To liberate a person to bond with other persons in an organic community, society needs to balance unique individual desires and social ideals. This article will explore this idea, through the examination of the relationship between a person and the community, that is, between the individual and society, as well as the ethical notions of good and evil, right and wrong, and responsibility for one's actions. How does a person relate to the community metaphysically and socially? Does the reality of the individual person have primacy over the reality of the community? Does the communal social order erase the concept of the individual in thought and practice? Is the individual secondary to the community? Indeed, how can a community or society develop an ethic of humanity free of social inequities and injustices?

These are some of the conceptual issues that Tsitsi Dangarembga's second novel, The Book of Not (2006), in full The Book of Not [Stopping the Time], appears to raise, and which I shall focus on in this study, employing the Zimbabwean unhu principle of personhood.