Towards a New Dharma and Ubuntu of Peace Building: African Perspectives

A look at the world today, north and south, east and west, portrays an array of events that have filled humankind with existential dread. There is palpable fear arising from the human quest for survival. While some fears are centered around insecurity, some are connected to droughts, wild fires, famine, heat waves, family and marriages, technology and science, global warming, COVID 19, and in recent times monkey pox. All these have placed humankind on the threshold of despair because there appears to be a seeming ontological threat to world peace. More so, in an attempt to guarantee peace both at the subjective and community levels, the United Nations was established even though it is still a zillion years away from actually guaranteeing world peace. With the seeming elusiveness to peace all over the world, it is obvious that the current paradigm as presently constituted rests so much on the postulations and constructions of the west. This has led to a complete dearth of faith and hope for humanity in its quest for a peaceful global order. Against this background, an alternative to the current chaos and anarchy that has robbed the world of peace could be gleaned in the African perspective to peace that goes beyond peace as development, peace as tolerance, peace as Gaia, etc., to founding and erecting peace on certain fundamental metaphysical foundations that confer personhood on the individual. There is an ontological connection between the individual and the community in African belief system. Therefore, any attempt at peace from the African prism must be viewed from the unity of a subject with the whole. Put differently, peace in Africa is ensconced in the interplay between the individual and the community. It is peace as understood from this perspective that makes for the possibility of ubuntu considered the African idea of peace. This paper adopted the analytical, critical, and reconstructive methods to achieving its quest. While the analytical method helped in the clarification of concepts like peace, the critical method critiqued hitherto conceptions of peace. The method of reconstruction repackaged ubuntu so as to fill the gap created by erstwhile conceptions. The paper concluded that if ubuntu replaced the present paradigm, we would have been able to recreate a new dharma for peace where all world traditions would actualize their dreams and potentials in a climate of common brotherhood.