ITUMELENG MAHABANE

The debate about xenophobia in South Africa is not really a debate. It is a symptom of an unfinished liberation, a decolonisation deferred, and a philosophy of being that was central to the struggle and has since been hollowed out. To understand what has been lost, we need to start with Botho.

Botho/uBuntu is more than an ethic of how to treat others; it is an ontology of how selves are continuously produced. Its central claim is not only that we are judged by our relations, but that we are constituted through them. Interaction is not a meeting of fixed beings, but a site of mutual transformation in which all involved are made and unmade.

Colonialism and apartheid were not only systems of extraction and exclusion. They were relational regimes that structured the world in ways that produced diminished forms of being. They did not simply misperceive people as less than human; they organised everyday life so that people became less able to live and experience themselves as fully human. Their legacy persists wherever our institutions continue to organise life through separation and through hierarchies of conditional recognition.

The damage was not only to what people had or could do. It was to what people could become and, crucially, because humans are never finished projects, to how far they would now have to travel to find themselves again.

The deepest implication of Botho follows directly: the human is not a stable category but an ongoing achievement.

Historically, who counts as fully human shifts with the regimes that govern life; existentially, each person’s humanity is expanded or diminished through the structures and relations they inhabit. If that is true, then liberation cannot be reduced to redistribution or representation alone. It requires the deliberate reconfiguration of the relational field — economic, spatial, social — through which people become who they are and can still become who they are not yet.

The deepest violence we continue to live with is the normalisation of a conditional humanism, one that ties dignity and freedom to property, productivity, and the arbitrary fact of geographic birth. It grades humanity according to ownership, employability, passport. Against this, Botho insists on a more demanding truth: that our humanity is constituted in relation, and that the measure of a society is not what it produces or accumulates, but the quality and breadth of the humanity it makes possible.

A national doctrine is not simply a set of policies. It is a design for the kinds of relations that make more expansive forms of humanity possible. This is what some of the most philosophically ambitious strands of the liberation struggle understood. From Nkrumah to Senghor, from Cabral to Césaire and Biko, the anti‑colonial project was not simply a demand for national self‑determination. It was a claim about the shared constitution of humanity under colonial fracture. Colonialism did not only steal land and labour. It severed the relational fabric through which people knew themselves, replacing it with hierarchies of race that were, at bottom, hierarchies of being. The struggle against that was not merely political. It was an experiment in ontological restoration.

Biko’s consciousness project, Césaire’s return to the source, and Nkrumah’s pan‑African solidarity: these were not isolated traditions. They were variations on a common recognition that the colonised self could be restored only through the restoration and extension of its constitutive relations. The restoration of the self was inseparable from the remaking of the field in which selves encounter and recognise one another.

We become human again together, or not at all. South Africans cannot disown this inheritance and still hope to heal.

Africa and South Africa’s unfinished liberation will not be completed by better policies administered through unchanged relations. It will require us to decide, concretely, through our institutions, our cities, and our economic arrangements, what kinds of selves we are in the business of producing and whose humanity counts. To do that is to decolonise not only our systems, but the ontology of belonging and being that those systems enact.