We concede that ethical thought in Africa is still largely uncharted seas. Africa's contribution to cosmopolitan normative systems is immense especially in revitalising a neo-humanism and restorative normative programme of reconciliation. This will be an important step in moving beyond the simple Afro-pessimism of the last few decades. This work displays a strong aversion to prescriptive approaches from so-called African moral thought, applied ethics for Africa or foundations for African moral thought and suchlike. Here we advocate minimal themes in moral discourse – even though the moral challenges for the continent rebuilding itself are daunting and urgent for anyone who carries hope for the continent's future.

African normative discourse cannot elaborate a discourse on morals in the sense of the eudemonia of Aristotle of the Nicomachean Ethics, the transcendental ethics of Spinoza or Kant's Metaphysics of Morals. For our part, we are interested in putting forward a neo-humanist discourse that has been elaborated in the context of ubuntu or humanism.

African discourse has a historico-normative basis that should engage other cultures in a multicultural dialogue. The discourse of African neo-humanism in the sense of African ethics elaborates a number of related values entered through a complex voluntary network of relations and not through some coerced edicts. But linked to this are other core values that are linked to intersubjective relations. One of these is Africa's relation to the environment, eco-ethics as many African thinkers have elaborated.

General applied ethics in the institutionalised and negotiated sense derive from this neo-humanist basis.

Now, ethical discourse cannot be foundationalist in the sense argued above. Michael Walzer has above all shaped the minimalist ethics that we present here. At this place we will elaborate some points regarding what such a normative discourse or ethics should be in Africa in the 21st century and what contribution such a discourse could make to neo-humanist thought in a post-Eurocentric world.