Ubuntu: the Indigenous Ethos of Restorative Justice

The second quote, "In Western culture, we are socialized to believe that the desire to inflict counterviolence upon or retaliate against someone who has hurt us or a loved one is innate and that justice has always been done and will always be done in this way. In fact, far from universal or natural, this adversarial vision of justice is a relatively recent cultural and historical construction, arising around AD 1200 with the dawning of the nation-state and racial capitalism [my emphasis]." is also a strikingly bizarre take. I don't understand how anyone could think this.

While I don't think that we can make a definitive statement that justice in "Africa" was nonexistent, the very idea of considering "Africa" as a single homogeneous environment or domain of policy is incredibly reductive at best.

Even the specific examples given of "restorative justice" are pretty much identical but less formal than the Roman Law counterparts.

> For instance, in ancient Zimbabwe, if you killed someone, you would pay 109 goats. If you had no goats, you would offer one of your children to the victim’s family. If you did not have a child, an adult from your family would go live with the dead person’s family.

I find this nearly impossible to believe that all of the hundreds of clans spanning tens of ethnicities that resided in what is present day Zimbabwe had "109 goats" encoded in their traditions, much less that oral traditions had sufficient stability over generations that this is even a sensical statement. If we accept the dubious idea that this was codified in a uniform way then the question is how does this differ from other traditions? Restitution for murder to avoid blood feuds was an essential part of both Roman and Germanic law traditions, as is subjugation and slavery (in the non-chattel sense used in the book).

This is incorrect. Wolf packs, apes, cats and many other social animals have methods to address social conflict and wrongdoing. What they saw was a resource to be conquered, and then retroactively justified it with with societal infrastructure. An argument could be made that they are better off with these things, but the way it was done was of course wrong.

> In Western culture, we are socialized to believe that the desire to inflict counterviolence upon or retaliate against someone who has hurt us or a loved one is innate and that justice has always been done and will always be done in this way. In fact, far from universal or natural, this adversarial vision of justice is a relatively recent cultural and historical construction, arising around AD 1200 with the dawning of the nation-state and racial capitalism.

Again, wrong. Matthew 5:39: Jesus tells his followers, "If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also". There was recognition, likely far longer than Jesus, that escalating retaliatory violence is not good. And in common times in Western culture, we do not inflict upon criminals what they themselves did to others. If a man stabs another man to death, he is not sentenced to death by stabbing.

> Though restorative justice is new to Western jurisprudence, it is not at all new in the broader sweep of human history. For most of human history, reconciliation and restitution to victims and their kin took precedence over vengeance. This is because restoring social peace and avoiding blood feuds were paramount social concerns. Restitution and reconciliation, not punishment, were overarching aspirations.

Again, no. Restorative justice takes place all of the time. It's precisely how we have been "avoiding blood feuds" in the West. "Restitution and reconciliation" is not always an option. You and I mostly follow reason, but we do not live in a world of universal humans, and not everyone is born equal. Some people have inherited exceptional anger, spite, vengeance, etc. Some people have an ideology so ingrained into their very being, that they would strap explosives to themselves and kills hundreds of people. The world is not sunshine and rainbows, there is some real evil out there.

> Punishment, the equivalent of officially sanctioned vengeance, is a mere variant of the original harm, replicating and reproducing it, resulting in the destruction of community safety nets and social breakdown.

Wrong. Punishment in a just system is not decided by the victim, and therefore vengeance is not considered. What does result in the destructions of society, though, is when some people believe there is not going to be a consequence to their actions. Then, to destroy a society, just a small group of bad actors have the ability to do whatever they want. In African indigenous societies, the village chief and the warriors/hunters would have punished a bad actor - you are insane to think otherwise.

> It locks us into the past and tethers us to disabling definitions of ourselves and an overidentification with the pain, mistaking it for who we truly are.

Would the person writing this tell this to a person that has been raped? As part of their restorative justice, the victim is forced to reconcile with their attacker. The attacker walks freely without punishment, whilst the victim is told to stop living in the past and to stop identifying with the pain.

Let's see how well that holds up.

> Imprisoned by the pain and the past, the harmed party experiences victimization a second time, but this time, it is self-inflicted. It is scientifically documented that hatred and anger eat away at our well-being, on physical and emotional levels.

"scientifically documented" - proceeds to not cite the science

Hatred and anger are normally present when there is a feeling that justice is not done correctly and quickly.

I think it's disingenuous to argue that a certain type of misery did not exist because it doesn't map 1:1 to our label of it. It's at least sloppy.

Noble savages are a fictional creation[0]:

> A large, horticultural population near Lake Victoria, the Gusii lived in clans that were territorially separated from other clan territories by areas of uninhabited bush. Because these clans were exogamous, men had to seek wives from neighboring clans. Many societies have chosen marriage partners in the same way without social conflict, but Gusii clans were so hostile to one another that most had feuded in the past, and animosities continued to run high. A Gusii proverb said, “Those whom we marry are those whom we fight.” This presented the Gusii with a dilema, but instead of attempting to soothe these tensions as other societies with a similar form of marriage have done, the Gusii made matters worse.

> Both before and after marriage, Gusii men were said to have been so frustrated sexually that they resorted to rape. Whether sexual frustration was the cause or not, the fact is that the Gusii committed rape almost four times as often as the average rate in the United States. In 1937, there were so many rapes that the British colonial government had to threaten military action, and in 1950 there were so many convictions for rape that there were not enough prison facilities to hold the offenders. Not surprisingly, married life itself was always distant and often hostile. The antagonism between Gusii men and women clearly caused considerable stress, and if it served any useful social purpose, it has yet to be identified.

[0]: https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-sick-societies-by-robert...

I'm not sure that you can have a modern large society with millions of strangers that relies only on restorative justice. I think you need strong communal cohesion for that to work by itself, and even in a relatively culturally homogeneous society, I'm not sure that scales beyond the size of towns.

It ends up mirroring the same blind spots it thought it was exposing.

Socrates was jailed and put to death in ~399BC. The Code of Hammurabi called for "an eye for an eye" nearly 3000 years before the claimed period.

The entire point of reciprocal justice was to prevent tit-for-tat blood feuds; "an eye for an eye" set an upper limit on vengeance, precisely to prevent the whole world from going blind.

The available evidence suggests that modern western societies have vastly lower rates of violent deaths than any indigenous pre-state societies, even factoring in deaths due to war.

The myth of the noble savage is precisely that - a myth.

https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-e...