There’s an African ethic know as ubuntu, which holds that our common humanity derives from what we share. No person is an island.
“In our culture, there is no such thing as a solitary individual,” Archbishop Desmond Tutu has said, describing ubuntu. “A person is a person through other persons.”
I experienced ubuntu firsthand on Saturday, after our Toyota Yaris became stuck in a drainage ditch while my girlfriend and I were en route to the Drakensberg mountains that line the border between South Africa and Lesotho.
The mishap occurred as I reversed the Yaris on a narrow dirt road and failed to see the ditch in time. Luckily for us, the car lodged on the ditch’s rim, which held the vehicle in place. Otherwise the vehicle could have overturned with us in it.
As we stepped out of the car and contemplated calling a tow truck, we resigned ourselves to our plans for the sunny, 70-degree day being upended by the accident. Just then, a car arrived and three Zulu guys jumped out.
They didn’t ask whether we needed help.
Instead, they sized up the situation without our having to explain anything and then filed into the ditch with the goal of pushing the car up and over the edge.
About then a second car appeared and then a third, and out poured the passengers of both vehicles. In all, we had six men ready to lend their strength to the effort. An Indian man arrived in his pickup truck. The group hatched a plan that the truck would tow while the rest of us pushed.
In what seemed like five minutes, the car was back on the road. Though the men did not ask for anything in return for their aid, I offered them some bottles of water that we had in an ice chest in the trunk.
In that instant, nine people on a road in rural South Africa came together in a community.
Ubuntu.