By Anselmo Boaventura
Short answer: Ubuntu comes from the Nguni saying umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, "a person is a person through other persons," often shortened to "I am because we are." In economic terms it means wealth is measured by the strength of your relationships, not only by what you own. Ubuntu works as insurance without insurers, credit without banks and contracts without courts. Its weakness is that trust inside the circle does not easily reach strangers, which is exactly what a modern national economy needs.
What Ubuntu actually says
The South African philosopher Mogobe Ramose, in African Philosophy through Ubuntu (1999), argues that Ubuntu is a whole way of understanding being: a person becomes fully human only through relationships with others, with the ancestors and with those not yet born. Similar ideas run through the Bantu languages of the whole region, including those of Mozambique.
From that follows a different idea of wealth. A family is wealthy because of who will stand with it when the rains fail. Cattle loaned to a neighbour are not lost; they are an investment in a bond that comes back in a hard year.
Ubuntu as economic machinery
| Problem | Modern answer | Ubuntu answer |
|---|---|---|
| Drought, illness, death | Insurance company | Gifts and loans inside the kin network |
| Need for a lump sum | Bank loan | Rotating savings group (xitique in Mozambique, stokvel in South Africa) |
| Labour at planting or harvest | Wages | Work parties: neighbours help, then are helped |
| Making people keep promises | Courts and contracts | Reputation in a dense network |
These are not primitive versions of modern finance. They are sophisticated solutions to life without reliable states and banks, which is why they have survived colonialism, war and structural adjustment.
The Nature of Belonging
Does citizenship or nationalism make nations rich? Europe, Asia, Islam and Ubuntu compared, and how Mozambique built wealth across the Indian Ocean.
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Where Ubuntu stops
Honesty requires naming the limits:
- Capital is hard to accumulate. The family member saving for a tractor may be asked to pay for a funeral first.
- Trust ends at the edge of the circle. A xitique works because everyone knows everyone. A nation of 35 million people cannot run as one big xitique.
- The language can be borrowed. Leaders can invoke Ubuntu to demand loyalty without accountability.
Why this matters for Mozambique
Most Mozambicans earn their living in the informal economy, and that economy runs on Ubuntu-style trust. It keeps families alive. It rarely makes them rich, because the trader in the market cannot get a bank loan, sign a supermarket contract or export under her own name.
The answer is not to replace Ubuntu but to build bridges from the circle to the market: savings groups with group bank or mobile-money accounts, farmer associations that sign contracts for their members, cooperatives that carry the trust of the village into the national economy. In The Nature of Belonging I call the goal Ubuntu citizenship: a citizenship with the warmth of Ubuntu and the reach of a modern state.
Frequently asked questions
What does "I am because we are" mean? It is a short form of the Nguni proverb umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu: a person becomes a person through other people. Your humanity, and your security, are made in relationship.
Is Ubuntu an economic system? Not a formal one, but it produces real economic institutions: mutual insurance, rotating savings and credit, shared labour and reputation-based contracts.
What is a xitique? A rotating savings group common in southern Mozambique. Members pay in regularly and each takes the whole pot in turn, with no paperwork, because social pressure enforces repayment.
What are the weaknesses of Ubuntu economics? It can make saving capital hard, its trust does not easily extend to strangers, and its language can be used to demand loyalty without accountability.
Read more: this article is adapted from Chapter 10 of The Nature of Belonging, which compares how Europe, Asia, the Islamic world and Africa turn belonging into wealth. The Ubuntu chapter is free on the book page.
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