Ubuntu/Hunhu and Youth Bulge: Unpacking the Nexus

Abstract

This study unravels the worldview of Ubuntu/Hunhu, an African interactive philosophy of humanity, in relation to the youth bulge. It gains its impetus from Afrocentric thinkers such as Fanon (1968), who holds that, “each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it.” Attention in this analysis is on urban youths. Utilising three residential suburbs geographically located in the City of Gweru in Zimbabwe, the study argues that the cosmopolitan landscape’s resocialising effect has far-reaching implications for human factor development. The critical pillars of Ubuntu/Hunhu, such as honesty, hard work, industriousness and moral rootedness, which, among others, promote norms and ideals, are slowly but surely being dislocated and marginalised in response to the encroachment of the ever-evolving globalisation and internationalism. Black youths have unconsciously become willing, cooperating partners in the demise of the existential philosophy that culturally developed an entire civilisation. It concludes that, while the external encroachment of Western modes and codes of socialisation and child development is now at the core, the person emerging from society as a cultural institution, cannot effectively and efficiently function. This study is guided and informed by lived and livable ontological experiences as enshrined in the Igbo proverbial adage: “What an old man can see sitting down, the youth cannot see standing up.”