Cultural Perceptions of Time in Africa: Colonial Impact

Introduction: Time as a Cultural Construct

Time is a foundational factor in every culture. The perception of time differs across most cultures, and the determining factor behind those differences is often based on the means of production. As Kokole observed, "most cultures have some concept of time, although the way they deal with time may differ fundamentally" (Kokole 1994, 35). Tracing the perception of time in Africa can be seen as tracing the European racial prejudices regarding the intellect of indigenous populations in colonized regions. Much of the information about the development of time concepts in African culture is colonial in origin and based on the recorded ideas of European interlopers—some of them missionaries, others capitalist adventurers, with only the occasional mark of a true historian.

In Mali, as in many other parts of Africa, mixed systems of time-reckoning exist: Islamic time overlays Bamana time, and French-imported time overlays Islamic time. Whatever temporal structure people apply, they understand that other systems impinge on their own (Koné 1994, 84).

Time in the African sense is no mere abstraction that has taken form in a linear progression; rather, time remained circular and episodic, told and retold, based on great events that occurred in a living historical past. This circular pattern of time is realized in such natural phenomena as birth, aging, and death. African time continues after death, because time is circular and not linear. Ancestors could be reborn back into the community of the living, or they could simply dwell in the world of ancestral spirits. For Africans, time is both sacred and profane, dividing the human world into sacred and non-sacred time, the temporal and the eternal. This concept differs from the European conception, in which time is linear and life ends with death (Holloway 1994, 200).

Time was also organic in the sense that the creation of the time frame within which human activities were conducted was largely the reserve of nature itself. Sunrise and sunset, wet seasons and dry seasons, long rains and short rains—these were among the forces of nature that combined to establish the rhythm of work and the expenditure of labor in precapitalist societies. The workday was not eight hours but rather the succession of agricultural or pastoral tasks and their relationship to one another. Within the limits of this time frame, people took as much time as they needed. Although hard work was valued, freedom from work was an equally important objective (Mazrui and Mphande 1994, 100).

This paper analyzes the changes in time perception among three subsets of African regional culture, isolating three factors that are central to the dissemination of change in time awareness: changes in labor practices, changes in regional dynamics or relocation, and changes in affiliation in relation to loyalty to family or place of origin. The regional or ethnic subsets examined are the Bantu-Kongo of modern Nigeria, the Nguni Zulu of modern South Africa, and the Akan of central and southern modern Ghana and parts of the adjoining eastern Côte d'Ivoire. Other regional affiliations are discussed where the history of a particular culture provides relevant testimony.

European Bias and the Historiography of African Time

One of the very first true historians to recognize the correlation between African oral tradition and European calendar time in sub-Saharan African culture was Emil Torday. His work was later brought to wider attention by Basil Davidson in 1959, a pioneer in the tradition of Western narrative history. Together they provide an excellent example of both historical record-keeping in Africa and the concept of organic time. Emil Torday traveled hundreds of miles into Central Africa not in search of rubber or ivory or conscript labor, but in search of information about the past.

When Torday reached the Bushongo people and sat listening to their chiefs, the elders recalled the legend and tradition of their past without difficulty, since remembering the past was one of their duties. They unrolled their story in measured phrases, traversing a list of their kings—one hundred and twenty names in all—right back to the god-king whose marvels had founded their nation (Davidson 1959, 3).

The establishment of calendar time to a history of Africa came about when the Bushongo elders, traversing the oral tradition of their kingdom, arrived at a reign that seemed to them nearly uneventful yet proved paramount to the European sense of history:

"As the elders were talking of the great events of various reigns, and we came to the ninety-eighth chief, Bo Kama Bomanchala, they said that nothing remarkable had happened during his reign, except that one day at noon the sun went out, and there was absolute darkness for a short time. When I heard this I lost all self-control... It was only months later that the date of the eclipse became known to me... The thirtieth of March, 1680, when there was a total eclipse of the sun, passing exactly over Bushongo... There was no possibility of confusion with another eclipse, because this was the only one visible in the region during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries." (Davidson 1959, 3–4)

Yet despite the early work of a true historian with the patience and attention to detail of Torday, the European school of thought was based on the almost universal assumption of indigenous Africans as intellectually inferior to Europeans, and from this erroneous assumption came the idea that African cultures were unhistorical. It was well into the 20th century before these perceptions were challenged by modern academics.

The situation remained largely unchanged until the seminal works of Edward Evans-Pritchard. In his groundbreaking study "Nuer Time Reckoning" (1939), Evans-Pritchard established that the Nuer of southern Sudan recognized a number of temporal structures or "planes of rhythm," including physical, ecological, and social planes, all of which were integrated into their social formation. Above all, he demonstrated that time in Africa and other precapitalist societies—and, for that matter, everywhere—is a product of culture and the environment rather than of intellectual capacity (Adjaye 1994, 4).

For much of the first half of the twentieth century, therefore, theories and conceptions about time in Africa merely articulated popular European misconceptions and prejudices. These may be summarized as follows: first, a denial that Africans, as "natives" of "inferior mental capacity," were capable of conceptualizing time in the same way as people in "civilized" Western societies; and second, distortions that characterized Africans as unhistorical and lacking a linear concept of time, even when the ability to conceptualize time was conceded. Even the very categories used to analyze life—culture, society, and time—were themselves European (Adjaye 1994, 3–4).

It is widely understood that European intellectuals did not begin to understand Africa and her diversity of culture as anything more than outside observers until well into the 20th century. African history had been based almost wholly on early colonial writings, and the historical perspective of the African people themselves did not become widely observed until recent times. Africa south of the Sahara encompasses some forty-eight countries with more than 600 million people. Although these states reflect great variety in their territories, populations, cultures, resources, and historical legacies, the diversity of this region should not obscure the common problems and challenges evident during four decades of post-independence development (Lewis 1998, 1).

The vastness of the continent creates one of the major difficulties that went almost unrecognized by early historians: the sheer number of cultures with differing ethnic, cultural, intellectual, and perceptual histories. Nearly the entire continent's population was grouped together as a nameless, homogeneous "native" African people. This is especially true of sub-Saharan Africans, with some exceptions made for those coastal Africans who had experienced greater exposure to European travelers and traders. For these reasons it is difficult to separate the true historical concepts of African culture from the perspective of European outsiders who have had an immeasurable impact on the cultures being studied.

The task of the modern historian is to glean from original sources the grains of cultural perception least likely to be influenced by the interjection of European tradition. A note worth making about the issue of organic time—and to dispel any simplistic ideas associated with the use of agrarian rather than quantitative time models—was offered by Koné in 1994:

"Although the Komo farming ritual and the Tswana king seedtime ritual are important in marking off the beginning of important times, they should not be taken as ritual time by which people are summoned to action. People observe the so-called ritual times because these times are doxic and because people see in them the potential for benefit. Even if the Komo, Dogon, and Tswana rituals described above were to disappear, their people would still know when to farm, because it is not the rituals that tell them when to farm, as the West believes." (Koné 1994, 84)

It is far too simple to assume, as some Westerners do, that because a temporal system is based on ritual or tradition dictated by a natural cycle, it also dictates action.