Episode 04
What Even is African Time? (Against the Clock)
There is a familiar argument that African cultures, because some of their languages lack an elaborate future tense, never developed a proper relationship to time — and that this explains a supposed civilisational lag. In this video, I take that argument seriously and dismantle it. What looks, through a European lens, like a deficient grasp of time turns out to be a different and in some ways richer one — and the deepest thing the argument stumbles onto is something the modern world is only now beginning to remember.
About the Companion
There's a familiar argument that African cultures, because some of their languages
lack an elaborate future tense, never developed a proper relationship to time —
and that this explains a supposed civilisational lag. Against the Clock takes
that argument seriously, and then dismantles it. What looks, through a European
lens, like a deficient grasp of time turns out to be a different and in some ways
richer one: not a line running from past to future, but a living sphere — sasa
and zamani — in which the present is inhabited rather than rushed through, and the
ancestors walk ahead of the living rather than receding behind them.
This is not a defence of lateness. Where the critique is right, the paper says so.
But the deepest thing the argument stumbles onto is something the modern world,
exhausted by its own clock, is only now beginning to remember.
A passage from the paper
The problem is that Mbiti was measuring the sphere with a ruler. The European lineal conception of time is genuinely one-dimensional. It is a sequence: past, present, future, arranged on a single axis. This linearity is not a universal feature of temporal experience. It is a specific cultural product — a form of time-organisation that suited specific economic and theological purposes, and that has been mistakenly treated as the universal standard against which all other temporal conceptions should be measured. The African conception, correctly understood, is not a deficient version of the European lineal model. It is a different and, in important respects, richer model. Ordinary lineal time — the sequential past, present, and future of daily practical life — exists within African experience. People plant at the right time, harvest at the right time, prepare for the journey ahead. But this dimension of time is embedded within a larger dimension of sacred time that gives it meaning and that the lineal model has no place for. The sphere envelops the line. And when you look at a multi-dimensional structure through a one-dimensional instrument, the dimensions the instrument cannot register look like absences. They are not absences. They are dimensions the instrument cannot see.