I had a friend at college who drove his own car to school. He was the type of person that was obsessed with driving, he always told you to wear your seat belt; he drove carefully; he even used fuel saving techniques such as driving with the gear-lever in neutral when on a steep decline. He also told some of the strangest stories. One morning he came to school with the story that at a zebra-crossing he hit a child with his car killing the child. For compensation he was told to pay for the child's burial. Up to today I am still not sure if any part of that story is true, but it was and still is believable to me. In the Africa that I am a part of that is the way such a situation would be handled.
However, there is such a thing as culpable homicide and had my friend been a negligent driver he would easily qualify for this crime. Culpable homicide has gotten many people into jail including, most recently, the double-barrel (no pun intended) South African Olympic and para-Olympic athlete.
I know of a negligent prison warden whose reckless driving resulted in the death of one of his four passengers, and he never went to jail. I don’t even know how he got out of it but I do know that his car was a stolen car and he didn't have a drivers licence. My point being that a lot of things are swept under the carpet this side of the world. When the damage is done the damage is done and some people simply write it off as bad luck and get on with their lives. Negligence isn't a thing that many Africans feel that they should be punished for; but if you become a public figure you do it at you own risk. On our path to a better world for Africans we are going to have to confront some very difficult issues, one of which is the Ubuntu question.
Ubuntu suggests that we are all human beings and we are a community. Furthermore it suggests that, for a society to function, individuals need to be conscious of or take into consideration in their actions that, what they do has an effect on everyone else. Basically it is saying be considerate. “A person is a person of people,” goes a famous song in a South African language. The best translation for the word “ubuntu” in English would be the word “human”.