My grandmother had left me with a question that sounded simple:
When I looked at everything I had achieved, did I really believe that I had done all of it alone?
The immediate answer was easy.
No.
Post 41 had already established that.
There had always been an “I” in my journey. I had to study, apply, work, make decisions, and persist.
But there had also always been a “we”.
That made me wonder whether I had been asking the wrong question.
Perhaps the question was no longer simply who belonged inside the “we” behind my journey?
Perhaps I first needed to ask:
What creates a “we” in the first place, and does the “we” have a boundary?
The “We” Can Begin Very Close to Us
The most obvious “we” may be the family.
People are connected through kinship, shared history, responsibility, and relationships.
But even within a family, the boundary can shift.
Sometimes “we” means the immediate household.
Sometimes it includes grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins.
Sometimes it stretches across an extended family whose members may live hundreds of kilometres apart.
So even something as familiar as family does not necessarily give the “we” one fixed boundary.
Then the circle becomes wider.
“We” as a village.
People do not all belong to the same family, but they may share a place, history, customs, relationships and responsibilities.
A village can therefore create a “we” among people who are not related by blood.
But why should the boundary stop there?
Sometimes Common Interest Creates the “We”
Consider the workplace.
People from completely different backgrounds can walk into the same organisation and begin speaking about “we”.
We need to complete this project.
We need to solve this problem.
We have achieved our target.
The “we” now exists because people share an organisation, objective, or responsibility.
The same thing happens professionally.
As a GIS professional, I can speak about “we” as GIS professionals.
The people included in that “we” do not have to be members of my family.
They do not have to come from my village.
They do not even have to work for the same organisation.
What connects us is a profession, knowledge base, and set of problems in which we share an interest.
A community of practice creates another kind of “we”.
People may come from different institutions and places, but a shared problem, field of knowledge or desire to learn from one another temporarily creates a collective identity around that purpose.
Perhaps common interest can therefore create a “we”.
But common interest cannot be its only foundation.
Shared place can create one.
Shared history can create one.
Shared experience can create one.
Shared responsibility can create one.
Shared identity can create one.
Even a shared problem can create one.
This suggests that the boundary of the “we” may move depending on the question being asked.
“We” as South Africans
The circle can expand again.
People who may be strangers to one another can speak of “we as South Africans.”
Now the common ground is no longer family, village, organisation or profession.
It may be citizenship, history, institutions, national challenges or aspirations.
People within that “we” can disagree profoundly.
They can belong to different cultures, speak different languages, support different political parties and have very different experiences of the country.
Yet there are questions for which South Africa becomes the relevant boundary of the “we”.
But even that boundary can become too small.
“We” as Africans
There are questions for which “we as Africans” becomes meaningful.
That does not mean Africans are one homogeneous people.
Africa contains different countries, languages, cultures, histories, religions and ways of living.
Even village life cannot be described as though every African village functions exactly like the village in which I grew up.
My experience belongs to a particular place.
Yet someone who grew up in a village elsewhere on the continent may recognise elements of my experience without having lived exactly the same life.
There may be shared questions around village life, communal relationships, traditional authority, indigenous knowledge, land, development, migration and the relationship between inherited ways of living and modern institutions.
The details may differ enormously.
But common experience can sometimes create a larger conversation.
Then there are interests that extend beyond village life.
African development.
African knowledge systems.
Economic development.
Scientific capacity.
The movement of people and goods.
Shared infrastructure.
Peace and security.
The ability of African countries to cooperate.
And the larger aspiration towards African unity.
These are questions for which the relevant boundary may no longer be my village or even South Africa.
The question itself can create a reason to say:
“We as Africans.”
Perhaps that is important.
If the challenges confronting African societies cross national borders, then the “we” needed to respond to them may also have to cross those borders.
And Then There Is “We” as Humanity
The circle can expand again.
There are questions for which even Africa becomes too small a boundary.
Climate change does not stop at national borders.
A major asteroid would not ask which country it was approaching.
A global pandemic does not necessarily respect the boundaries humans draw on maps.
The future of the planet raises questions that eventually make it reasonable to speak about:
“We as humans.”
Now people who may previously have been outside one “we” are suddenly inside another.
Someone can be outside “we as villagers”, but inside “we as South Africans.”
Someone can be outside “we as South Africans”, but inside “we as Africans.”
And someone can be outside “we as Africans”, while still belonging inside “we as humanity.”
Perhaps the boundary did not disappear.
The boundary moved.
Then Who Are “Them”?
This creates another difficulty.
Every time humans create a “we”, do we also create a “them”?
Perhaps.
But “them” does not necessarily mean enemies.
It may simply mean people who are outside the particular boundary relevant to that conversation.
If I say “we as GIS professionals”, somebody from another profession becomes part of “them” for that particular discussion.
But if the discussion changes to “we as colleagues within the same organisation”, the same person may suddenly be inside the “we.”
If the discussion changes again to “we as Africans”, millions of people previously outside the smaller groups become part of the collective.
The identity of “them” therefore changes when the boundary of “we” changes.
And perhaps this is why the relationship between the “I”, “them” and “we” is more complicated than I initially thought.
They are not necessarily fixed categories.
They depend partly on what connects people at a particular moment.
So Does the “We” Have a Boundary?
I think it does.
But perhaps it does not have one permanent boundary.
The boundary can expand and contract.
Sometimes the relevant “we” is the family.
Sometimes the village.
Sometimes colleagues.
Sometimes a profession or community of practice.
Sometimes South Africa.
Sometimes Africa.
Sometimes humanity.
What determines the boundary may be a combination of shared identity, place, history, experience, responsibility, knowledge, purpose, challenge or common interest.
The “I” does not disappear inside any of these groups.
I remain an individual.
But I can belong to several different versions of “we” at the same time.
Perhaps that is the important distinction.
The question may not be:
Where does the “we” end?
Perhaps the better question is:
What makes us draw the boundary where we do, and when should that boundary expand?
Because sometimes the problem itself may reveal that the “we” we have chosen is too small.
Join the conversation
What defines the boundary of your “we”: family, place, shared experience, common interest, responsibility, nationality, Africa, humanity, or does the boundary change depending on the question?
Leave a Reply