearers to this work. I describe them as 'relational interlocutors' who have laid the ground for engaging with ubuntu as an inter-being relation that offers emancipatory possibilities for healing.