Inspirational Quotes for the WEEKEND

By Dr Charles Leyman Kachitsa

The African concept of Umunthu is a nerve of purity and at the very core of the definition of a person. Though the person in nature is a universal concept as referred to a human being created by God, the Umunthu is always associated with the perception of a being in the context of African societies.

Culture which encompasses values, beliefs, conduct, behaviour and one would add priorities and perceptions, all come in focus to describing the abilities and temperaments of groups of people. People have to agree what they want to put forward as their most pressing priorities without losing their grounded values of morality. Umunthu is being a person in a person, thus empathy becomes paramount in human interactions in regard to the concept.

Those advocating Umunthu must be Umunthu for its meaning to permeate and dissolve the hate of oneself often flooding to others if intensity is high, a state that human beings often found themselves in. Family as a foundation of humanity is therefore at the centre, if you accept it, of the Umunthu philosophy. For it is in Love that human bore human and in fact the word that created man was first and foremost Love. In this case if one has to truly be a \’munthu\’, one has to accept Love and share it, for we can not give that what we do not possess.

The quotes this week are a continuation extraction from the book that has come to be known for its contribution to the understanding of why some nations have and yet others do not possess anything that one can point to. I am sure the selected quotes below from this book will enlighten you to one or two life lessons, read and enjoy:

THE WEALTH OF NATIONS by Adam Smith

\”Whatever be the actual skill, dexterity, and judgement with which labour is applied in any nation, the abundance or scantiness of its annual supply must depend, during the continuance of the state, upon the proportion between the number of those who are not so employed in useful labour, and that of those who are not so employed. The number of useful and productive labourers, it will hereafter appear, is everywhere in proportion to the quantity of capital stock which is employed in setting them to work, and to the particular way in which it is so employed. ……\”

\”It is in this manner that money has become in all civilized nations the universal instrument of commerce, by the intervention of which goods of all kinds are bought and sold, or exchanged for one another.\”

\”The real value of all the different component parts of price, it must be observed, is measured by the quantity of labour which they can, each of them, purchase or command. Labour measures the value not only of that part of price which resolves itself into labour, but of that which resolves itself into rent, and of that which resolves itself into profit.\”

\”China, however, though it may perhaps stand still, does not seem to go backwards. Its towns are nowhere deserted by their inhabitants. The lands which had once been cultivated are nowhere neglected. The same or very nearly the same annual labour must therefore continue to be performed, and the funds destined for maintaining it must not, consequently, be sensibly diminished. The lower class of labourers, therefore, notwithstanding their scanty subsistence, must some way or another make shift to continue their race so far as to keep up their usual numbers.\”