One of the great privileges of my life has been the opportunities I've had to visit Rwanda and get to know some of its people. It's a remarkable country in many ways, often staggeringly beautiful and full of all sorts of surprises. Each of my five visits has given me fresh energy and a wider perspective on the world.
Of course, the defining event in the recent history of Rwanda is the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, in which hundreds of thousands of people were killed. More than thirty years on, Rwanda is by no means a perfect place. But that a functioning society could be rebuilt after such horror is extraordinary in itself.
There is a word in Kinyarwanda, the language of Rwanda, which has been on my mind a great deal lately.
Ubumuntu. Say it roughly as oo-boo-mun-oo. (Honestly. That t is silent)
The dictionary definition is simply "humanity", but it carries much more emotional weight than that might imply. Sometimes it is translated as "greatness of heart", but even that doesn't quite go deep enough.
It is about what it means to be truly human: to live with integrity and empathy, and to recognise the humanity of others, even when the world is shouting at us not to.
Of course, it is closely related to Ubuntu, a word made much more familiar in computing circles. But ubumuntu seems to carry a particular weight in Rwanda. This is a country which knows, within living memory, what can happen when people cease to see their neighbours as fully human. The genocide did not begin with killing. It began much earlier, with language, with division, with the steady insistence that some people were somehow less human than others.
That is perhaps why ubumuntu feels to me like rather more than a pleasant ideal. It is an urgent necessity.
And that is why I've been thinking about it.
There seems to be a hardening in our own public life at the moment. We are becoming increasingly comfortable with language which divides people into "us" and "them": people who belong and people who don't; people whose suffering deserves our compassion and people whose suffering can safely be ignored.
Migrants become "illegals". Refugees become an "invasion". People living in poverty become scroungers. Those who argue for inclusion are dismissed as "woke", as though being alert to injustice were somehow an embarrassing weakness.
None of those things is remotely comparable with what happened in Rwanda, and it would be grotesque to pretend otherwise. But Rwanda's history does remind us that language matters. The habit of denying other people's humanity is not something that appears suddenly, fully formed. It can grow slowly, almost unnoticed, as contempt becomes normal and compassion begins to look foolish.
Perhaps that is why I find ubumuntu such a helpful word.
Because it doesn't only ask me to recognise the humanity of people I instinctively like, or understand, or agree with. That would be easy.
It asks me to recognise humanity in the stranger. In the person whose politics make me angry. In the frightened migrant arriving in a small boat. In the person whose behaviour I find baffling or offensive. In the person I would much rather dismiss with a label than encounter as another complicated, vulnerable human being.
And, inconveniently, it also asks me to remember the humanity of those doing the labelling.
That may be the hardest part.
There is always a temptation, when resisting dehumanising language, simply to create another group of people whom we are permitted to despise. But that doesn't get us very far. If ubumuntu means anything, surely it means refusing that temptation too.
For me, as a Christian, there is something profoundly familiar about all this. Jesus repeatedly draws attention to the person everyone else has stopped seeing properly: the foreigner, the leper, the woman with the wrong reputation, the tax collector, the beggar by the roadside. Again and again the question seems to be: Can you see this person? Really see them?
But ubumuntu does not depend on sharing my faith, or any faith at all. Its claim is much more basic than that. We do not owe one another dignity because we believe the same things. We owe it because we are human beings together.
That, perhaps, is what makes the idea so demanding. There is no theological test to pass, no political tribe to join, no agreement required. The common ground is simply our common humanity.
Perhaps that is what we need to recover.
Not niceness. Not endless agreement. Not pretending that injustice doesn't matter, or that cruel ideas should go unchallenged.
Something much more demanding than that.
The stubborn determination to remain human ourselves, and to recognise the humanity of those around us.
Ubumuntu.
It seems to me that we could do with rather more of it.
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richard <AT> deckzero <DOT> uk