Nineteenth-Century Ubuntu: Black Philosophy Under the Nine Wars of Dispossession (1779-1878)

Abstract

Ubuntu, the philosophy of ethical personhood, is embodied in the dictum ‘umuntu ngumuntu ngabanye abantu’ (a person is a person through others). This dissertation examines the written and lived traditions of Ubuntu amongst isiXhosa speakers under the Nine Wars of Dispossession (1779–1878). In the Wars of Dispossession, British and Boer settlers waged war for the land, labour and cattle of isiXhosa and Khoe–San-speaking peoples in the Eastern Cape of Southern Africa. These wars were the longest period of military action in the history of European presence in black Africa since modernity’s inception in 1492 and would ultimately lead to the end of black sovereignty in Southern Africa. In this dissertation, I argue that amongst indigenous peoples of Southern Africa, Ubuntu provided an ethical grounding for war conduct and conquest – what I call an indigenous ethics of ‘conquest and incorporation.’ Against Ubuntu ethics of ‘conquest and incorporation’, I examine isiXhosa speakers’ responses to the metaphysical crises precipitated by settler colonial conquest’s ‘logic of elimination of the native’ and the British introduction of the ideology of total war in the Cape during these Wars of Dispossession. Drawing from Black Studies, Settler Colonial Studies and Indigenous Studies, I extend the analysis of the settler colonial logic of elimination to consider the specific predicament of the ‘native’ who is black