also on YouTube if you prefer to watch/listen x https://youtu.be/CQqWFWty4aI
I recently turned 29 years old, and it was not lost on me how in today’s world your birthday is such a significant part of your existence, your date of birth is on your birth certificate, ID, to the point that we are people with dates attached to us. This is of course evidence of the individual nature of citizenship which came with colonial capitalist modernity. I am saying this because on my birthday I thought of my grandparents and great grandparents and even those before them who were born in times before the need for identification documents or birth certificates, again which were introduced at colonialism like the Kenyan kipande system for purposes of surveillance and administrative control (Perrot, 2021) and even to reinforce social structures like in the case of Rwanda.
The purpose of me writing this is two fold, on one hand I want to talk about what it means to celebrate a birthday, before the capitalist colonial understanding of time, and then I want to talk about how birth was remembered before there was a need to know a person’s exact birthday.
If there is anything I have learnt from the writing of John Mbiti, a Kenyan theologian and philosopher in this 1969 African Religions and Philosophy, it is that time is made up of events, or rather how I understand it, time is how we experience events. Mbiti wrote that from the African communities he surveyed, he found that time was traditionally understood as two dimensional. The first was zamani meaning an infinite ocean of time “where everything gets absorbed into an aspect of reality, which is neither after nor before“. This means we are all existing in zamani, or rather that all time exists all together as an infinite ocean of events. The second dimension is sasa which is “the here and now within which people exist“, meaning that a person’s individual sasa begings when they are born so the older a person is, the longer their sasa is, and their sasa consists of the events they experience, similarly a community would also have its own sasa of the collective sasa of its people.
The purpose of saying time is event based according to Mbiti is that traditionally people see time as time to… time for… and not arbitrarily through the clock, for example, it is morning because the sun has risen, not because the clock says so. The event of the sun rising is what produces the time of morning.
what does this have to do with my birthday? it means that I am not marking my birthday just because the calendar says a year has passed, but rather looking at the events that have produced this season, or rather which events are taking me from one stage of life to another. This takes me back to my grandparents and great grandparent to look at how they remembered their births, and which stages of life called for celebration instead of arbitrarily marking a calendar year.
The best way I can think about this is through age sets. In those days, a person’s birth was remembered based on the season or context of a person’s birth, and often a person’s name would have something to do with the context of their birth. People who were born around the same time also belonged to the same age set, so that they would go through life experiencing the same events together or in a similar time, for example puberty, adolescence, work, education, marriage, rites of passage, and so on (Mbiti, 1969; Muriuki 1969), and it was those events in a person’s life that were celebrated because people recognized events, and it was those events that propel a person from one stage of life to another.
Just to give a small analogy of age sets, In Chunia Achebe’s Arrow of God, when Umaoro was at war with Okperi, the district commissioner ordered for people from both villages to come together and break their guns in half to end the war, and it was such a big deal that the children born in that year their age set was called Breaking of the Guns, so their birth was remembered around that context.
I was born barely a week after Princess Diana died, and for my mother that is the context she uses to remember my birth, which I find very beautiful.
So yes, my take away from this is that events are what produce time, events are how we experience time, events are how we remember and anticipate time. There is no past, only events which have happened, no present, only events which are happening, and no future, only events which we anticipate to happen. Time does not exist independently of the events that constitute it, as Mbiti said. And the future does not exist as an empty space just waiting for us to get there. It is by experiencing events that we produce time. We are the masters of time, never slaves to it. And this serves a beautiful lens through which to study capitalist and colonial modernity and the commodification of time.
Anyway, heri ya siku ya kuzaliwa kwangu // happy birthday to me!
Mumbi, August 2026, Nairobi, Kenya.
References
Perrot, S., & Sandrine Perrot. (2021). A kipande for Ugandans?: The aborted 1947 “identity card for Africans.” In Identification and Citizenship in Africa (1st ed., Vol. 1, pp. 137–143). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003053293-10
John Mbiti, African religions and philosophy, Heinemann, 1969.
Godfrey Muriuki, A history of the Kikuyu to 1904, PhD dissertation, University of London, 1969.
Achebe, C. (1986). Arrow of God. Heinemann.
Mumbi Macharia 
Leave a comment