Time in the Black Experience Recent Titles in Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies Religion and Suicide in the African-American Community Kevin E. Early State against Development: The Experience of Post-1965 Zaire Mondonga M. Mokoli Dusky Maidens: The Odyssey of the Early Black Dramatic Actress Jo A. Tanner Language and Literature in the African American Imagination Carol Aisha Blackshire-Belay, editor Visible Ellison: A Study of Ralph Ellison's Fiction Edith Schor The Early Black Press in America, 1827 to 1860 Frankie Button The Black Laws in the Old Northwest: A Documentary History Stephen Middleton The African Aesthetic: Keeper of the Traditions Kariamu Welsh-Asante, editor History and Hunger in West Africa: Food Production and Entitlement in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde Laura Bigman Financing Health Care in Sub-Saharan Africa Ronald J. Vogel Folk Wisdom and Mother Wit: John Lee — An African American Herbal Healer Arvilla Payne-Jackson and John Lee; Illustrations by Linda Kempton Armstrong Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston: The Common Bond Lillie P. Howard, editor A Journey into the Philosophy of Alain Locke Johnny Washington Time in the Black Experience Edited by JOSEPH K. ADJAYE Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies, Number 167 Greenwood Press WESTPORT, CONNECTICUT • LONDON Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Time in the Black experience / edited by Joseph K. Adjaye. p. cm. — (Contributions in Afro-American and African studies, ISSN 0069-9624 ; no. 167) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-313-29118-7 (alk. paper) 1. Blacks—History. 2. Afro-Americans—History. 3. Blacks— Social life and customs. 4. Afro-Americans—Social life and customs. 5. Time—Social aspects—Africa. 6. Time—Social aspects—America. I. Adjaye, Joseph K. II. Series. CB235.T56 1994 305.896—dc20 93-35843 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 1994 by Joseph K. Adjaye All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 93-35843 ISBN 0-313-29118-7 ISSN: 0069-9624 First published in 1994 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. Printed in the United States of America The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984). 10 987654321 Copyright Acknowledgments Chapter 7 is reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press from an ear­ lier version that was published in the Journal of African History 29 (1988): 229-44. For Chapter 10,1 acknowledge the permission of Princeton University Press to repro­ duce extracts from Mechal Sobers The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (1987), pp. 30-37, 40-43, 64-67. To the memory of my mother Adwoa Asobo, and to my daughters Ewurafua Stacie and Maureen, joys past and present This page intentionally left blank Contents Figures and Tables ix Acknowledgments xi 1 Time in Africa and Its Diaspora: An Introduction 1 Joseph K. Adjaye 2 Ntangu-Tandu-Kolo: The Bantu-Kongo Concept of Time 17 K. K. Bunseki Fu-Kiau 3 Time, Language, and the Oral Tradition: An African Perspective 35 Omari H. Kokole 4 Time, Identity, and Historical Consciousness in Akan 55 Joseph K. Adjaye 5 Time and Culture among the Bamana/Mandinka and Dogon of Mali 79 Kassim Kon6 Vlll Contents 6 Time and Labor in Colonial Africa: The Case of Kenya and Malawi 97 Alamin Mazrui and Lupenga Mphande 7 "Kafir Time": Preindustrial Temporal Concepts and Labor Discipline in Nineteenth-Century Colonial Natal 121 Keletso E. Atkins 8 Time and History among a Maroon People: The Aluku 141 Kenneth M. Bilby 9 Jamaican Maroons: Time and Historical Identity 161 Joseph K. Adjaye 10 Early African-American Attitudes toward Time and Work 183 Mechal Sobel 11 Time in the African Diaspora: The Gullah Experience 199 Joseph E. Holloway Bibliography 213 Index 225 About the Contributors 231 Figures and Tables FIGURES 2.1 Cosmological Time 23 2.2 Main Stages of Vital Time 25 2.3 Kongo Hourly Time Segmentation System 29 2.4 Luzingw. Time Scroll 32 TABLES 3.1 Meal Times 47 4.1 Asante Day Names 60 4.2 Day Names and Their Attributes 61 4.3 The Asante Calendar 64 4.4 The Fante Calendar 65 4.5 The Asante Adaduanan (40-Day) Calendar: November 8-December 20,1991 68 5.1 Seasons in Selected West African Linguistic/Ethnic Groups 87 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments I am indebted to a number of individuals without whose support and assistance this volume would not have been a reality. To Peter Osei- Kwame, with whom I explored initial ideas and formulations on time in Asante as a panel topic for the African Studies Association meeting of 1985; to my old friend Said S. Samatar, who, several years later, assured me of the viability of the topic as an edited volume; to my colleague and friend Buba Misawa, who, at the critical and difficult stages when the end seemed so near and yet so far, gave me invaluable suggestions and critiqued some of