Harambe as a pillar of Ubuntu

Harambee does not stand alone. It is one of five key values through which Ubuntu is expressed.

Ubuntu is the worldview from which Black people of Africa derive relational, communal, societal, environmental and spiritual knowledges, values and practices. These five dimensions are expressed through five values: ukama (relational), ujamaa (communal), harambee (societal), umvelo (environmental), and uroho (spiritual and moral).

Ukama guides how people relate to one another through bonds of kinship, care and mutual belonging. Ujamaa frames life as a shared communal project, in which no one flourishes in isolation from the group. Harambee is the societal value, whole of society collective action that moves beyond the individual, family or group, in pursuit of the common good. Umvelo shapes humanity’s relationship with the natural world, responsibility, stewardship and belonging to creation. Uroho grounds human life in spiritual and ethical purpose, the inner compass that orients all the other values.

Positioned within this framework, harambee is the value that scales Ubuntu up from relationships and community to the level of whole societies. Where ukama and ujamaa operate at the level of people who know one another, harambee operates at the level of people who may never meet but who are nonetheless bound together as members of one society.

This is also where the deeper meaning of harambee becomes clear: you cannot refuse to be part of what you are, society. Individual identity, in this worldview, is inseparable from societal health. Ubuntu is often summarised as I am because we are. Uharambee extends that logic to the societal scale: we act as one, for all.

This lesson answers a question that is often assumed rather than examined: what exactly is society, and how does it differ from community?

Society is the broadest human collective, the entire body of people who share a common political, institutional and structural existence. It encompasses all individuals, groups, institutions, governments and systems, held together by common norms, laws and governance. Society is inclusive of all: it contains every individual, family and group within it, and no one stands outside of it. Society is also governed by shared structures: laws, national institutions and a collective sense of belonging to one common order.

Levels of society, from smallest to largest scope, include kingdom (which may be the same as national, emirate or sultanate), national, regional (such as ECOWAS, SADC or the EAC), continental, and global.

Community is different. Community is a specific part of society, one or more villages, suburbs, towns or wards, made up of people sharing an identity, location or interest. Community operates at the meso level, while society operates at the macro level.

This distinction is the foundation for everything that follows in this course, because harambee is the unit of society, not the unit of community. Society is the level at which harambee operates, where collective mobilisation creates change that belongs to everyone. A community project, however valuable, is not harambee on its own unless it connects to and serves the whole of society.

Beyond society, the harambee model extends further outward to two additional levels: mega, the environmental level, and meta, the spiritual level. Where society marks the boundary of most social development thinking, harambee treats the environment as the level at which humanity’s relationship with the natural world, responsibility, stewardship and belonging to creation, becomes part of social development itself. Beyond even that sits the spiritual level, meta, which grounds the whole model in ethical and spiritual purpose, the inner compass that orients all the other levels. In this way, harambee does not stop at the whole of society as its outer limit, it treats society as one point along a wider continuum that ultimately extends to the environment and the spiritual.

Now, you should be able to define society and community in your own words, place each on the micro, meso, macro, mega and meta scale, and explain why harambee requires the societal level specifically. You should be able to name all five Ubuntu values, explain what each governs.