Time in an African Worldview, part 1

Tanzanians don’t care about time.

I hear this often from expats living in Tanzania and from foreigners who are visiting. (And often, too, from Tanzanian citizens living in urban areas.)

It’s not true.

“Yes it is. We’ve planned three weeks in a row for our village savings and loan group meeting to begin at 10:00. And we’ve never started before 11:30. The farmers there have little respect for me and zero respect for time. And this has been true everywhere I’ve worked in Africa.”

There is a simple explanation for this. It has to do with the assumptions each of us make about how the world works — our worldview.

That your worldview is based on assumptions necessarily means you didn’t choose it, but rather adopted it by way of cultural norms. Your society has (by default) agreed the world works in a particular way, and so the world — ahem, your world — indeed does work in that way.

Tanzanians care deeply about time. But they measure it differently than Americans.

Westerners orient time around a clock; they are clock-oriented. The African worldview has traditionally been event-oriented. Time is measured by events and occurrences, and not ticks on a clock or clicks on a calendar.

Some examples:

• In Tanzania 7:00 am is referred to as 1:00, because it is the first hour of the day, measured from the event of sunrise.

• When I ask farmers to create timelines of village history, they don’t use number years, but rather event years: the year of the drought or about the time the bridge was built.

• You can see, too, why it’s strange to ask, “How long will it take to repair the bicycle?” Because repairing the bicycle is the event, and events are how you measure time.

There’s nothing inherently good or bad, right or wrong, about time orientation by clock or by event. It is only because entire cultures have adopted one or the other that it becomes true for them.

In my next blog post I’ll explain why the village savings and loan meetings never start on time, and how that isn’t a sign of disrespect, but rather the opposite.

-bh