It’s important, too, to recognize how you are being spoken to. An invitation for a meal, for instance, might be tatemae, a purely formal mark of courtesy that is not meant to be taken up. English speakers do much the same thing – ‘We must do lunch,’ they may say, brightly, without intending any such thing – but they have no word to describe what they are doing. It’s not about being deceitful but about not wanting to give offence.
Politeness and courtesy are built into Japanese society, and the distinction between honne and tatemae is also a virtue in its own right. One of the teachings of Confucius is that neither happiness nor anger should be apparent in one’s face, and a traditional Japanese would consider it a shameful breach of good manners to express his true feelings or intentions directly. Such behaviour might be described as baka shoujiki, or honesty to the point of foolishness, and it would be seen as naive, impolite and childish.
So the Japanese, having understood and codified behaviour that the languages of the rest of the world seem to prefer to ignore, must presumably be relaxed and at ease with themselves? Sadly, no. Some social commentators agonize over fears that the rest of the world sees them as dishonest or insincere. So, as foreign travel grows more popular and Western influences increase, Japan might begin to move away from the twin concepts of honne and tatemae. Yet while English speakers value politeness, gentleness and consideration for other people’s feelings just as much as the Japanese, perhaps what’s needed is not for Japan to abandon the words but for them to be adopted into English to describe a practice for which we need feel no embarrassment.
Ubuntu
(Bantu)
The quality of being a decent human being in relation to others and therefore of benefit to society as a whole
The music of Beethoven, the poetry of Shakespeare, the paintings of Van Gogh – it seems somehow wrong to think of them as German, English or Dutch. They belong to all of us because they remind us what we are all, as human beings, capable of at the very summit of our potential. And the same is true of the southern African Bantu word ubuntu (u-BUN-tu, where the u sounds are rounded like a Yorkshireman asking for ‘some butter’).
Translated literally, it means the quality of being human – humanity, if you like. But that goes almost nowhere towards explaining the ramifications of what has grown into a cross between a world view, a moral aspiration and a political philosophy in southern Africa. And even that leaves out most of the associations that have grown around the word from the principles of the anti-apartheid movement and the achievements of Nelson Mandela.
When Mandela tried to explain the concept of ubuntu, he used a memory from his childhood of how a traveller reaching a village would never have to ask for food, shelter and entertainment. The villagers would come out and greet him and welcome him as one of them. That, said Mandela, was one aspect of ubuntu. It didn’t mean, he went on, that people should not make the most of their own lives and enrich themselves – the important thing was that they should do so in order to enable the community as a whole to improve.
His colleague in the fight against apartheid, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, also spoke about ubuntu in a speech in 2007.[20] ‘In our culture, there is no such thing as a solitary individual,’ he said. ‘We say, a person is a person through other persons – that we belong in the bundle of life. I want you to be all you can be, because that’s the only way I can be all I can be.’
Ubuntu can also be a personal quality – an individual might be described as ‘having ubuntu’, in which case they have an instinctive awareness of the importance of interdependence. They will stand by their social obligations and be as conscious of their duties as they are of their rights; they will be aware of whatever personal qualities they possess, such as beauty or wisdom, but only in relation to other people. They may be ambitious, as Mandela suggested, but along with that ambition will go a sense that the community as a whole should profit from their advancement.
However, it is as a view of the world, a prescription for how people should behave, that ubuntu is best known. It is a philosophy, not a religion, as it’s occasionally described – there is no supernatural element in it, no aspect of duty towards an all-powerful being, but simply a joyful recognition of the importance of community. It’s important to stress that it is not a matter of unselfishly subjugating one’s personal interests to those of wider society, as a communist might enjoin; rather, ubuntu is all about the development and fulfilment of a person’s potential both as an individual and as part of a community.
In the years leading up to the collapse of apartheid in South Africa in 1994, there was a widespread conviction across the rest of the world that the country was heading for a bloodbath. But though there was violence – sporadic fighting between rival opposition groups, outbreaks of tribal antagonism, the shooting of twenty-nine people by troops in the so-called Ciskei homeland in 1992 and car bombs in Johannesburg – the widely expected wholesale slaughter never happened.
‘In our culture, there is no such thing as a solitary individual.’
One aspect of ubuntu is that it specifically renounces vengeance. Many leaders of the anti-apartheid movement, Mandela and Tutu among them, believed that freedom would benefit not only blacks but whites as well – freeing the jailer as well as the prisoner. More than twenty years later, South Africa remains a nation beset by problems, but ubuntu – described by President Barack Obama as ‘Mandela’s greatest gift’[21] – is a living tribute to the commitment to a sense of common purpose that transcends politics and race.
You don’t need to be South African or, more specifically, a black South African to appreciate ubuntu. Like Beethoven’s music, Shakespeare’s poetry and Van Gogh’s paintings, it is an inspiring reminder of what we might be capable of at our best.
Insha’allah
(Arabic)
Literally ‘God willing’ … but also works well as a brush-off, because nothing happens unless God wants it to happen
There are phrases in several languages that reflect something of the meaning of the Arabic insha’allah (insha-all-AH) – God willing in English, of course, or the Latin deo volente. The Spanish and Portuguese words ojalà and oxalà, with their echo of the Arabic, carry a dim 500-year memory of Moorish rule in Iberia; and the Welsh os mynn duw is a Celtic version of the same idea. But none of them has the same deep, universal resonance of insha’allah.
The word Islam itself means submission – submission to the will of God, that is – and through the whole religion runs a rich vein of fatalism. Nothing, the devout Muslim believes, will happen unless God wishes it to, and so it is sinful to promise anything without acknowledging that only the will of God can bring it about. The precise phrase comes from a verse in the Qur’an, which warns: ‘Never say of anything, “Indeed, I will do that tomorrow,” except [when adding], “If Allah wills [Insha’allah].”’
20
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, ‘Semester at Sea’ lecture, 2007, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZHx9DJR-M).