“You are, therefore I am”

This is a lovely story from the May 2023 issue of the Chinese magazine 讀者 (Reader). I would like to translate it here.

An anthropologist came to a tribe in Africa to study the local customs and culture. On the day before his expedition ended, he set a basket full of good things to eat and presents down at the foot of a tree, then gathered the children of the tribe together, drew a line on the ground in front of them and said: “When I say ‘go’, run towards the tree. Whoever gets there first will have everything in the basket.”

The anthropologist called out “go”, and to his complete astonishment the children took one another by the hand and ran forward together.

He asked them: “Why did you run together when the fastest one of you could have had it all?”

A little girl looked at him and answered: “How could any of us enjoy our own happiness if everybody else had lost?”

Some years later the well-known South African activist Desmond Tutu used the word “ubuntu”, from Zulu, a language of southern Africa, to describe the way that little girl thought. “Ubuntu” means “I exist because of the existence of the people around me”.

Tutu explained the idea like this: “Africans have a thing called ‘ubuntu’. They believe that a person exists thanks to the existence of others, and that ‘I’ am closely bound to everyone else. As they see it, no one in their world has to be alone. When you make an effort for the people you belong to, your existence matters enormously.

Only when you have somewhere to belong do you truly come into yourself.”