South Africa’s multi-ethnic heritage

African science articulates a cosmology of interconnectedness like that of the Baltics. According to Mathias Guenther (2020), the Sān peoples of Southern Africa shared a common perception of the universe as unbounded and changeable. Roaming an arid landscape alongside the other species they depended upon for subsistence, the ancient Sān believed humans and animals flowed into one another through spacetime. These social interactions brought meaning and order to the chaotic impulses of a participatory universe. In contrast to the gather-hunter Sān, who recognized the right of all life to a free existence, the pastoral Khoekhoe possessed livestock and paid tribute to tribal leaders (Smith, 2009). While Khoekhoe societies introduced a degree of hierarchy into the self-other relationship, animal welfare was a shared value among all Indigenous Southern Africans, who often shifted between herder and hunter lifestyles and Khoe-Sān identities (Barnard, 2008).

Across Sub-Saharan Africa, Bantu-speaking societies teach a similar worldsense. Experiencing the cosmic web of life as a divine Vital Force, Bantu-speaking peoples recognized the rights of other species to wellbeing, with cultural philosophers appointing the spirits, ancestors, and living human elders as ecological guardians. During the colonial era, the Bantu concept of Vital Force merged with Christian notion of God, giving rise to African Christianity, in all its cultural, linguistic, and ethnic forms (Kaoma, 2014).

Ubuntu is a pan-African moral philosophy. Although the term derives from the Xhosa and Zulu languages of Southern Africa, Ubuntu concepts undergird moral thinking across the continent. As a distinctly African science, Ubuntu challenges the Euro-Western discourse on human rights, which places individual and collective rights into opposition rather than recognizing their interdependence. In The Lessons of Ubuntu, Mark Mathabane (2018) identifies the hostile and nihilistic ideologies undergirding racial and ethnic relations within the neoliberal world-system. The survival-of-the-fittest theorem buttressing modern rational discourse reduces human agency to a stark choice: ‘to hate or be hated, to oppress or be oppressed, to kill or be killed’ (p 9).