In the mid-19th century the term Ubuntu saw its first appearance in South-African sources. Its early translations covered the

human nature, humanness, humanity, virtue, goodness, and kindness.

The concept gained support and became more popular in the 1950s in terms of a “philosophy” or “world view”. In the seventies Ubuntu began to be described as the African form of humanism. In light of the Africanisation in the 1960s – the period of decolonization – Ubuntu was used as a term for a specific African kind of socialism or humanism found in blacks, but lacking in whites. One of the first publications with regard to Ubuntu as a philosophical concept was released in 1980, Hunhuism of Ubuntuism: A Zimbabwe Indigenous Political Philosophy by Stanlake J.W.T. Samkange. Here Hunhuism or Ubuntuism was presented as a political ideology for the new Zimbabwe at the time.

The concept was taken over by South Africa in the 1990s as a guide for the transition from apartheid to majority rule. Moreover, the term Ubuntu is also established in the constitution of South Africa “there is a need for understanding but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not for retaliation, a need for Ubuntu but not for victimisation”.