Prince Cedza Dlamini, grandson of both former president of South Africa Nelson Mandela and King Sobhuza II of Swaziland, traveled to the United States from Johannesburg to speak with students at the Southampton campus on Feb. 13.
There, Dlamini spoke mainly of the traditional African ideology of Ubuntu.
“Some people say, ‘I think therefore I am,'” he said, repeating Rene Descartes famous saying. “But Ubuntu is, ‘I am because you are.'” Dlamini believes that “no man is an island,” and that Ubuntu focuses on people’s relationships with each other.
In 2005, Dlamini founded the Ubuntu Institute for Young Social Entrepreneurs, an organization that hopes to arm young African leaders with strong leadership and professional skills.
These skills are needed to achieve the U.N. Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) — an eight-point strategy adopted by world leaders to eradicate poverty, hunger and disease in Africa and throughout the world by 2015.
“Participation by young people is an investment [in any] country’s future,” he said.
Through the Ubuntu institute, Dlamini is teaching not only youth in Africa, but also those around the world. The Institute offers programs in which American students can go to Africa and volunteer, sometimes even for credit; a program Dlamini hoped to bring to Stony Brook.
The prince, who humbly prefers not to be called by his royal title, believes that “humility, not arrogance, will take you far.” He said, “Life isn’t about what you have, or what you’re born with, but what you do with what you have.”
For a man with so many accomplishments, complacency seems easy. However, he thought otherwise. “I feel like I really haven’t done anything?I feel like there is so much more I can do,” he said.
Dlamini, who left South Africa and a corporate job at Mitsubishi Corporation in 2000, to attend Tufts University, where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in international relations.
He now serves as a youth emissary and spokesman for the MDGs and promotes his vision for a better world.
“I value the sense of being committed to something that inspires me [every morning],” he said.
