What Ubuntu Taught Me About Public Health

Ancestral Wisdom · Public Health · Ubuntu Philosophy

I came to these ideas as an observer, through the field’s own frameworks. Epidemiology. Behavioral theory. Social determinants. Risk stratification. The field gave me rigorous tools for understanding why some communities get sick at higher rates than others — and it was honest, at least in its critical iterations, about the structural causes underneath those disparities.

But Ubuntu philosophy — the southern African principle umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, I am because we are — asked me something that the field, even at its most structural, had not fully answered: what is a human being, and what does it mean for one to be well? Much of the field has implicitly answered: a human being is an individual. Wellness is the absence of disease in that individual. Ubuntu said: no. A human being is a node in a web of relationship. Wellness is the health of the web.

What Public Health Gets Right — and Where It Stalls

The social determinants of health framework was a genuine advance. The acknowledgment that income, housing, education, neighborhood, and exposure to violence shape health outcomes more than individual behavior — that was important, and it is still contested by forces that prefer a behavioral explanation for structural inequity.

But even the social determinants framework, in many of its applications, still tends toward fixing individuals within broken systems — or at best, fixing specific system inputs. It does not always grapple with the question Ubuntu forces: what if the community itself is the primary unit of health? What if the interventions that work best are the ones that strengthen communal bonds, restore ancestral practices, and rebuild the relational fabric that structural racism systematically dismantled?

That is a different kind of public health. It doesn’t begin with a health problem and work backward to causes. It begins with the question: what does this community already know about how to sustain itself — and what conditions would let that knowledge operate? That is the work Ubuntu and public health can do together.

The Shift Ubuntu Required

Ubuntu philosophy is not a wellness practice. It is an ontology — a complete account of what exists and how. In the Ubuntu understanding, personhood is not something you possess individually. It is something you achieve together. I am because we are is not a slogan about cooperation. It is a metaphysical claim: that the individual is constituted by their relationships, their community, their lineage, their land. You cannot be well in isolation, because you do not fully exist in isolation.

When I internalized that — really internalized it, not as a concept but as a lens for seeing — I could no longer look at a community’s health outcomes and ask: what is wrong with these individuals? The question became: what has been done to this web of relationship? What has extraction — of labor, of land, of cultural knowledge, of people through incarceration — done to the conditions that allow communal health to exist?

That reframe is not comfortable. It is also, I believe, more accurate. And I think it asks a different posture from anyone who works in health: not experts arriving with interventions, but learners arriving with resources, who understand that the healing knowledge already exists in the community.

What Ubuntu Taught Me About Evidence

Public health is a field that takes evidence seriously. I am glad for that. But the dominant frameworks for what counts as evidence have historically excluded the knowledge systems that communities themselves have developed — knowledge held in practice, in ceremony, in oral tradition, in the body, and across generations.

Epigenetic research is beginning to explore what ancestral traditions long encoded: that what a community carries in its collective memory may leave marks on the biology of its members, that healing may move across generations, and that the body may hold history. The human evidence is still early and its findings are debated, and I hold it that way. This is ancient knowledge. A scientific vocabulary does not make it newly true. It makes it newly legible to a particular institutional framework.

Ubuntu taught me to hold both: the rigor of evidence-based practice and the recognition that the communities I work with have always held evidence — in forms that the field is still learning to read. Many elders hold knowledge that our current measurement tools may not yet capture. That does not make them unscientific. It makes the measurement tools incomplete.

Ubuntu as a Public Health Framework in Practice

In my observation, Ubuntu-centered health work looks like: the community defining its own health priorities, in its own language, rooted in its own understanding of what wellbeing means. It looks like health workers who are from the community, embedded in it, trusted by it — not parachute practitioners. It looks like ceremony and ancestral practice as legitimate health interventions, not supplements to “real” medicine. It looks like grief being held collectively rather than managed individually. It looks like intergenerational knowledge being resourced and transmitted, not displaced by biomedical curricula.

East Harlem, where Ubuntu Village is headquartered, holds this lesson in its own history. It is a neighborhood that has carried structural pressure for generations — and that has maintained extraordinary cultural and relational resilience through all of it. The question is not what a community like this lacks. The question is what conditions would let its existing capacity expand.

African spiritual traditions are not separable from that capacity. The ancestral knowledge systems that survived the Middle Passage, survived Jim Crow, survived redlining — those are not cultural artifacts. I have come to see them as a form of health infrastructure. That seeing changed how I think and write about health.

What I Wish the Public Health Conversation Had Said

I wish the conversation had said: the communities you will serve know things your curriculum does not contain. Walk in as a learner. Your job is not to close the knowledge gap between the institution and the community. Your job is to close the resource gap.

I wish the conversation had said: health is relational, not individual. That the most powerful public health intervention is often the restoration of trust — between a community and its healers, between generations, between people who have been isolated by the same systems that made them sick. The research points the same way: a meta-analysis of 148 studies and more than 300,000 participants found that people with stronger social relationships had a 50 percent greater likelihood of survival.

I wish the conversation had said: ancestral wisdom is not a cultural consideration to be added at the margins of evidence-based practice. It is a body of knowledge that communities refined over millennia and encoded in forms that sustained them through catastrophes the institution has no framework for.

Ubuntu taught me those things after the fact. The science is now catching up. I believe the field will too. And I believe the communities who have been practicing Ubuntu health all along — often without the resources that would make it easier — deserve to be the ones leading that shift.

Frequently Asked Questions

If you work in health, healing, or community — and something here landed — this is for the person in your field who needs to read it.

---

References

• Metz, Thaddeus. “Ubuntu as a Moral Theory and Human Rights in South Africa.” African Human Rights Law Journal, vol. 11, no. 2, 2011, pp. 532–559.
• Commission on Social Determinants of Health. Closing the Gap in a Generation: Health Equity Through Action on the Social Determinants of Health. World Health Organization, 2008.
• Holt-Lunstad, Julianne, Timothy B. Smith, and J. Bradley Layton. “Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review.” PLOS Medicine, vol. 7, no. 7, 2010.
• Jones, Camara Phyllis. “Levels of Racism: A Theoretic Framework and a Gardener’s Tale.” American Journal of Public Health, vol. 90, no. 8, 2000, pp. 1212–1215.

Related Reading

• ‣ What Is Ubuntu Philosophy? What It Actually Means and Asks of Us
• ‣ The Body Keeps the Ancestors: What Science Is Learning About Inherited Memory
• ‣ Spirituality Was Never a Personal Journey: What African Ancestral Traditions Have Always Known
• ‣ Your Grandmother’s Strength Lives in Your Cells: Epigenetics and Ancestral Memory

I Am Because We Are. And Together, We Heal.