12 June 2017

Ubuntu

[oo-buhn-too]

/ʊˈbuːntʊ/

noun

1. (South African) humanity or fellow feeling; kindness
a quality that includes the essential human virtues; compassion and humanity.
“there is a need for understanding not vengeance, ubuntu not victimization”

Word Origin

Nguni

Collins English Dictionary

Contemporary Examples

Additionally, Jeremy Fox, who helmed ubuntu in Napa Valley, is planning a series of pop-up dinners around the Bay Area.
The Buzziest Pop-Up Restaurants
Tien Nguyen
February 15, 2011

He not only embodied ubuntu ; he taught millions to find that truth within themselves.
Full Text of President Obama’s Eulogy for Nelson Mandela
The Daily Beast
December 9, 2013

Today’s quote

Ubuntu […] speaks of the very essence of being human. [We] say […] “Hey, so-and-so has ubuntu.” Then you are generous, you are hospitable, you are friendly and caring and compassionate. You share what you have. It is to say, “My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours.” We belong in a bundle of life. We say, “A person is a person through other persons.”

– Desmond Tutu

On this day

12 June – Russia Day, held every year in Russia since 1992 to celebrate the establishment of the Russian Federation, when the First Congress of the People’s Deputies of the Russian Federation adopted the Declaration of State Sovereignty of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic on 12 June 1990.

12 June 1929 – birth of Anne Frank, author of the ‘Diary of Anne Frank’. On her 13th birthday (1942) she was given a diary which she kept while the family was in hiding from the German Army. The family hid for two years in a secret annex behind her father’s office. In 1944, the family was discovered and sent to concentration camps. She died on 12 March 1945 in Auschwitz Concentration Camp. The diary was published in 1947.

12 June 1967 – the US Supreme Court declares that inter-racial marriages are Constitutional and cannot be banned by the states.

12 June 1991 – Boris Yeltsin becomes Russia’s first democratically elected President following the end of the Soviet Union.