A proverb shared across the Nguni languages of southern Africa, here in isiXhosa: umntu ngumntu ngabantu, a person is a person through other people. It is the root of the idea known as ubuntu. The claim is philosophical, not sentimental: you do not first exist as a finished individual and then decide to join others. You become a person by being named, raised, argued with and held to account by other people. Desmond Tutu carried the idea through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and into No Future Without Forgiveness (1999); the philosopher Mogobe Ramose, in African Philosophy through Ubuntu (1999), reads it as a full account of being as relation. We print the isiXhosa because the proverb belongs to the language it lives in. Set it beside No. 34, “Descartes is dead”: here the self starts in the plural.