What if I told you that for many traditional African societies, the concept of a linear, abstract, infinite future doesn’t exist?
See, one day, I was making a video about how we joke that “African time” connotes lateness or disorganization (See the video here). Then, while reading Sylvia Tamale’s A is for Africa: Towards the Decolonization of Knowledge Production, I came across something that stopped me mid-scroll: according to some African scholars, many African communities view time not as a grid of hours and minutes, but as a rhythm of events.
There’s no strict segmentation of time down to the hour or the second because what matters isn’t the clock, it’s the happening. So, we might say we’ll meet at sunrise, and whether the sun rises at 6am or 7am doesn’t matter; what matters is the event of the sun rising. Or we’ll say the party will start in the afternoon, whether that’s 2pm or 3pm is immaterial; what matters is the feeling, the energy, the shared understanding of “afternoon.”
That, to me, is a quiet form of temporal disobedience, a refusal to let time exist as an external authority, divorced from lived experience.
Rethinking Time Through Mbiti
The idea that time is cultural rather than universal is one that African scholars have been debating, critiquing, and expanding for decades. Most famously, by John Mbiti, the Kenyan theologian and philosopher whose African Religions and Philosophy (1969) still echoes through our classrooms and conversations today. I’ve made several videos on this, the most popularly viewed one is this one)
Mbiti, from his research across Africa (especially among two East African Bantu communities), argued that traditional African thought understands time through two dimensions:
- Sasa — the immediate time: the present, recent past, and near future.
- Zamani — the vast, endless past where all events eventually settle.
But what about the future? For Mbiti, the future doesn’t exist, at least not in the abstract, predictive, Western sense. Time must be experienced to be real. Until something happens, it doesn’t yet belong to time.
As you can imagine, that conclusion has been misread many times. Some interpret it as Africans having “no concept of the future,” but that’s a colonial misreading. What Mbiti actually shows is that for many traditional societies, the golden age isn’t in some abstract tomorrow, it lives in zamani.
In this worldview, death, inheritance, changing seasons, generational shifts, even the rise and fall of kingdoms, these are not new phenomena. They have happened before, they will happen again. Time is cyclical, not linear. The future is not imagined as endless progress but as a return, a renewal, a movement within rhythm rather than escape from it.
The point here isn’t whether Mbiti was “right” or “wrong.” It’s that he invites us to see that time is event-based, that time exists when it can be tied to meaning, to lived experience, to something that breathes.
Literature Review: Beyond Mbiti
Of course, Mbiti’s ideas didn’t go unchallenged. Scholars have since revisited, reframed, and complicated his framework, revealing the richness and diversity of African temporal thought.
- Ali Mazrui (1970) and others questioned whether Mbiti’s binary between sasa and zamani might be too rigid, noting that many African societies do plan ahead, just differently, through generational or ecological cycles rather than fixed calendars.
- Kwame Gyekye (1987), writing on Akan philosophy, proposed a more dynamic understanding of time, one that includes moral and spiritual dimensions where the future, though uncertain, remains morally charged and socially anticipated.
- V.Y. Mudimbe (1988) critiqued the very idea of “traditional Africa” as a static category, arguing that both “tradition” and “modernity” are colonial constructs that distort how African thought evolves in relation to power and history.
- Achille Mbembe (2001, 2021) takes the conversation further, suggesting that African temporalities are marked by “entanglement”, where past, present, and future coexist and fold into each other. Time, he argues, in On the Postcolony and Out of the Dark Night, is lived as “simultaneity,” not succession.
- And more recently, thinkers like Sylvia Tamale (2020) and Nkiru Nzegwu (2019) have connected African temporal philosophies to questions of gender, embodiment, and epistemic decolonization, showing how reclaiming African time is also about reclaiming African ways of knowing.
Together, these thinkers remind us that African time isn’t a lack, it’s a language. It names a relationship to being, to community, to nature, and to memory that Western linearity cannot translate.
Closing Reflections
So maybe time, as we’ve been taught to think of it, progressive, measurable, external, is only one rhythm among many.
Maybe African temporalities remind us that time can move in circles, spirals, and echoes; that it can pause to listen; that it can remember.
Temporal disobedience, then, isn’t just about rejecting clocks or calendars, it’s about reclaiming the right to experience time as living, as ours, as something that breathes through us, not over us.
And maybe that’s what the decolonization of time really means: to move again in rhythm with the world.
References
- Gyekye, K. (1987). An Essay on African Philosophical Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme. Cambridge University Press.
- Mbembe, A. (2001). On the Postcolony. University of California Press.
- Mbembe, A. (2021). Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization. Columbia University Press.
- Mbiti, J. S. (1969). African Religions and Philosophy. Heinemann.
- Mazrui, A. (1970). “The Moving Cultural Frontier of World Order: From Monotheism to Monism.” International Organization, 24(4), 722–742.
- Mudimbe, V. Y. (1988). The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. Indiana University Press.
- Nzegwu, N. (2019). Family Matters: Feminist Concepts in African Philosophy of Culture. SUNY Press.
- Tamale, S. (2020). Decolonization and Afro-Feminism. Daraja Press.
Mumbi Macharia 
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