Umuntu Ngumuntu Ngabantu

There is a common expression in Xhosa (Zulu), I have read, umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu which means “a person is a person through other persons”. This is just as true for the nomad as it is for the villager, perhaps even more so, despite the distance and the time that holds us apart from others we know and love.

The villager or city-dweller, whose daily comings-and-goings are local, finds self-identity through daily relations with the known: friends and family, co-workers, lovers, the guys at the corner bar. While strangers are met every day in the city, they are countered by the rich social circle formed by friends and relations. And perhaps, with so many close contacts, the city dweller’s sense of self is likewise close, tightly binding, almost constraining. A heavily layered self, like many coats of lacquer on a wooden box, holding a thick book written by many hands, telling the stories that make us who we are.

The nomad is equally defined by bonds with others, but those others are remote, out of sight and touch for long periods: days, weeks, or months. The nomad moves through the wilds, away from any home, out in the world of uncertain strangers. In this sphere, the tenor of contact is made more: when friends and lovers are met, each meeting is a celebration, a time worth savoring, a chance to rediscover ourselves in the world.

More than villagers, the nomad feels a part of something large and moving, and made larger by this loose confederacy of others: one shining light in a constellation, even when the other lights are far, far away, and even when each is moving in paths that look to be diverging, not converging, not coming back together again until who knows when. And the dark around us — the wilds, the strangers, the foreign terrain — is what makes us shine so brightly.

Just as it is the brightest lights that cast the darkest shadows, the strongest bonds are those linking travelers to the unmoving world, but they are loose ties, hardly felt, like the embrace of the Earth holding us, or the push of the wind at our backs as we move ahead in the night. We are defined by our circles, but for the traveler these are loose, flowing, light: not a box and a book, but instead a bedouin’s robe and a song or two, songs to be sung alone, or with others over the next rise. Travelers are never more themselves than then, sharing our innermost songs, singing the circles, telling our own tales. and then, moving on.

“My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in what is yours.”