I Am Because We Work: Ubuntu Philosophy and the Future of Remote Labor

Long before open offices, productivity metrics, and performance reviews, African communities understood something Western work culture still struggles to name: labor is not a transaction. It is a relationship. Work happens between people, not in spite of them. The Hausa call communal labor gáyya. The Igbo call it ọrụ ọha — work of the people, for the people, woven into the fabric of collective life. You worked because your community needed you. Because they needed you, you were somebody.

What the Office Was Built to Do

The modern workplace did not emerge neutral. It was built inside systems of racial capitalism that treated Black and Brown bodies as inputs rather than persons — units of production, not sources of wisdom. The corner office, the dress code, the meeting culture, the performance review, the implicit requirement to perform whiteness in order to be taken seriously: these are not bugs in the system. They are the system.

Research consistently documents what Afro-diasporic workers have always known in their bodies: navigating predominantly white workplaces requires sustained emotional labor that white colleagues are rarely asked to perform. Code-switching. Managing how much of yourself you bring to a meeting. Calculating whether to name what you just witnessed or stay quiet to protect your position. That chronic vigilance is not just exhausting — it is a form of harm. Psychologists call it racial battle fatigue. The body keeps the score.

When the pandemic forced millions into home offices, something unexpected happened for many Black professionals: the tax lightened. Not eliminated — racism does not stop at the front door — but the daily, embodied exposure to microaggressions, to being the only one in the room, to performing palatability, reduced. For many, productivity went up. Stress went down. That is not a coincidence. That is the body exhaling.

Ubuntu and the Meaning of Work

The Nguni Bantu philosophy of Ubuntu — umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, “a person is a person through other persons” — does not ask what you produced today. It asks who you served. What relationships did you tend? What did your labor make possible for others? These are not soft questions. They are a fundamentally different architecture of value.

Ubuntu does not oppose work. Ubuntu orients work. It locates the purpose of labor not in individual achievement but in collective flourishing. When Afro-diasporic workers step out of extractive workplace cultures and into home environments where they can light a candle, play music that feeds their spirit, and take calls without shrinking themselves, something shifts. They are not just more comfortable. They are more themselves. And a person who is more themselves does better work — not because productivity metrics improve, but because they can bring their whole intelligence to what they do.

The philosopher John Mbiti wrote that in African thought, the individual says: I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am. Remote work does not sever us from that web of relation. But it gives us the chance to choose which web we belong to — and to build new ones on our own terms.

Designing Work That Honors the Whole Person

African cosmological traditions did not separate the sacred from the everyday. The Yoruba concept of ori — the personal divinity that guides each person’s destiny — is not something you leave at home when you go to work. Your purpose, your gifts, your spiritual constitution are not personal details irrelevant to professional life. They are the foundation of it. Working in ways that honor your ori is not self-indulgence. It is alignment.

This is why environment matters — not as a productivity hack, but as a spiritual practice. A workspace that holds objects from your lineage, music that connects you to your people, light that lets you think clearly: these are not luxuries. For people who have spent years in environments designed to signal they do not fully belong, the ability to work inside a space that says you are welcome here, all of you is quietly radical.

Rhythm matters too. Many African traditions organize time not as a linear march toward productivity but as cycles — seasons, moon phases, communal rhythms that ebb and flow. The 9-to-5 is an industrial invention, not a natural law. Remote work opens a door, however narrow, to working with your body’s actual rhythms: moving when you need to move, resting when you need to rest, thinking deeply when your mind is ready for it.

Connection Is the Work

The greatest risk of remote work is not isolation. The greatest risk is individualism — the illusion that working alone means working for yourself alone. Ubuntu pushes back on that illusion. The web of relation does not disappear because we are not physically in a room together. It requires tending.

For communities in the African diaspora, remote work has created something worth naming: the possibility of global collaboration that bypasses historically exclusionary institutions. Ubuntu Village teams on two continents coordinate across time zones not because efficiency consultants told them to, but because the work itself is relational — rooted in East Harlem and East Africa simultaneously, held together by shared purpose and the kind of trust that takes years to build. That is not a Zoom call. That is Ubuntu in practice.

Multigenerational households — common in many African and Afro-diasporic communities — are not a liability for remote workers. They are a resource. The elder who passes through the room. The child who interrupts. The meal being prepared down the hall. These are not distractions from real life. They are real life. Remote work, at its best, stops requiring us to pretend otherwise.

A Caution: Flexibility Without Justice Is Not Liberation

Remote work is not inherently liberatory. A Zoom call with a toxic team is still a toxic team. Racial bias in performance reviews does not disappear when they happen over email. The digital divide — unequal access to reliable broadband, adequate devices, and home spaces that support concentration — means that the flexibility of remote work has not been distributed equally. Workers in low-income communities, many of them Black and Brown, were disproportionately excluded from remote-work opportunities because their jobs — caregiving, food production, transit, sanitation — require physical presence and offer none of the protections that office workers take for granted.

Ubuntu requires us to hold both truths: that remote work has been a genuine partial liberation for some Afro-diasporic knowledge workers, and that the conditions making that liberation possible have not been extended to all. The response to that tension is not guilt — it is solidarity. Those of us with access and flexibility carry a responsibility to advocate for the structural changes — broadband equity, living wages, paid care leave, worker protections — that would make genuine choice available to more people.

I am because we are. That does not stop at the edge of my home office.

I am because we are. That does not stop at the edge of my home office.

Has remote work given you more freedom to work in ways that reflect your values — or has the distance created its own kind of weight? Share your experience with us.

I am because we are.

Ubuntu Village connects East Harlem and East Africa through values-centered programs that honor ancestral wisdom and build collective power. Support the work.

Michele Mitchell is the Founder, President & CEO of Ubuntu Village Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with programs in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria. A writer, advocate, and community strategist working at the intersection of ancestral wisdom, public health, and community power, Michele leads Ubuntu Village’s work to center communities as the protagonists of their own healing. She writes from the conviction that science and spirit are complementary, that healing is relational, and that community is the medicine. Read more about Michele, or connect with her on LinkedIn.