[SuchFriendsAreDangerous]

The other day while enjoying an almost mystical hike in the June gloom created cloud forests of the San Gabriels last week, a Rastafari brother and I were discussing our experience with African time and its radical difference from our own Western experience in which we were raised and thoroughly inoculated. There seems to be in Africa an entirely different ontology when it comes to the concept of “Time” in comparison with the Western mindset. In Africa, time remains as fluid as it was before the invention of mechanical time pieces. The word for “minute” evolved in the English around the 15Th century coinciding with the invention of more accurate clocks, and this word was the literal measurement along the circle (which in geometry a minute still is). We now divide our day by minutes, seconds, hours, etc etc. In Africa time is not yet so concrete, so rigidly defined. Writer Ryszard Kapuscinksi in his book In the Shadow of the Sun noticed this in his extensive travels across the African continent. He explains that Newtonian time, the standard for Europeans, is ‘absolute, true, and from its own nature.” Further, the European is a slave to time suffering from “an unresolvable conflict.” Africans, according to Kapuscinski, view time as not a rigid, inviolate series of laws, but rather “it is man who influences time, its shape, course, and rhythm.” The African concept of time is more abstract, as the time appears “as a result of our actions and vanishes when we neglect or ignore it.” While the European feels that he is a slave to time for the African its time that is subservient and dependent to man. He writes that Europeans admire Africans “fantastic talent for waiting” which consists of mute silence. “Africans believe that a mysterious energy circulates through the world, and if it draws near and fills up, it will give us the strength to set time into motion- something will start to happen; until this occurs, however, one must wait: any other behavior is delusional and quixotic.”

Our Western misconception of Time often makes us dissatisfied and disagreeable with reality and so when we are upset with how life seems to be based from our concept of the passing of time, we are really rejecting reality. When we get frustrated with the passing of time, either because it is moving to slow or is falling away too fast, we really are just getting out of touch with reality, and this is truly as it was said before.. quixotic.


In Amharic "minute" is translated as deqiqa, the root for this word viz. is “deq” which is the action of pounding grain into flour, which is then called duqit. The implication then is that a “minute” on the clock is viz. pulverizing and grinding away at the day, or really to waste it by having measured it. In the process of measuring a day's time into "minutes/deqiqoch" in the Amharic mind you are actually "pulverizing/temedeqeq" the day, the imagery of the language is lovely in this regard, as it suggests a person grinding at a mill or a grind stone, and surely we would think a day was wasted if we were to grind it at the mill. This is how the Ethiopians interpreted the concept of time when they began to encounter Westerners with a new fascination with "watches" and measuring "time" around the 16th century.

ደቂቃ ~ minute (part of an hour) (n.) /däqiqa/

ማድቀቅ ~ pulverize (v-inf.) /madqäq/

Africans exist in an altogether different concept of time, where past, present, and future essentially coexist, meant to be experienced rather than contemplated. Surely Africans get bored, but they accept reality much more reasonably than folks like us from the Western mindset which counts away at the clock day after day. Further, they seem to have a remarkable ability to savor the moment however long it may take. I’ve learned from my experience with Ethiopians and other Africans to let time flow by. When celebrating, worshiping, eating, or just hanging out with Ethiopians, you really should just leave your watch at home, it will be of no use to you

 

ድር (der web)
ድሮ (dero old, olden, in past times)

Another Amharic anecdote.. The concept of “olden times, in the past” in Amharic is rooted in the word for “spiders’ webs, chain” (der) which implies the concept of a past-present interconnection. Language both is defined by and defines our ways of thinking, so when Ethiopians speak of minutes on the clock in the same visual speech as grinding away flour, and when they think of the olden times as being like a spiders' web, clearly there is this embedded connection. We in the Western world could really use a lesson on reorganizing our concepts of time more according to the African experience.

[jon boy]

racist.

[SuchFriendsAreDangerous]

 

Originally Posted by jon boy

"racist"

[floatingslowly]

more Africans should have jobs.

time for bed.

[finding nobody]

This was very interesting to read. Thanks for posting man! I think Africans know whats up.. Time sucks. and while what you are saying makes complete sense to me, it's a hard concept for me to grasp.. Being an American who's never left the country and everything. any suggested reading on the subject?

[Glice]

I think it's unfair to suggest 'the West' is obsessed with time in one way. There's a massive difference between the average German's approach to time (rigorously punctual), an Italian's (you will not get food or drink in public within 30 minutes) and rural Irish (everything happens slowly and goes on forever).

Not having spent much time with Africans, I'm sure there's a few Zim or Ghanaians who wouldn't be impressed with Amharic being taken as representative of the whole continent.

This is an interesting paper I recently read on linguistic relativity. Beware Sapir/Whorf.

[SuchFriendsAreDangerous]

Originally Posted by Glice

I think it's unfair to suggest 'the West' is obsessed with time in one way. There's a massive difference between the average German's approach to time (rigorously punctual), an Italian's (you will not get food or drink in public within 30 minutes) and rural Irish (everything happens slowly and goes on forever).

Not having spent much time with Africans, I'm sure there's a few Zim or Ghanaians who wouldn't be impressed with Amharic being taken as representative of the whole continent.

This is an interesting paper I recently read on linguistic relativity. Beware Sapir/Whorf.

a) i didn't intend for Amharic to representative of the whole continent its just the only African language I am intimately familiar with, did you happen to speak Shona or Bimoba to elaborate the linguistic perspectives of time in Zimbabwe or Ghana. If y'all had experience with Africans in general you would see it was quite common, if anything I was more so connecting Ethiopians into the African concept of time by using Amharic etymologies, as we in Rasta say who feels it knows its. If y'all can't feel it, then y'all don't know it, but surely there are folks out there in SYG who have experience with Africans and have learned to see this difference in conception of time.

b) of course the "west" and "europe" do not necessarily have a monolythic interpretation of time, but I think we all could agree that the western mindset is a bit time-oriented, and my point is that in the indigenous African mind this is completely foreign, and further for the point of comparison obviously I had to draw it out into an almost dichotomy.