the essays; to these and others too numerous to name, I am most grateful. This page intentionally left blank Time in the Black Experience This page intentionally left blank 1 Time in Africa and Its Diaspora: An Introduction Joseph K. Adjaye Time is the coordinating principle that orders human life in all societies. It occupies a central role in our individual as well as collective affairs, permeating not only feelings but also activities. It is through time that personal identities become intelligible and communicable to others. Time is also the vehicle by which the universe becomes comprehen­ sible to us. As far back as classical times, Ovid aptly noted that time devours all things. Centuries later, J. T. Fraser observed in his introduc­ tion to the first modern major collection of essays on time, The Voices of Time:1 Temporal experience ... more than any other aspect of existence is all-pervasive, inti­ mate and immediate; and life, death and time combine in a dialectical unity which is hard to comprehend but which, nevertheless, is symbolically stated in all great reli­ gions. Furthermore, time also seemed to be a constituent of all human knowledge, expe­ rience and mode of expression; an entity intimately connected with the functions of the mind; and a fundamental feature of the universe. Yet, what is time is not always easy to define, even for historians, to whom time and space are cardinal dimensions within which history sets the actions of its actors. Because of the unity and diversity of temporal experience, time defies easy definition, even in its all-pervasive­ ness. Thus, the physicist, biologist, geologist, theologist, philosopher, 2 TIME IN THE BLACK EXPERIENCE historian, anthropologist, psychologist, horologist, and specialists of other disciplines may all have different perceptions of the concept of time. However, the problem with the subject of time among Black peoples in Africa and the diaspora has not been so much a matter of differing concepts among specialists of various disciplines as one of either out­ right denial or distortion by Western authors. Until the past three decades or so, much of the writing about Africa was done by outsiders, non- Africans who portrayed little, if any, understanding of the continent and its peoples. In consequence, their portrayals of Africa were permeated by their preconceived notions and concepts; Eurocentric hypotheses, prejudices, subjectivities, and epistemological categories became the paradigms and archetypes by which African experiences were shaped and described.2 This is the problem that V. Y. Mudimbe (1988, p. 15) succinctly captures in his concept of "otherness" and categorizes as "epistemological ethnocentricism; namely, the belief that scientifically there is nothing to be learned from 'them' unless it is already 'ours' [that is, Western] or comes from 'us.'" During the colonial period (about 1885-1960), uncritical and distort­ ed observations by missionaries, travelers, and colonial administrators reinforced the Western vision of Africans as inferior people, and pseudo- justification for the inferiority of Black and darker races was found in the Hamitic myth. As late as 1963, distinguished English historian Hugh Trevor-Roper may have exposed not only his own prejudices but also those that were dominant in his time in the West when he gave the infa­ mous and oft-cited lecture in which he described the African past as nothing more than the "unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in pic­ turesque but irrelevant corners of the globe."3 Africans were thought of as tribesmen who were grouped together as a nameless, undifferentiated mass euphemistically labeled natives, as vividly described by English historian Arnold Toynbee:4 When we Westerners call people 'natives,' we implicitly take the cultural colour out of our perception of them. We see them as wild animals infesting the country in which we happen to come across them, as part of a local flora and fauna and not as men with pas­ sions like ourselves. So long as we think of them as 'natives' we may exterminate them or, as is more likely today, domesticate them and honestly (perhaps not altogether mis­ takenly) believe that we are improving the breed, but we do not begin to understand them. Westerners indeed did not begin to understand Africa until recent decades. For long their vision was characterized by that of an outsider, Time in Africa and Its Diaspora 3 perpetuating a myth of Africa that Thomas Hodgkin described as a "Hobbesian picture ... in which there was no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society."5 In the reification of the "primitive," Africans were depicted as being deficient in delineating relations of time, because time, in the "abstract mentalism" tradition of Lucien Levy-Bruhl (1910, 1923, 1938), was considered a product of mental activity in which "inferior societies" were thought to be wanting.