For many outside Africa, the word ubuntu is just a software brand or a vague slogan about togetherness. In much of sub-Saharan Africa, however, it is a moral tradition. It frames human beings as deeply relational and bound to one another in mutual care. At first glance, this can seem at odds with the competitive dynamism of the free market. A closer look suggests the opposite. Ubuntu offers a moral grammar for markets. It shows how economic liberty, far from eroding solidarity, can be its strongest guardian.
Ubuntu is often translated as “I am because we are.” The phrase captures the conviction that personhood is not a solitary achievement but a shared reality. In practice, ubuntu expresses itself in hospitality, reciprocity, respect for elders, and a sense of responsibility for the vulnerable. These are not government programs. They are virtues cultivated in households, villages, and congregations, carried on through ritual, story, and daily life.
When Archbishop Desmond Tutu invoked ubuntu during the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he was not appealing to a socialist utopia. He was drawing on a native ethic of mercy and responsibility that sees justice as restorative rather than purely retributive. Ubuntu at its best binds freedom to virtue.
Critics sometimes present this communitarian language as an implicit rejection of markets. The assumption is that to be pro community is to be anti capitalist. But this dichotomy is a modern invention. Long before European colonial administrations, African societies had thriving systems of trade and entrepreneurship embedded in communal structures. In precolonial West Africa, for example, Hausa traders built long-distance commercial networks based on trust and reputation. East African coastal cities flourished as hubs of Indian Ocean commerce combining kinship obligations with sophisticated mercantile practices. These were living examples of what Catholic Social Teaching later called subsidiarity, the principle that decisions should be made at the smallest, most local level capable of handling them.
Markets and community are not natural enemies. Markets depend on trust, honesty, and voluntary cooperation, virtues that cannot be legislated into existence but are cultivated in families, neighborhoods, and congregations. Ubuntu describes precisely that moral soil.
The collapse of African economies under late colonial and post-independence central planning reinforces the point. State monopolies on agriculture, punitive licensing systems, and ideologically driven “African socialism” displaced local initiative and weakened the very communal networks they claimed to protect. Far from embodying ubuntu, these policies eroded it, replacing neighborly reciprocity with bureaucratic patronage.
Wherever African governments have loosened their grip and allowed people to trade freely, ubuntu has reasserted itself in economic form. Micro enterprise, rotating savings clubs, mobile money, and informal credit associations rooted in personal trust have lifted millions out of poverty without massive state programs. In Kenya, for example, the rise of M Pesa, a mobile money platform, was not a government brainchild but a bottom-up innovation built on existing social networks. It allowed families and small businesses to exchange value quickly and securely, strengthening local ties while expanding opportunity.
Western Christians should recognize something familiar here. Ubuntu echoes the biblical picture of humanity as created in the image of a relational God and called into covenantal community. The New Testament letters are filled with “one another” commands such as love one another, bear one another’s burdens, and outdo one another in showing honor. These mirror ubuntu’s emphasis on interdependence. Yet Scripture also presupposes private property, voluntary exchange, and the moral agency of individuals. In Acts, believers share their goods freely, not by compulsion. Paul instructs the Thessalonians to work with their own hands so they may lack nothing and be able to help others. The Christian vision is neither collectivist nor atomistic but a tapestry of free persons bound together by charity and justice.
Ubuntu can also help correct a distortion in contemporary market debates. Too often advocates of economic freedom defend markets purely in terms of efficiency or consumer choice. Meanwhile critics denounce them as engines of greed. Ubuntu offers a richer language. It reminds us that the point of commerce is not merely consumption but communion, people meeting each other’s needs through creativity, work, and exchange.
Consider a small roadside market in Kampala or Lagos. Each stallholder is pursuing her own interest by selling tomatoes, mending shoes, or offering phone repairs. Yet each also depends on the trust of customers and neighbors, informal credit extended by suppliers, and networks of kin who help with childcare. This is market life embedded in community life, and it is how most of the world actually lives. Policy that ignores this reality in favor of abstract planning almost always does harm.
Ubuntu also helps us imagine a moral check on the abuses of power that can occur in markets as in governments. It affirms the dignity of the poor and the stranger not as clients of a welfare state but as fellow members of the human family. It calls business leaders to see employees and suppliers not merely as cost centers but as partners in a shared project of human flourishing. And it warns against the temptation common to elites of every ideology to treat people as data points for social engineering rather than as persons with agency and stories.
This does not mean baptizing every informal practice as virtuous or denying the need for the rule of law. Ubuntu without the discipline of justice can degenerate into cronyism or nepotism. But the cure for these pathologies is not to eradicate community in favor of technocracy. It is to strengthen the habits of honesty, reciprocity, and personal responsibility that ubuntu at its best cultivates. In biblical terms, the law is fulfilled in love.
What would it look like to apply these lessons more broadly? Development agencies and foreign churches could focus less on top-down aid projects and more on empowering local entrepreneurs, cooperatives, and congregations to solve their own problems. The Catholic principle of subsidiarity and the Protestant emphasis on vocation both point in this direction. So does ubuntu. In practical terms, this might mean micro loans rather than grants, property rights reform rather than perpetual relief, and partnerships that respect local moral frameworks rather than imposing alien agendas on sensitive issues of family and sexuality.
African policymakers themselves can draw on ubuntu to resist the siren call of statist paternalism. True solidarity does not require smothering initiative. It requires creating a stable legal environment by enforcing contracts, protecting property, and limiting corruption in which people can act responsibly for one another. This is ubuntu translated into institutional form.
Christians in the Global North can also learn from ubuntu how to heal the fragmentation of their own societies. Loneliness, family breakdown, and the loss of intermediate institutions have left many Westerners rich but rootless. Market freedom alone cannot repair this—but neither can the state. What is needed is a recovery of the virtues that make freedom humane: generosity, hospitality, and mutual accountability. These are not foreign imports. Rather, they are the marrow of the Christian tradition. Ubuntu simply reminds us.
The South African philosopher Mogobe Ramose writes that ubuntu “carries in its bosom the ontological truth of human interdependence.” In a world where both collectivist authoritarianism and hyper-individualist consumerism threaten to reduce persons to numbers, whether in a state registry or an algorithmic profile, this truth is urgently needed. Markets work best not when people are isolated but when they are rooted in webs of trust and responsibility. Ubuntu gives a name to that web.
The free market is not an amoral arena but a moral practice of exchange among moral agents. It flourishes where communities cultivate honesty, diligence, and mutual aid, and it withers where these are absent. Ubuntu offers an African articulation of this universal reality. It does not abolish the individual but situates the individual within a narrative of belonging. It does not reject economic liberty but shows how liberty finds its highest purpose in service.
“I am because we are.” That proverb need not be a rebuke to economic liberty. Properly understood, it is its foundation. Without trust, reciprocity, and shared moral norms—without ubuntu—the free market cannot survive. With them, it can be not only a mechanism of exchange but also a school of virtue, forming people who know how to live free because they know how to live together.
