When I was a child, I remember being secretly jealous of another girl at my school who was my age but a grade above me. She was the star of the class — with her bouncy ponytails and fresh fits, she was socially charismatic and naturally smart — which easily made her the teacher’s pet. One night over dinner, my parents asked me why she was “ahead of everyone else?” On the surface, that might have been an innocent question, but my 11-year-old-self immediately interpreted it as an accusation — why wasn’t I ahead of everyone else? Was I too dumb or simply not fast enough to skip grades? This simple question amplified the many anxieties I harbored about myself; as a neurodevelopmentally-challenged student with reading and writing delays, I grew to be hyper-aware of how far behind I was in school compared to my peers.
But I know many other students that felt the same way. Parents often celebrate the early academic successes of their children and individuals like me are taught to feel behind when our work ethic and pace fail to align with the academic clock of success. Now, in my fourth and final year of university, I am finally understanding how narratives surrounding academic success, ambition, and productivity are not written with intentional living and justice in mind. In one of my courses called “Writing the Body,” we explore how mainstream understandings of time shape our relationship with history, body, land, and our futures. As I combed through the readings for this course, I began to see how my childhood feelings of inadequacy was just me reacting to a capitalist-colonial system of education.
African temporal thought
In most Western capitalist thought, time is a linear arrow moving from past to present to future. Originating from Judeo-Christian ideas and then Newtonian physics, time is believed to be quantifiable and commodifiable — a map on which we regiment our days and structure the physical, and even emotional course of our daily lives. This philosophical view of time is culturally expressed through an emphasis on punctuality, schedules, deadlines, and efficiency. In other words, time as an infinity is decontextualized from the environment, history, body, and ancestral or existential qualities of the human experience. By contrast, in his book African Religions and Philosophy, the Kenyan theologian and professor John Mbiti posits that pre-colonial African time is two-dimensional, encompassing a long past, a present, and virtually no future.
By studying the anthropological and linguistic features of tribal communities in Kenya and beyond, Mbiti concludes that time is understood through events, natural landscapes, and ritualistic or communal activities. In A Socio-Cultural Reality in the Process of Change, academics Sunday Fumilola Babalola and Olusegum Aydeji Alokan explain that: “Time to [African communities] has to be experienced. [Time] makes meaning to them when it is related to weather, seasons, and natural phenomena around them. Time then was not mathematical or numerical. It is simply time as experienced by the people in relation to events around them.”
This vibrant piece by Anayo, titled Time and Beyond, is a captivating exploration of the theme of time and its impact on human experience. The composition is filled with clocks, watches, and other symbols of time, creating a sense of urgency and introspection. The central figure, with an expressive face and tilted head, holds a green alarm clock close to their chest, perhaps symbolizing the intimate and constant presence of time in our lives.
While there is an incredible degree of diversity in cultural practices and thought across the African continent, it is undeniable from anthropological records and colonial studies that the African temporalities emphasize communal experience over individual schedules. Moreover, as articulated by Mbiti and others, time is existential and measured through human activities, not abstract chronology. Another way to think about this is that time unfolds when something happens: seasons change, rituals occur, a community gathers, a person is born or dies. Without events, time cannot be actualized.
During the colonization of Africa, Christian missionaries imported aspects of Western culture under the guise of education, marking the onset of mass literacy programs that imposed strict linear and codified ideas of time. Babalola and Alokan writes that with reading, writing, and numeracy education, “emphasis shifted from mere relation to events, natural phenomena, and weather. The [colonized African populations] began to see the need for calculating time in a modern way.”
By rewiring the hands of time, colonialism introduces temporal violence: the use of time to further the colonial agendas of governments, education systems, and other areas of public and private life. A clear example of temporal violence is through language. The colonizers will use words like “ancient” and “primitive” to describe their colonized subjects and associate them with the past, which becomes synonymous with inferiority.
Temporal violence and the God of capitalist urgency
In my class, I learned about how capitalism became an ideology that informed how we relate to and understand time. Capitalism as an economic and political system manipulates how we think about the nature of work and labour, leisure, freedom, and rest in order to sustain itself. In her book Decolonizing Time, author Nichole Schippen notes that capitalism creates abstract time, where time is perceived and inhabited as an independent entity on which human activities are dependent. In this manner, capitalism as an inherently unjust and unequal system dominates the social meaning, value, and organization of time. The imposition of Western temporal systems (e.g., work hours, school timetables, calendars) was also an imposition of power, a restructuring of indigenous rhythms to fit industrial and bureaucratic control.
A central tenant of temporal violence is framing expectations of “lateness,” “punctuality,” and “timeliness” exclusively through Western standards, which erases other cultural logics of time. These expectations then become associated with subjective valuations of worthiness and success, greatly shaping how we see and love ourselves. I feel these contemporary implications of temporal violence in my body. As a woman with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) — a hormonal and reproductive condition that affects 6-13% of reproductive-age women — my body fails to run on the imperialist temporal logic. Mental fog, energy crashes, fatigue, mood swings, and nutritional and hormonal imbalances is a daily struggle as I try my best to conform to the pressures of a 9-5 workday.
Further, I believe that capitalist conditioning through our education system as a medium of temporal violence has convinced us all that taking long breaks, prioritizing self-care over deadlines, or not going to every networking event is somehow a sin. Under current workflows, self-optimization, ambitious self-branding, and overworking ourselves to curate an image of professional perfection are hailed as moral virtues. We live in a culture that treats stillness like stagnation. “Don’t stop or you’ll fall behind,” “why did you take so many gap years,” and “you can study more if you woke up earlier” are all subtle messaging that reduces the value of time and presence to work, to appease the capitalist Gods of urgency.
Intentional living is my new ambition
At some point or another, we have to question the colonial and imperialist logic behind capitalism’s demonization of rest and how we relate to time. And trust me, it’s not easy! In my experiences, learning about the African concept of time has been truly revolutionary in a personal sense. For years, I carried shame and self-disappointment for failing to align my hormonal and mental cycles with the rhythm of academic work that was expected of me. We live in times of tremendous political and economic uncertainty; striving for the narrow definition of success under capitalism and putting our ambition on overdrive makes us believe that we can buffer ourselves against the unaffordability crisis, rising rents, social atomization, and other anxieties of modern living.
I believe learning about how various African cultures and philosophies relate to time and human experiences can help us live more intentionally, more lovingly. For me, taking inspiration from African temporalities looks like honouring my body’s preferences and rhythms over the corporate grind. With its emphasis on alignment with nature’s cycles, African temporalities teach us to be kinder to ourselves during these gloomy winter months. It teaches us that healing, connection, and the very essence of how we experience time is made meaningful through nurturing our social bonds.
The truth is, grinding for that job promotion while neglecting self-care and rest in fear of “lost time” is what systems of oppression want us to believe. We measure success by how fast we move and how impressive our lives are, but rarely do we have the courage to ask where we’re headed? We feel that the answer might reveal a darker truth about how much we’ve emptied ourselves out to fill the cups of others.
