Ubuntu Leadership Quotes

[Don Beck] said, after hearing about the three stages of epiphany, "There's a word in the Bantu languages that [Archbishop Desmond] Tutu has used to help bring the entire country of South Africa together: ubuntu, meaning 'Today I share with you because tomorrow you share with me.'" The word can also be translated "I am because we are.

Unity is not a myth. It's a progressive action.

If you lacked ubuntu, … you lacked an indispensable ingredient to being human. You might have much of the world’s goods, and you might have position and authority, but if you did not have ubuntu, you did not amount to much.18

The Renaissance idea of individualism never penetrated Africa like it did Europe and America. The African model of leadership is better expressed as ubuntu, the idea that people are empowered by other people, that we become our best selves through unselfish interaction with others.