The Colonial Myth of Development: The Circle Not the Line

There’s a clip of Julius Nyerere that has been living rent-free in my mind.
In it, he says:

“Development to us can not mean the building of a road so we that we can point and say, ‘there you are, at one time we had no road, now we have a road.’”

The more I listen to that video, I realize Nyerere wasn’t just talking about economics, he was talking about time.

We’ve been taught to think of development as something linear. A straight line from “undeveloped” to “developed.” A story about moving forward, about growth, about modernity. But this idea of development is tied to a very specific kind of time which is linear, mechanical, and extractive (Fletcher, 2024). It’s the same time that organized the factory, the plantation, and the colonial office, where hours meant productivity, and productivity meant worth. It’s a time that turns life into a project, something to be completed, evaluated, and compared.

Some time ago I posted a video talking about the work of John Mbiti, a Kenyan philosopher and theologian who said traditional African societies reckoned with time in two dimensions, sasa (the present, near past, and near future) and zamani (the vast endless past where all events eventually settle) and the past, an that an idea of an abstract linear future didn’t really exist (or it only exists as potential time because time is relational and event based, the future only becomes real as it moves into sasa and then flows into zamani.

And under this video I always get the same recurring comment:

“Oh, is this why Africa is underdeveloped?”

And this comment makes me want to scream, because anyone who has read Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa would never say such a thing.

Rodney’s argument is simple but revolutionary: Europe didn’t develop while Africa stood still. Europe developed by underdeveloping Africa. One region’s progress was and is literally build on the extraction and delay of another region.

In other words, “development” and “underdevelopment” are not natural stages of history, they are relational conditions. The wealth of one part of the world was built on the exploitation of another. Europe’s progress depended on Africa’s dispossession. The timeline of “progress” we’re all supposed to follow is one drawn by colonialism itself.

So when we use the same clock, the same metrics, the same obsession with catching up, we’re still trapped inside that colonial temporality, one where the north is the future and Africa is somehow late.

But this hierarchy of time runs deeper than economics, thinkers like Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Franz Fanon remind us that colonialism also conquered the imagination and psyche of the colonized. It replaced African languages, and their temporalities, with those of the colonizer. The very grammar of development is colonial. To decolonize time, then, we must decolonize language, reclaim the words with which we imagine progress, growth, and being.

Nyerere understood this. Through his philosophy of Ujamaa, a Kiswahili word meaning familyhood, he proposed a different vision of development, one that valued relationships over material accumulation. For him, development was never about things, but about people. About whether communities are cared for, whether work is dignified, whether we live in balance with one another and the land, because if our development depends on someone else’s depletion, then it isn’t development at all.

So Nyerere’s point wasn’t to reject modernity or change. It was to reject a mechanical imagination of time, one that measures life only in motion and value only in accumulation.

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