Cultural Perceptions of Time in Africa: Colonial Impact

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.

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.

"Kongo" refers to a cultural, linguistic, and historical group of people descended from a larger body of Bantu-speaking communities who migrated south from the Benue-Cross River region of present-day Nigeria into the equatorial forest of West Central Africa and beyond (Fu-kiau 1994, 17). Dating back to the second millennium B.C., waves of migratory Bantu communities slowly pressed southward. Within a few centuries, early Iron Age settlements of Bantu speakers were established throughout the region. It was this shared past of common origins and history, and millennia of interrelationship, that gave rise to the affinity in cultural traditions, belief systems, and time concepts among the Kongo and other Bantu groups (Fu-kiau 1994, 17).

By far the most successful of the Bantu states of West Central Africa was Kongo, which developed a highly advanced iron technology, agrarian culture, complex trade systems, and elaborate political institutions well before the arrival of the first Europeans in the region in the late fifteenth century. In the view of one commentator, "in terms of natural resources [Western Europe was] poorer and in terms of its economic development at the time, in many respects more backward than advanced" (Baran 1961, p. 138, as cited in Fu-kiau 1994, 18). One of the largest and most powerful of these states was Kongo, which expanded from its Angolan base to the area of modern Zaire and the Congo Republic. Other Bantu kingdoms created in the Congo River region included Bemba, Lunda, Lulua, and Kuba (Fu-kiau 1994, 17–18).

The glory of the Kongo state did not last long after European arrival, which signaled the beginning of its decline and ultimate demise. With the European entry into the Americas and the establishment there of slave-based plantation systems, the fate of Kongo and that of the New World became intertwined for several centuries. Kongo, along with other states of West Central Africa, became the region from which Europeans obtained the most enslaved Africans transported across the Atlantic during the 3.5 centuries of slave trading from the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. It was Portuguese slave-raiding activities that, more than any single factor, accounted for the destabilization and eventual fall of Kongo, politically and economically (Fu-kiau 1994, 18).

The three factors foundational to the change in cultural time perception—labor changes, relocation, and changes in family or regional loyalty—are especially interesting in the Bantu-Kongo context, as this region was already comprised of people who had undergone relocation. That relocation was ancient, gradual, and served as a cultural aspect fundamental to the identity of the region. Another distinction particular to the Kongo is the level of knowledge about the region that predates European colonization. The evidence clearly suggests that not only was there a rich history in this highly successful region but that this history outshines that of Western civilization during the correlating timeline.

As early as 1960, European colonial government began to acknowledge the existence of a rich cultural heritage existing long before colonial rule. Much of the archaeological work done in the region was initiated at the sites of colonial entrepreneurial activity—when mining operations began to uncover significant artifacts, further analysis could not be neglected. A Surveyor of Antiquities was appointed in 1943 and subsequently made excavations at Ife in the Western Region and in Southern Zaria and areas on and near the Jos Plateau in the north, where tin-mining operations had revealed valuable material. From the former site came important finds in bronze and terracotta displaying considerable artistic achievement; in the north, the material provided evidence of a culture that flourished some 2,000 years ago and was probably associated with the working of iron (Nigeria: The Political and Economic Background 1960, 27).

The perception of time as associated with progress and wealth is often thought to be a European phenomenon, but the truth is that this may only be true in the sense of capitalism. Just as there are fluctuations in a capitalist economy, there are also fluctuations of wealth in any non-industrialized society. It is clear from the representations of time in the oral tradition that the expectation of fluctuation is based more on the natural rhythm of nature—seasons, weather, unusual occurrences like drought or even an eclipse—and that the recognition of success as an issue of wealth is universal. In a non-industrial society wealth might be judged by the degree of one's hunger or lack thereof; in another, it is determined by the numbers that dictate economic health.

In the Bantu-Kongo region, the culture and economy began a rapid decline as exposure to European colonialism increased. The rapidity with which changes were assimilated in regards to relocation—a normally gradual or seasonal process—deteriorated the familial and locational loyalties that lie at the heart of a strong non-industrial culture. The rapid decline of the Kongo state can be clearly associated with European colonialism, but permanent relocation—the worst form of which was the relocation of enslaved people to colonial nations—was a deteriorating factor directly linked to the creation of a forced labor force. Colonialism has sometimes been seen as a stage in the development of capitalism on a global scale, and "the logic of colonialism itself, as a political system, was primarily predicated upon the mission of sowing seeds of capitalist expansion in otherwise precapitalist, often agrarian societies" (Mazrui and Mphande 1994, 97).

