Babah Tarawally at the Stadsschouwburg: Ubuntu as a compass for leadership

On Sunday 11 October, Babah Tarawally gave a lecture on Ubuntu and leadership at the Stadsschouwburg Utrecht. In the conversation with Kiza Magendane and in questions from the audience, the cozy sense of connection soon began to chafe.

On Sunday 11 October, Babah Tarawally took the stage at the Stadsschouwburg Utrecht to talk about Ubuntu, the African philosophy of connectedness. Omroep AfroNet broadcast the afternoon live. The lecture is a production of @muviews and was part of Black Achievement Month.

Host Caroline led the afternoon. She spoke with Kiza Magendane, who is introduced in the broadcast as a friction architect and who later entered into conversation with Tarawally. The opening was by Lamin, who played the kora. According to Lamin, the instrument carries a message of connection. Later he explained that the strings stand for past, present and future, in groups of seven.

Caroline asked the audience who they were and why they had come. One visitor had read Tarawally's book *Ik ben geen mango*. Another had known Ubuntu for more than 25 years and saw it as an answer to the pigeonholing she often encounters in the Netherlands.

Sawubona, I see you

Tarawally began with a single word: Sawubona, I see you. The reply is: here I am, and then as a community, not only as an individual. According to him, you can only be human if you recognise the other as human. He told the audience that in the 1990s he came from a we-culture to an I-culture, and that he was struck by how firmly the I stands here.

He quoted the Nigerian philosopher Sophie Oluwole. According to Tarawally, her thinking on complementary opposites means that man and woman, or good and evil, do not exclude each other but complete each other. Western thinking, he said, sets opposites against each other. As an example he showed a talking stick, which you pass on as soon as you are done. The West, he said, turned that into the microphone.

Tarawally also spoke about the unborn. What we leave behind for children who are yet to be born, he called the meaning of life. This was followed by a life course in African traditions: a naming ceremony after seven days, rites of passage for young people, and leadership by older women after menopause. He said that in Africa people get more people around them as they grow older, while in the Netherlands he sees elderly neighbours without any contacts. According to him, Ubuntu exists in the West too, but there it has been partly replaced by insurance and public services.

In a text of his own, he reflected on the history of the slave trade. He called the story that Africans sold their own people a distorted picture that mainly divides. According to him, the real story was far more complicated, with demand from Europe and kings who were beheaded because they refused to cooperate. He urged descendants of enslaved people and Africans to seek each other out and heal historical wounds together.

Leadership and its price

The talk then turned to leadership. Tarawally spoke of servant leadership: a leader asks not only what he can achieve, but how he can help others and the community to flourish. He named Nelson Mandela as an example of someone who made unpopular decisions to prevent a civil war. His tip on listening was to listen in order to understand, not in order to respond.

He sharpened the choice with an imaginary case. Suppose that as a director you get a raise, but it means ten people lose their jobs. Ubuntu then asks whether you want to do that, he said, because those ten have families and a mortgage.

He distinguished three kinds of leaders: at the front, in the middle and at the back. He said none of the three is better than the others, but that he himself chooses to lead from the middle, with consultation like the South African indaba. His call was to start small: greet your neighbours and do something for your street. Anyone who never did anything for their own neighbourhood and wants to become a leader straight away, he said, should arouse suspicion.

Discomfort in the conversation

In the conversation with Kiza Magendane things became more uncomfortable, as had been announced. Magendane asked who belongs to the we and who falls outside it. Tarawally replied that you can widen the we, like football supporters who suddenly become Dutch together at an international match. For the Netherlands, he saw the biggest challenge in dividing the pie. When people depend on the state, polarisation gets worse, according to him. He argued for steering the conversation more towards socioeconomic questions than towards skin colour.

The middle also sparked a discussion. Magendane warned that the middle is sometimes an excuse for not taking a position. Tarawally maintained that the middle is big enough for people to find each other, and said that in his own family he was always the mediator. Now that he has become the eldest, all the questions land on his plate. Magendane also raised critical points. In African cities, according to him, the leadership Tarawally advocates often does not exist, and he felt uneasy about people who use Ubuntu as a business model. Tarawally replied that Ubuntu is not a product but a way of living, and that it has to come from within yourself.

Questions from the audience

The audience joined in generously. Someone who works in healthcare asked whether Tarawally also addresses conservative, hierarchical leaders. Another wanted to know how you build a we with so much diversity. Tarawally did not give a step-by-step plan. He said it begins with small contributions, and that being present in the room was already a first step.

One visitor spoke about deep canvassing, in which volunteers go door to door and listen to residents about politics and migration, without an agenda. Another pointed to the danger of preaching to the choir. He suggested that Tarawally speak at a party conference on the right. Tarawally said he does not know those people and that the visitor could simply email the party. A response from a party was not part of the broadcast.

To the question of how to stay curious about someone who thinks radically differently, his short answer was: ask where the pain is. According to Tarawally, many people who vote right have long felt unseen. He believes that anyone who denies their humanity is no longer fully human either. At the end, Magendane had the audience turn to their neighbour and finish the sentence: I am who I am thanks to. With that, he said, they had practised Ubuntu without knowing it.

Background

Black Achievement Month is held every October. According to the organisation, this year's theme is Turning Black Excellence into Change, with extra attention to dialogue, encounter and young people. According to the LSE, Sophie Oluwole (1935 to 2018) was the first woman in Nigeria to earn a doctorate in philosophy. She compared the Yoruba thinker Orunmila with Socrates. On loneliness in Africa, Magendane said in the conversation that according to the WHO the continent is the loneliest. In June 2025, the WHO reported that one in six people worldwide experience loneliness. TRT Afrika wrote about the same WHO data that loneliness is more common in Africa than in Europe.

The full lecture and conversation can be watched on the video channel of Omroep AfroNet.

Bronnen

• Omroep AfroNet op YouTube: de volledige live-uitzending
• Black Achievement Month
• WHO: Social connection linked to improved health and reduced risk of early death
• TRT Afrika: Community to crisis, how Africa became the world's loneliest continent
• LSE Hub for African Thought: Sophie Oluwole