Professor James Ogude is a Research Fellow and the Director of the Center for Advancement Scholarship at the University of Pretoria, as well as Director of the African Observatory for Environmental Humanities and Director of the Southern African Hub of the BRIDGES Coalition, a UNESCO MOST Sustainability Science Coalition. For over three decades, he has studied African culture, history and traditions, from indigenous value systems to popular cultures and from the continent’s ecologies to its geographies of resource exploitation. In October 2023, he spoke at AmCham Greece’s 21st Corporate Responsibility Conference, sharing his insights on how today’s interconnected world and global business landscape can benefit from the values of Ubuntu—an African philosophy often summarized as “I am because you are; you are because we are.” Business Partners caught up with him to find out more.
From African cultures, identities and literatures to Black intellectual traditions and African ecologies, your work has spanned a broad range of interconnected topics. Can you give us a brief outline of this journey?
When I entered academia in the 1980s, I started as a scholar of literature in the broadest sense: ancient Greek Drama, European literatures (including Russian and French) in translation, African American and Black Diasporic literatures, and African literatures, largely written in English. With time I realized that my understanding of the postcolonial experiences in Africa would require much more than just a study of cultural streams in English. I broadened my interest to the broader study of African cultures, which would necessitate some attention to other streams of cultural production and an understanding of Black intellectual traditions that also shaped cultural imaginaries on the continent. That meant moving the gaze to oral traditions in Africa and also looking for Africa’s elsewhere—think of Africa’s Indian Ocean trade with India, the Persian Empire and the Far East in general—and, more importantly, tracing the Transatlantic slave roots and routes, what these connections meant for understanding Africa’s diaspora and what these connections have meant for the politics and cultural currents within the continent. This is how I got interested in Black intellectual traditions that found their inspiration from African indigenous modes of thought; African nationalism and its connections to Black liberation movements such as the Harlem Renaissance, Pan-Africanist movement and of course the liberation struggles on the continent, and the cultural currents that these streams of struggle unleashed. These led me to the study of postcolonial literatures, popular cultural streams and cultural products produced on the margins of mainstream culture, and to Ubuntu, a Southern African philosophy that emphasizes our interdependence not simply as human beings, but in relation to the totality of our environment. My study revealed that our environment was destroyed through activities such as extractivism of all sorts, largely driven by the desire for absolute profit, often at the expense of environmental sustainability and the ethics of care. My current research on Ubuntu and African ecologies endeavors to understand how ancient wisdom/philosophies can be a source of alternative visions for sustainable development.
Your exploration of the role of ancestral knowledge systems and indigenous ways of understanding the world has highlighted their relevance to today’s challenges. Tell us a bit more about this.
French philosopher and environmentalist Michel Serres has warned that global climate change calls for new epistemologies that no longer imagine themselves as separate specializations, as we need what he calls a “collective ethics in the face of the world’s fragility.” Similarly, scholars such as Kevin Gary Behrens and Achille Mbembe, among others like myself, have argued that African endogenous eco-philosophy positions have not been adequately considered in the global dialogue on ways to address the current climate crisis. My position is simple: We need to start looking at indigenous forms of knowledge, not simply as alternative epistemologies but also as a method for dialogue and conversation between multiple epistemes in order to address the challenges facing humanity and the planetary universe.
We must begin experiencing ourselves as being part of nature, rather than as an outside force destined to dominate it
As I pointed out at AmCham Greece’s 21st Corporate Responsibility Conference in October 2023, the challenges confronting humanity today reside in our footprints—and so do the answers to those challenges. That world though needs new ways of thinking, which a philosophy like Ubuntu offers, and that is the awareness of our interdependence and relations of mutuality not just between humans but more importantly between humans and non-humans. The co-principle of Ubuntu is co-agency: the awareness that agency does not just reside with humans but also with non-humans. It is the awareness that non-humans are implicated in those instances of human agency—agency as action and/or effect rather than intentionality. Landscape, animals, and other non-humans produce effects on humans as well as the broader system. For example, stewardship of the environment is a highly cherished principle in Ubuntu philosophy. Ubuntu ethics impels us to understand that non-humans are morally considerable because they too have been forged or created through the natural processes of the Earth alongside humans and are therefore inextricably interconnected with the natural processes that continue to create and sustain life.
How can Ubuntu, with its emphasis on connection and interdependence, be mobilized to drive corporate responsibility and sustainability efforts?
To reopen the future of our planet to all who inhabit it as Ubuntu philosophy encourages us, we will have to learn how to share it again among humans, but also among humans and non-humans. Ubuntu encourages eco-justice aimed at restoration of the cultural and environmental commons through a re-establishing of the interdependence of people on people, other species, and other ecosystems for survival and for the wellbeing of future generations. The hyper-separation of human communities from the natural world renders communities unsustainable and impoverished. We must begin experiencing ourselves as being part of nature, rather than as an outside force destined to dominate and conquer it. Ubuntu is useful in reminding us, and the corporate world in particular, of our situatedness in nature and the need to mobilize communal awareness and responsibility toward the environment—that we share life rather than own it. This vision of community extends beyond humans and is inclusive of the more than human. The challenge, therefore, is to reconfigure those forces that have created the problems in the first place and to avoid the indiscriminate use of resources as if they are infinite. Finally, and more importantly, Ubuntu philosophy, with its anti-anthropogenic values, should help the corporate community to start working on changing value systems on how the world, or shall I say the planet and its resources, ought to be governed and managed for sustainability.
Ubuntu in my view, offers the corporate world community and the rest of us new ways of re-imagining the future by pointing to our shared responsibility in ensuring that we protect the environment for our own good as the human community. This may entail a radically revised idea of corporate responsibility that goes beyond philanthropic gestures and emphasizes working with communities to build eco-friendly values and projects that are not just human-centered, but rest on ethics of care.
