GreyDoveTravels

The Afrikans word "apartheid" means "to be holy" or "to be set apart." Established as a community following the Boer War, Afrikaners with the support of the British developed the system of racial segregation and oppression known as apartheid. A system that was implemented and enforced by numerous acts and laws that institutionalized racial discrimination and ensured the dominance of white people over people of other races. Apartheid was distinguished from segregation practiced in other countries by the systematic ways it was formalized in law. Apartheid became a comprehensive legislative project only after the National Party came into power in 1948. However, it was preceded by many statutes established by previous British and Afrikaner administrations in South Africa's provinces. Archbishop Tutu's spiritual leadership was instrumental in exposing the evils of apartheid through his  resistance to seeing an apartheid state as a city of God, which it ...

Ubuntu (pronounced oo-BOON-tu ) is an African concept of personhood in which the identity of the self is understood to be formed interdependently through community. The word ubuntu comes from the Sub-Saharan languages known as Bantu. Ubuntu is the interdependence of persons for the exercise, development, and fulfillment of their potential to be both individuals and community. Archbishop Tutu's theology of ubuntu is complex, but ultimately he describes ubuntu as hospitality, an open and welcoming attitude that is willing to share, to be generous and caring. Ubuntu is the development of the kind of character in a person who proves a neighbor to a stranger and welcomes them as friends. Ubuntu forms knowledge that human existence is caught up and inextricably bound up with God's creation and that a solitary human being is a contradiction in terms. "I need other persons," Tutu concludes, "to become a person myself."