Decolonising Identity: Anyuola, Ujamaa, and Ubuntu as Indigenous Frameworks for Understanding ‘Africanness’

Publication Details

Publication Date

10/08/2026

Volume / Issue

Vol 1, Issue 3 (2026)

Article No.

034

Journal

British Journal of Contemporary Research

DOI

https://doi.org/10.67693/BJCR-2KWT8LGN

Received

27 Jul 2026

Views

198

Downloads

57

Abstract

Dominant scholarly accounts of African relational personhood have been built almost entirely on Bantu-language concepts, principally Ubuntu (Nguni), botho (Sesotho/Setswana), hunhu (Shona), and utu (Kiswahili), together with the Bantu-derived political philosophy of Ujamaa articulated by Julius Nyerere. This concentration has produced a durable but partial theory of Africanness, one that generalises from a single linguistic family while leaving the continent's Nilotic and other non-Bantu societies analytically silent. This article introduces Anyuola, a Dholuo (Luo) concept denoting the blood-bound community of kin descended from a common ancestor, as an indigenous framework in its own right, and argues for its formal incorporation into the comparative vocabulary of African identity and values alongside Ubuntu and Ujamaa. Using a qualitative, desk-based conceptual and comparative-etymological method grounded in Luo ethnography (Southall, 1952; Ocholla-Ayayo, 1976; Parkin, 1978; Onyango-Ouma & Aagaard-Hansen, 2020) and situated within decolonial theory (Mudimbe, 1988; Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, 1986; Mignolo, 2009; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018), the article shows that Anyuola encodes a genealogical and generational register of belonging, rooted in the verb nywol (to give birth or beget), that is distinct from, yet fully compatible with, Ubuntu's synchronic ontology of relational being and Ujamaa's political economy of familyhood. A comparative lexicon of seven cognate blood-and-birth-based kinship concepts drawn from West, East, Horn, and Southern Africa, including Igbo umunna, Akan abusua, Somali tol, and Oromo gosa, demonstrates that Anyuola's underlying logic recurs independently across the continent's major language families, supporting its claim to representativeness rather than parochialism. The article argues that a full theory of Africanness requires all three registers, the ontological (Ubuntu), the political-economic (Ujamaa), and the genealogical-generational (Anyuola), and that omitting the Nilotic case reproduces the very epistemic hierarchy that decolonial scholarship seeks to dismantle. The article closes by considering the implications of this triadic framework for Indigenous studies, Made in Africa Evaluation, and the broader question of who may be said to be African and by what values.

License

This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License . Free to read, share, and adapt with attribution.