It has been mentioned previously, as a universal example of the forces of labor change, that South African labor history follows the pattern of the degradation of cultural dynamics. What is remarkable is how precious little was known about the preindustrial northern Nguni work ethic—about the ways in which such an inner compulsion or ethos shaped the African response to the wage economy, determined work choices, and affected job behavior. A key place in which to correct this deficiency is by probing the changes that can be identified in the temporal consciousness of African workers (Atkins 1994, 121–122).

Time was at the nexus of the "Kafir labor problem." No sooner was a work agreement made than confusion arose from the disparate notions of the white employer and his African employee regarding the computation of time. The record of persistent desertions from service was in very many instances related to the fact that the terms of master-servant contracts, which were based on European units of measure, did not accord with the African mode of temporal reckoning (Atkins 1994, 123).

Like most other non-industrial societies, the Zulu used a lunar calendar and also observed a subsystem of holidays that created difficulties for European settlers who relied on them for labor. Inyanga, the word for "moon," was also the name by which the Zulu called their lunar month. They computed time by the phases of the moon, and the annual cycle was divided into thirteen "moons," each associated with ecological changes and social activities that served as time indicators for holidays and seasons (Atkins 1994, 123).

Problems also arose from the absence of a concept in Zulu corresponding to the European "year." Europeans quite mistakenly assumed that the term uNyaka or umNyaka signified "year." However, to the traditional Zulu, the word had quite another meaning: their annual cycle was divided into two seasons, both with approximately six "moons"—uNyaka, the rainy or fieldwork season, and ubuSika, the dry or winter season. The two were entirely separate and distinct (Atkins 1994, 126).

A further point of serious contention was the length of the working day. The crisis was most noticeable in commercial agriculture, where "Kafir time" had a profoundly adverse effect on the development of sugar plantations (Atkins 1994, 127). The workday length of the Zulu was dictated by sunrise and sunset for two reasons: a belief in the need to rise after the dew had burned off the grass as a preventative for disease, and a belief in evil spirits that would attack anyone outside at night. During the intense labor period of sugar cane production, continuous industry was required to complete the task with any great success.

"It is generally known that the Kafir looks to the sun's course to regulate his hours of labour; that 'puma langa' with him commences about an hour after sunrise, and that 'shuna langa' begins with the same time before sunset. It is difficult either to induce or compel him to work either before or after those periods of the day, which have received his arbitrary definition of sunrise and sunset." (Atkins 1994, 129)

These conflicts in ideas about workday length, lunar calendar, holiday work stoppages, and translation differences between seasonal concepts like "years" constituted an almost insurmountable barrier between colonists and the labor force. The only solution was a precarious balancing act based on complex and careful communication between the indigenous worker and the colonist. On occasion there was a successful exchange; on other occasions a worker would leave their employment six months prior to the time the colonist assumed they would be leaving. When communication broke down entirely, there may have been conscription and forced labor, or piece-work hiring (by completion of a job) rather than hiring by length of time.

The South African Nguni Zulu appear to have been fairly adaptive to the idea of wage labor and the migratory changes it caused. They attempted to maintain the standards of their culture that enforced family and home, returning with each seasonal work stoppage and upholding the dictates of their representational ideas of calendar. For a longer period they were living lives closer to their nature, but in later years—due to natural disasters and tyrannical colonial representatives—the Nguni endured the forced urbanization brought about by industrial, natural, and political changes, and the eventual establishment of the Apartheid system that subjugated the black proletariat majority until recent times. This eventual demise resulted in permanent damage to pre-colonial cultural identity and to familial and locational loyalties.

One of the phenomena that needs explanation is why the early reports of reliable, diligent workers were by the mid-1850s almost uniformly supplanted with accounts of incorrigible contract breakers who refused to work fully the year round. The concurrent development of Africans insisting on selling their labor for the briefest terms—that is, by the day or some fraction of that time unit—was critical in both shaping and reinforcing negative attitudes held by whites toward African workers (Atkins 1994, 122).

"Akan" is an ethnographic and linguistic term used to refer to a cluster of culturally homogeneous groups living in central and southern Ghana and parts of the adjoining eastern Côte d'Ivoire. The Akan constitute two broad subcategories: the inland Asante, Bono, Akyem, Akwapem, and Kwawu, who speak Twi, and the coastal Fante, who speak a dialect of the same name. The Akan dialects are, for the most part, mutually intelligible, and most of these ethnic groups constituted autonomous political systems in the pre-colonial period (Adjaye 1994, 57).