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/ 215 / Chapter 8 Out of Commission Salus or Ubuntu? 8.1.1 On the terms set forth by the TRC, the type of community we find enacted in Greig Coetzee’s Past Imperfect would have a very specific name: ubuntu. Translated sometimes as “humanity,” “compassion,” and “recognition of the humanity of the other”1 and sometimes simply as“caring for the community,”2 ubuntu is most often interpreted within transitional justice in opposition to the basic concepts of liberal legality: it is understood to prioritize symbiosis and cooperation over competition between individuals, social harmony and forgiveness over punishment, restorative justice over adversarial litigation, and duties to the collective over individual rights.3 It’s in this sense that ubuntu is usually understood to“permeate”the 1996 Constitution4 and to be central to the lexicon the TRC attempted to set into place to dissociate the postapartheid state from its predecessor.5 Despite this centrality, however, scholars of the TRC seldom have posed the term’s translation as a problem for thought. Instead, ubuntu is most often translated in the manner that Dipesh Chakrabarty has called, in the double sense,“rough”—­ a translation that is careless, hasty, or even abusive and whose very inaccuracy or imprecision is precisely what makes it most useful for the language of command , for the“rough-­ and-­ ready methods of colonial rule.”6 It’s not by accident, then, that the less roughly one takes the task of translating ubuntu, the more thoughtfully and carefully one considers its grammar and logic, the more one is led to question the assumption, so widespread in postapartheid jurisprudence, that ubuntu does nothing more than, as Mark Sanders has put it, “regulate[] and limit[] the rights of the individual in favor of the collective.”7 It is not, in other words, by accident that the scholars who are most mindful of the history of colonial anthropology also have been the most inclined to doubt the wisdom of translating ubuntu on the assumption that African traditions are uniquely suited to reciprocal, 216 / The Impossible Machine harmonic, forgiving, and communal ways of life.8 Other readers, perhaps for similar reasons, have preferred to arrive at their understanding of ubuntu through careful and methodical philological work, deriving from the Zulu proverb umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu formulas that are downright Kantian in their austerity (e.g.,“a person depends on other persons to be a person” or“a person is a person through other persons”).9 But while such renderings may be more accurate than the blunt conversion of ubuntu into the newest communtarianism ,even they are not without their own sort of errancy.To begin, as Sanders observes, the very assumption that one could translate umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu in the imperative, as if it were a Kantian maxim regulating the conduct of moral persons, is already off the mark: this is, Sanders seems to suggest, to mistranslate into the familiar terms of modern moral philosophy a phrase whose grammar suggests, if anything, an ontological dispropriation of the moral person.10 Even a translation of ubuntu that is accurate in a philological sense, in other words, is thus no guarantee that one will have thought the term beyond the limits of colonial reason. If anything, in fact, philology is not so much an antidote to“rough translation ” as a more erudite version of it. As Valentin Mudimbe has shown, contemporary African philosophers have long criticized the colonial underpinnings of the ethnophilosophical practice of trying to reconstruct an“African Weltanschauung” or“unconscious philosophy” from philological analysis of isolated utterances passed down from oral tradition.11 In Mudimbe’s view, the extremely detailed translations of the “ntu vision of the human being” that one finds in the work of scholars like Alexis Kagame or Tshiamalenga Ntumba owe much to the discipline of colonial philology.12 For Mudimbe, consequently, the indispensable condition for contemporary African philosophy is a critique of the colonial epistemes that enable scholars to arrive at “accurate” knowledge of “Africanicity.”13 These epistemes are, in Mudimbe’s account,not at all limited to open condescension: they range from the reduction of African thought to a“mirror”for rediscovering the truths of Western philosophy, to the exoticizing generalizations of colonial anthropology, to the exacting particularizations of colonial philology. The most careful thinkers of ubuntu are aware of this: they are alive not only to the silent agency of colonial epistemes but also to the cunning and interdisciplinarity of those epistemes,and they take steps,accordingly,to differentiate...

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