Policy Brief No. 239 — June 2026
Beyond Harmony, Beyond Rhetoric: Politicizing Ubuntu for AI Governance Anye-Nkwenti Nyamnjoh
Key Points → In artificial intelligence (AI) ethics, Ubuntu is increasingly invoked as a relational African ethical resource and as an African alternative to liberal individualism, signalling epistemic presence without necessarily reshaping how harms, power and accountability are handled in AI governance — a pattern that can risk ethics washing and leave existing governance failures intact. → Moving beyond rhetoric requires a political turn in how Ubuntu is read and applied. A political reading treats AI systems as sociotechnical infrastructures embedded in relations of power, and understands governance failures as products of institutional arrangements that concentrate authority, externalize harm and limit contestation. → If Ubuntu is to matter in practice, it must have institutional consequence. This policy brief translates a politicized Ubuntu into concrete governance moves — participatory authority, reciprocity in data practices, restorative responses to harm and collective data stewardship — without requiring Ubuntu’s formal adoption as a policy framework.
Introduction This policy brief is a translation exercise. It starts from the observation that Ubuntu has become a prominent ethical resource in academic AI ethics but remains thinly specified in policy discourse and rarely translated into governance design. This brief ’s central argument is that the move from ethical vocabulary to policy language is not neutral and that unless questions of power, institutional design, contestation and remedy are brought into view, Ubuntu risks entering AI governance as rhetorical affirmation without being meaningfully translated into a basis for institutional design. Ubuntu is part of a wider family of African relational moral philosophies, formalized in African philosophical scholarship, that ground personhood and ethical life in social relations and community (Molefe 2025). It is this more formalized discourse, often discussed alongside Afro-communitarianism, that has become a prominent reference point in AI ethics, especially in efforts to Africanize ethical reflection on emerging technologies (Gwagwa, Kazim and Hilliard 2022; van Norren 2023). Africanization is an interpretive lens rather than an official doctrine. It names a demand that AI ethics and governance be adapted to African contexts rather than imported uncritically from frameworks developed elsewhere.