What Ubuntu ('I Am Because We Are') Says About Friends and Goals

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who chaired South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the late 1990s, described ubuntu this way in No Future Without Forgiveness (1999): a person with ubuntu “is open and available to others, affirming of others,” and “is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished.” The phrase behind the idea, umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, is usually translated “a person is a person through other persons.”

Short answer: ubuntu is a Southern African ethic that treats a self as something built in relationship, not something you finish alone and then bring to the table. For goals, it points to a plain practical claim: the people around you are part of how you become who you are, so letting them see what you are trying to do is not a weakness.

What follows is a Q&A, because the idea invites questions, and some of them should be uncomfortable.

Where does the phrase come from, and who gets to explain it?

The saying is Nguni, the language family that includes Zulu and Xhosa. Neighboring traditions have their own versions; in Sotho it is motho ke motho ka batho babang. Ubuntu was written into South Africa’s 1993 interim constitution, whose postscript spoke of “a need for understanding but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not for retaliation, a need for ubuntu but not for victimisation.” The Constitutional Court later discussed the concept in S v Makwanyane (1995), the case that ended the death penalty.

So this is an ethic with a legal, political and religious life, not a quote from a poster. I am an outside reader borrowing one thread. If you want the fuller picture, read African philosophers directly: Mbiti, Tutu, and the many scholars who disagree with each other about what ubuntu requires.

Is “I am because we are” a self-help slogan?

Not originally. Mbiti’s line, “I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am,” appeared in African Religions and Philosophy (1969) as a description of how many African communities understood personhood, with obligations running in every direction: to the living, the dead and the unborn.

The self-help version usually keeps the warm half (we need each other) and drops the demanding half (you owe people, and they can ask things of you). This article tries to keep the demanding half.

What does it say about friends specifically?

Take Tutu’s sentence at face value. If you are “diminished when others are diminished,” then your friends’ failures are partly yours, and yours are partly theirs. Friends are not an audience that applauds finished work. They are part of the structure holding the work up.

Compare that with the default modern picture of self-improvement: you privately choose a goal, privately fight yourself, and announce results afterward. The ubuntu picture says the fight already involves other people whether you tell them or not. They notice your tiredness, they cover for a missed plan, they absorb your bad weeks.

The research on social ties points the same direction, with the usual caveat that it is correlational. Julianne Holt-Lunstad and colleagues’ 2010 meta-analysis of 148 studies, covering over 300,000 people, found that people with stronger social relationships had about a 50 percent greater likelihood of survival over the follow-up periods than those with weaker ones. That is about health, not goals, but it fits the view that people do not run well as sealed units. A similar story is told in Roseto, Pennsylvania, where a close-knit town looked unusually healthy for a while.

What is the difference between a friend as an audience and a friend as infrastructure?

An audience watches. You perform for them, they react, and when the show ends they go home. Infrastructure carries load. You can stop thinking about a bridge and still cross it.

Here is how the two roles differ in a goal like “be up at 6:30 every weekday.”

	Friend as audience	Friend as infrastructure
When do they hear about it?	After you succeed	Before you start, and on the days you do not want to
What do they see?	A highlight	The ordinary, boring evidence
What do they owe you?	Applause	An honest “I did not see it today”
What do you owe them?	Nothing	The same visibility in return
What breaks it?	You stop posting	Either of you stops showing up

The last two rows matter most. Ubuntu is reciprocal. A friend who watches you and is never watched back has been cast as a judge, which is a worse relationship than most people want. There is a reason your closest friend can be a poor witness when the arrangement is lopsided or too soft to bear any weight.

Is there a historical version of this for something as small as waking up?

Yes, and it is almost charming. Before alarm clocks were cheap, people in industrial England paid a “knocker-up” to tap on bedroom windows with a long pole. The role was neighborly work, not a gadget. If you want the history, the knocker-up trade covers it. It is a small example of the same pattern: a thing as private as getting out of bed was, for a long time, handled by another person who knew your name and your street.

Modern alarms removed that person and left you alone with a button. That is efficient. It is also the point at which waking up became one of the few things people are expected to do in complete privacy, with no one noticing a failure.

What would an ubuntu-style approach look like in practice?

Three rules, all small.

1. Both of you report. If you ask a friend to watch your morning, you watch something of theirs. It does not need to match: a workout, a call to a relative, a page of writing.
2. Evidence beats promises. “I’ll be up” is a promise. A ten-second clip of you upright is evidence. Evidence is kinder, because nobody has to guess or argue about it.
3. Notice, then ask. If a friend misses a day, the first move is a question, not a verdict. “Rough morning?” keeps the relationship intact, and that is the whole point.

This is roughly the design behind DontSnooze, an iOS app where you post short proof that you are awake and your friends see it, react, and notice when you do not. It is one way to give a witness something real to look at. The point of the idea is the reciprocity, which a group chat can also provide if you are strict with it.

What are the limits of borrowing this idea?

Several. Ubuntu is not a technique, and nobody should claim it makes you disciplined. It is also not a license to be dragged along by people who treat you badly; scholars debate whether the ethic is conservative, pressuring individuals to conform, or liberating, protecting the vulnerable. And an app cannot create the thing the word describes, which is a community with shared obligations over years.

What a small tool can do is lower the cost of the first step. Seeing a friend’s clip at 6:40 on a Wednesday is not ubuntu in any full sense. It is a way of being known on an ordinary day, which is where most of the work happens.

What should you try this week?

Choose one friend, not a group. Agree on one visible thing each, for seven days, and a time to compare notes on Sunday. If you want a low-pressure setting for that Sunday, a cozy night in works well, and these hygge-style friend plans are built for exactly that kind of weeknight.

Then ask them one question on Sunday: on which day was it most useful that I knew you were watching?