A New Analysis of Mbiti’s “The Concept of Time”

Kalumba, Kibujjo M.

doi:10.5840/philafricana20058111

Cited by 11 publications

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“…There is ample scholarship documenting and exploring alternative ways of understanding, measuring and living time (that differ significantly from this Western notion of time as progress, arrival, project) that were prevalent in different precolonial societies. In African scholarship, John Mbiti ([1969Mbiti ([ ] 1990 argues for example that the African notion of time is two-dimensional (further discussed by Kibujjo M. Kalumba, 2005). And Joshua N. Kudadjie (1996) makes an argument for Ga and Dangme time as a spiral.…”

Section: Western Time and The Feminine Othermentioning

confidence: 99%

Woman, time and the incommunicability of non-Western worlds: understanding the role of gender in the colonial denial of coevalness

Coetzee

2021

Feminist Theory

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Central to the functioning of colonialism and coloniality is a specific construction of time, in terms of which the spatial ordering of the world also translates into a temporal ordering. Anthropologist Johannes Fabian argues that there is a specific rhetorical device at work here, namely the ‘denial of coevalness’, which is a colonial distancing strategy through which other worlds are robbed of validity on account of not existing within the same time as the West. In this article, I aim to add to analyses of scholars like Fabian, Chakrabarty and Mignolo by arguing that this colonial temporal ordering, which persists today, is also thoroughly gendered. As a point of departure I use Walter Mignolo’s idea that the denial of coevalness relies on two distinctions, namely nature versus culture, and tradition versus modernity. I argue that the discursive construction of nature (as opposed to culture) and tradition (as opposed to modernity) centres on gendered assumptions and an obsession with control over women’s bodies. In the course of making this argument, I also point out the overlaps, as well as key differences, between woman’s exclusion from Western linear time, on the one hand, and the temporal distancing of the colonised, on the other. In particular, I show how Western linear chronology positions Western women and previously colonised women in vastly different ways. I argue that if one considers the extent to which the denial of coevalness relies on colonial gender discourses, the erasure of indigenous sexuate knowledges that contradict the colonial gender discourses is not one erasure among many, but one of the key erasures that colonial temporality hinges on. A crucial implication of my analysis is that the process of undoing, deconstructing or dismantling the colonial denial of coevalness is also inherently a feminist project.

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Section: Western Time and The Feminine Othermentioning

confidence: 99%

Woman, time and the incommunicability of non-Western worlds: understanding the role of gender in the colonial denial of coevalness

Coetzee

2021

Feminist Theory

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“…He makes it known that time is something that African people relate to events and phenomena, not for the sole purpose of mathematical certainty as valued in the west. There have been a number of favorable opinions and critiques of Mbiti’s African philosophy of time (Ani, 1994; English, 2006; Gyekye, 1995; Kalumba, 2005). Gyekye (1995), for example, argues convincingly that future time does exist in African reality, and particularly in the Akan language of West Africa (pp.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Africological Historiography: Primary Considerations

Adé

2022

Sage Open

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Africological Historiography is scholarship dedicated to the preservation of African cosmology in the telling of African history. Such an historiography also serves as a means to tease out the agency of African people in any circumstance of marginality, misinterpretation, suppression, and omission of said historical agency. For the purposes of developing Africological Historiography, Africologists may take on various interests in other fields in order to garner the data necessary for their inquiries. However, it is important to make sure that the data garnered from other disciplines are approached using Afrocentric methodology or they will be no good for Africological research. In this article, I explore the benefits and dangers of other fields of interests, the dangers of Eurocentric theoretical models, afrophobic historiographies, and the inherent praxis of the discipline in its use for producing Africological Historiography. These are primary considerations for Africologists in the presentation of African history.

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“…This is because what binds the past and the future together neither changes nor remain the same. 4 This distorted believe and question of the African sense of time has arisen because of some dangerous conclusions of some writers on Africa have drawn. Strange enough some of them are Africans.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Justification of the concept of time in Africa

Nnajiofor¹

2016

Og J. Af Stud

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The metaphorical concept of African time is one in which tardiness, lousiness and a total disregard for schedules and program is made out to characterize all Africans. Tardiness is a universal phenomenon; it should not be made to hang around African's neck like a milestone meant to drawn a criminal. This preposterous tag is seen as a harbinger of the continuous cycles of poverty, bad governance, monumental backwardness and a seemingly perpetual over-dependence on other peoples of the world for minimal survival. This, however, cannot be read to mean that Africans lack the notion of time or that of future time. The best we can say is that they lack "time-discipline." With hermeneutic method, this paper seeks to give some justifications to this notion of African of time or Africans posture to time and observes that Africans relational attitude, her polychromous nature, even lack of some basic amenities, etc. are some of the justifications to these and concludes that there needs to be a balancing (prioritizing) of time vs. events considerations and that most people are usually somewhere in between the two extremes. It is usually necessary to adapt to the time and event orientation of a culture group.

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A New Analysis of Mbiti’s “The Concept of Time”

Cited by 11 publications

References 0 publications

Woman, time and the incommunicability of non-Western worlds: understanding the role of gender in the colonial denial of coevalness

Woman, time and the incommunicability of non-Western worlds: understanding the role of gender in the colonial denial of coevalness

Africological Historiography: Primary Considerations

Justification of the concept of time in Africa

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