Ushaba Quotes

“Umteto wesintu prescribes five amabanga okuphila (phases of becoming) as the stages by which to attain ubuntu. These are birth or the introduction of experience, growth or opening up and outward; and the adaptation to the demands of growth, maturity, or the highest point of achievement. Then there is the decline, the winding down of experience and death of the conclusion of experience for the person. Each phase is the moment of living out a principle; babyhood expresses the excellence which inheres in the person. During infancy the child grows; opening outward characterises his personality; he needs all the latitude he can have to learn and grow and develop his personality. At the height of his power he identifies himself with his neighbor to project society into the future or to guarantee its survival. Decline is important, too, because it enables the person to reassess his life and to give it meaning; he opens himself to all experience and to all persons; he responds to the call of mutuality. Death ferries him to the world of spirit-forms and death in the latter is rebirth into the physical world. The person, like all creation, is always moving between 'death' and 'birth' and vice versa. The cycle has no beginning and no end; it can neither be caused nor terminated because the person is a cell of the infinite consciousness.
Ubuntu denies that the person owes his existence to any power outside of himself. The consciousness does not create him; he is its constituent organ. Since an infinity is by definition a unity, the consciousness cannot be other than whole; nothing can be taken away from it and nothing can be added to it; it cannot be whole if the person is taken out of it; it needs him as much in order to be a whole as he needs it to survive.
It is this element of mutuality which binds the consciousness and the person and which keeps the cosmic order a unity and gives rise to the mutuality principle. . . . God is the cell of the consciousness infinitised, while the human being is God personalised.”
― Jordan K. Ngubane, Ushaba

“In an orthodox Buntu home, emphasis is on harmony, stability and mutuality. The person lives for all and the group lives for the person.”
― Jordan K. Ngubane, Ushaba

“The white man's ideals and values together with the patterns of society to which they gave rise had not been evolved for racially or culturally mixed societies. They came under increasing strain or cracked in proportion as the area of white influence widened on the globe. In the resulting conflicts, the peoples of colour developed syncretic cultures to adapt to the demands of survival in the conditions created by white domination. In time the colonial peoples of Africa, the Americas and Asia found themselves divided into the traditionalists and the syncretists. . . .
English is the link which binds this vast conglomerate of races and cultures. It assumes different forms in each racio-cultural milieu and develops different perspectives. the common differences create the peculiar consensus and identity which distinguish the English-speaking world from the others.”
― Jordan K. Ngubane, Ushaba

“A state is able to maintain its viability as long as it can feed the city masses; that is, as log as it can convert food into the productive potential and then into wealth which must be enough to produce the food.
Whenever a state breaks the cycle and locks up the bulk of its wealth in unproductive armies or burns its accumulated wealth in wars, it reduces its ability to provide for its people and sets itself firmly on the road to final catastrophe.”
― Jordan K. Ngubane, Ushaba

“The Buntu principle of agmination.”
― Jordan K. Ngubane, Ushaba

“People ask how the Afrikaner can be in his senses when he gives the entire Black World a vested interest in his destruction. How can he survive if he is finally thrown out of Africa, when he has nothing to give? The Jews survived because they had something to give.”
― Jordan K. Ngubane, Ushaba

“Shawcross passes for a great liberal; a great friend of the Africans; a great student of the race problem and of history. But for him, as for most whites, the Africans had no history before the advent of the whites!”
― Jordan K. Ngubane, Ushaba

“These rules require that she should prepare the ground for the statement of the theme, develop her subject, establish her point, relate the point to prevailing conditions, and then conclude her presentation. These steps are based on the movement of the person through life on this earth and represent birth, growth, maturity, decline, and death. The fingers of the open right hand symbolizes each stage and birth starts with the shortest finger.”
― Jordan K. Ngubane, Ushaba

“He has forced the Afrikaner into the position where the Arabs placed the Jews.”
― Jordan K. Ngubane, Ushaba

“The Afrikaner's fear is compounded by his unique position in the white world. He is a creature of the beauty and the ugliness of South Africa, while he is a white man, his psyche has been affected profoundly by the African.”
― Jordan K. Ngubane, Ushaba

“Integration is a negation of equality. One race arrogates to itself positions of superiority; the weaker acknowledge the superiority by fighting to be recognised as the equals of those whom they acknowledge to be their superiors, on terms laid down by their conquerors. They end up upholding the pattern of life which has brought about their ruin; they become slaves by choice.”
― Jordan K. Ngubane, Ushaba

“His theory is that the Afrikaner is unique among the peoples of South Africa. If the English lost their position of economic dominance, they would lose their money, but still be free to emigrate to other parts of the English-speaking world. The Africans have lost their land and freedom, but survive because of their numbers and will win in the end because history, Free Africa, world opinion and numbers are on their side. The Afrikaner has political power; if he lost it he would lose everything. He has nowhere to go, for Holland would be too much of a foreign country for him to survive in.”
― Jordan K. Ngubane, Ushaba

“Zulu law stated that the woman must not change her name when she married. . . . The white missionaries opposed this recognition of the woman's equality with the man. . . . They forced the Zulus to adopt the . . . customs of the white man; on the day of her marriage, a girl . . . adopted her husband's name.”
― Jordan K. Ngubane, Ushaba

“Umteto wesinto enlarges the human personality; while it rejects the view that the person lives to carry out a mandate, it emphasises the enduring obligation to be responsible every moment of his life to the challenge of being human. It teaches that hi is fulfilled when he sees to it that his neighbor makes the best possible use of his life in the light of his choices and his abilities. The enduring obligation to one's neighbor is the hallmark of a civilised person.”
― Jordan K. Ngubane, Ushaba

“The ugliness of the system of the white man's system of values (umteto wesilungu); the wickedness of the theory that the person is a creature . . . the person is his own creator; that he is not indebted to any power outside of himself for what he is, not to God, not to any idol and not even to the spirits of his ancestors themselves. He is himself the conscious cause and the determining of his destiny.”
― Jordan K. Ngubane, Ushaba

“Government policy goes beyond segregating black and white, it separates every African language group from every other.”
― Jordan K. Ngubane, Ushaba

“The world of the white man is at last on trial, the Africans say. It has been built on arrogance, larceny, lying, and hatred for the African.”
― Jordan K. Ngubane, Ushaba