The Republic of Laughter and Belonging: Indigenous Wisdom and the Future of African Democracy

This lecture reimagines democracy in Africa as a moral art of belonging and laughter—an interplay of care and critique rooted in indigenous wisdom. Drawing on Ubuntu, the Southern African ethic of shared humanity, and Koreduga, the Malian tradition of truth-telling through humor and irreverence, it explores how democracy may be renewed not by institutional reform but by moral imagination. 

Ubuntu teaches that to be human is to belong through others; it grounds politics in empathy, reciprocity, and communal care. Koreduga, by contrast, transforms laughter into civic pedagogy—an act of truth that humbles power, exposes vanity, and restores the moral balance of community. Together they shape what this lecture calls a Republic of Laughter and Belonging: a democratic ethos where fellowship and irony, tenderness and satire, become twin instruments of renewal. In this republic, laughter is not escape but moral resistance, and belonging is not sentiment but structure. Against narratives of failed states and borrowed systems, this lecture recovers Africa’s indigenous arts of accountability—where care becomes critique, and laughter becomes a form of love. Democracy, in this vision, is not merely a system to be perfected, but a shared practice of becoming human together.

World Philosophies Lecture 29

Speaker 

Michael Onyebuchi Eze teaches Africana Studies at California State University, Fresno. He earned his PhD in Political Science and International Studies from the University of Cambridge, and holds a second PhD in History and Cultural Reflection from Universität Witten-Herdecke, Germany. His work bridges African philosophy, political theory, and intellectual history, with a focus on Ubuntu, decolonization, and the moral imagination of democracy. He is the author and editor of several books, including Intellectual History in Contemporary South Africa and the forthcoming Religious Nationalism and Survival Politics in Contemporary Nigeria. His scholarship appears in leading journals such as The Monist, Philosophical Papers, and African Studies Review.

Contact

cgcp@soas.ac.uk

Organiser

Centre for Global and Comparative Philosophies 

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