Birth of the uBuntu girl

‘Thabi, my Thabi. I’m leaving. I’ve resigned.’

My Thabi. My Zulu mom, the pillar of Rhino River Lodge. This sanctuary in the African bush has been my home for the past year. Managing it was the best life: a perfect setting, supportive and caring owners and a complement of staff that work and play together like a real family.

Thabi is in a state of shock. Her spoon free falls into the bowl. I can see her mind seething with vivid Zulu words and sayings that, once translated, leave a much softer landing space for her English rendering.

‘The tsotsis are going to kill you!’

And so begins a two-week campaign of daily protests against my planned-unplanned journey. Every day she explores another angle, a different scenario.

‘You are going to starve!’

We are in the kitchen preparing Thabi’s renowned mushroom quiche. I am competing, yet again, to see if I can finally master the secret of 
her pastry.

‘Thabi, if a hungry stranger walked into your village, would you turn her away?’

Silence. Then her last attempt, feeble this time, worn down by my hard-headedness, ‘You’re going to ruin your skin . . . .’

‘Thanks, my Thabisile. But I’ll take a big hat and some sunscreen.’

Her back straightens and she looks me in the eye. Simultaneously defeated and triumphant.

‘It means that you are going to look for the spirit of uBuntu.’

uBuntu is a South African buzzword used as marketing tool by corporates and politicians. Or so I think. Thabi explains its meaning to me on this day, when she has just crushed all hope that I could ever oust her as pastry champion. ‘Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu – people are people through other people.’

And she devises a plan that makes her feel more comfortable with my leaving. ‘We must explain to people what you are doing on a T-shirt that you must wear every day.’

Thabi helps me with the isiZulu wording and translation:

ASIFUNDENI
iNtombazane
emhlophe
efuna
ukufunda
UBUNTU!
Ngicela usizo

The T-shirt leads to the name of the uBuntu Girl. ‘Girl, Thabi? But I’m 34!’ Thabi says that I am a girl according to her, because I am not married and I do not have children. I almost tell her, jokingly, that the word she might mean to use is not girl, but ‘smart’!

On my last morning the staff prepare a farewell breakfast and it is with more than a heavy stomach that I leave my home in the bush. The people here create a hole in my heart that can never be filled by anybody else. The owners of this special lodge say that there will always be a place here where I belong, that I may return whenever I want to this realm of acacias and nightjars, rhinos and dung beetles. This place with its smells of earth’s deepest composting secrets, this place of bright pink impala lily blossoms and brownest brown drought, of funny-looking bugs and funny people. Goodbye to sunsets in the African bush.

The sun rises on another chapter as the bus makes its way to the Eastern Cape. I am heading there first to help my sister plan her wedding before I set off into the unknown. I take an old yellow 33-litre backpack and my camera along. It makes sense to leave from East London, rather than go back to my home town Eshowe in KwaZulu-Natal.

Then it dawns on me that I have no planned route. All I know at this point is that I want to travel clockwise through all nine provinces of our magnificent country. I want to see whether I can let go of the human need for control. My gut says that people will guide me where I need to go. The locals know best, right?

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Rhino River Lodge

Rhino River Lodge is situated along the banks of the Msunduze River in the Southern part of the Zululand Rhino Reserve. The reserve was chosen as the second release site for the Black Rhino Range Expansion Project (a partnership between Ezemvelo KwaZulu-Natal Wildlife and the World Wide Fund for Nature). The aim of the project was to translocate founder populations of black rhino from the saturated provincial and national parks to private and community-owned reserves with adequate security for the protection of rhino. In 2005 a founder population of black rhino were released into their new home here and to date the commitment and passion of the staff (and guests) and meaningful interaction with the local community has seen the population grow. They have been able to export mature males to keep the programme running elsewhere.

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uBuntu

The core of uBuntu can best be summarised as follows:

“A person is a person through other people strikes an affirmation of one’s humanity through recognition of an ‘other’ in his or her uniqueness and difference. It is a demand for a creative intersubjective formation in which the ‘other’ becomes a mirror (but only a mirror) for my subjectivity. This idealism suggests to us that humanity is not embedded in my person solely as an individual; my humanity is co-substantively bestowed upon the other and me. Humanity is a quality we owe to each other. We create each other and need to sustain this otherness creation. And if we belong to each other, we participate in our creations: we are because you are, and since you are, definitely I am. The ‘I am’ is not a rigid subject, but a dynamic self-constitution dependent on this otherness creation of relation and distance.”
– Michael Onyebuchi Eze (a definition)

“A traveller through our country would stop at a village, and he didn’t have to ask for food or for water. Once he stops, the people give him food, entertain him. That is one aspect of uBuntu but uBuntu has various aspects. uBuntu does not mean that people should not enrich themselves. The question therefore is: Are you going to do so in order to enable the community around you to improve?”
– Nelson Mandela

“It is the essence of being human. It speaks of the fact that my humanity is caught up and is inextricably bound up in yours. I am human because I belong. It speaks about wholeness, it speaks about compassion. A person with uBuntu is welcoming, hospitable, warm and generous, willing to share. Such people are open and available to others, willing to be vulnerable, affirming of others, do not feel threatened that others are able and good, for they have a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that they belong in a greater whole. They know that they are diminished when others are humiliated, diminished when others are oppressed, diminished when others are treated as if they were less than who they are. The quality of uBuntu gives people resilience, enabling them to survive and emerge still human despite all efforts to dehumanise them.”
– Desmond Tutu

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Talking Point: What would you have said to Sonja before she left on her journey?