You can have everything covered but what you overlook is the human factor, especially when it is stretched to its limit at both ends, good and bad.

And as delightful as it often is to be tempted away from people; to put everything, as it were, into systems and structures, it is just as delightful to be reminded, through forcibly being placed upon these often overlooked reserves, of the goodness to be discovered therein.

It was perhaps this tendency to not consider falling back on others during hard times that Schabir Shaik had in mind when he stood on the Durban High Court steps and upbraided us Africans whose culture excludes us, as he put it, from grasping fully the concept of ubuntu by not realising how one might want to help a friend.

Yes, well, I can see that. And if he could find a way to tell me just how to get others - once I have moved to my own, new full grasp of ubuntu - to reciprocate with their own understanding - that is, the understanding that they will allow me to fall back on them for my overdraft - then I shall be truly home, in all senses of the word.

But I did not need Schabir to organise this for me, fortunately, in my own little community when a strong sense of this selfsame ubuntu prompted others to pre-empt my slow understanding of being a person through others and avail themselves of my largesse before I had time to get into the spirit of this sharing.

And when my neighbour's wife, not even dressed in her day clothes, came across six of these unexpected but hopeful beneficiaries of my sense of ubuntu, sitting on our fence in anticipation of my leaving the house, and my things, to them, well, sadly, her culture also prohibited her from being charitable.

And they must have been very surprised by this lack in her, this deficit, because they promptly all fell off the fence at her shout, that is, except the one whose foot got caught and who was left dangling.

But they chose to give us another chance, having such a strong sense of it, so that they merely backtracked to the front side of the house, where they gave us another opportunity to meet them more fully in this understanding of helping others.

However, and this is quite strange, here they were further accosted, and by someone whose culture positively exudes ubuntu, who, in fact, has ubuntu as his first language; the full colouring of his being, so to speak.

And the shock of this sent them reeling off, but not for long.

A third try was also halted, and from yet another house, which did not stop the first neighbour from raising the alarm with the security company, who had been hampered from picking up our signal by the cutting of our telephone lines at the fourth, and successful, attempt.

So by the time I had returned home after receiving three telephone calls, from everyone in our cul de sac, at the minute of my walking into work, it was to find the entire neighbourhood in my yard, all engaged in various aspects of the chase, with the neighbour's wife, still not properly dressed, riding around in the armed-response car, the better to direct operations.

And this lessening of the full impact of what we could have expected - our loss and others' gain - in not meeting Shaik's requirements to the letter, could, I suppose, have left me with some measure of despair of ever being quite integrated. Yet I was left strangely elated, the contribution of everyone, and not all from one culture, working - in an inverse way to Shaik's ubuntu - to make me feel fully at home.

With acknowledgements to Laura Melville and The Natal Witness.

Is it actually possible that Ubuntu can justifiably mean different things to different people?

Is there valid :
Nguni Ubuntu?
Muslim Ubuntu?
Anglo-Saxon Ubuntu?