𝐁𝐲 Prof. Kettehkumuehn Murray, Ph.D.
In traditional West African societies, time was not measured by mechanical clocks or numerical calendars. As historian Carl Patrick Burrowes observes, temporal reckoning followed the rhythms of nature itself: the alternation of day and night, the waxing and waning of the moon, the succession of dry and rainy seasons, and the cycles of planting and harvest.
Time was not an abstract thing. It was lived, embodied, and anchored in concrete events.
Moments were remembered and distinguished by what happened: the enthronement of a king, the outbreak of drought or epidemic, an eclipse of the sun, a migration, or a decisive communal turning point. Time, therefore, was inseparable from experience and meaning.
Even the day itself was not divided into numbered hours but understood through observable stages of the sun and life. Morning announced itself with the crowing of the rooster and the rising of the sun. As the sun “cleared its eyes” and began to stand, human activity intensified.
When it stood fully erect overhead, it was noon. As it leaned and began to slip, work slowed. At dusk, the sun reclined, and when it finally “went to bed,” night—and rest—arrived. Time was read from the sky, the land, and the body, not from an instrument.
This understanding finds philosophical articulation in the work of John S. Mbiti, whom one may fairly describe as a secular theologian of African thought. Mbiti argued that traditional African societies conceive time as having two primary dimensions: the present and the past, while the future exists only marginally, as expectation rather than substance. Time does not stretch endlessly forward; rather, it moves toward human beings, absorbs their actions, and settles into memory.
Burrowes echoes this insight when he notes that, in African thought, time moves from the present into the past—not forward into the future. To minds trained in linear, progressive time, this appears counterintuitive. Yet within African epistemology, it is coherent and complete. The past is not dead; it is continuously expanding. The future, by contrast, remains unknown and fundamentally beyond human control.
For this reason, guidance is sought not from speculative futures but from history, precedent, and ancestral wisdom. The ancestors are not relics of a bygone era; they are custodians of accumulated time. They dwell in what Mbiti called the “living past”—a temporal realm still accessible through memory, ritual, and moral obligation.
Burrowes further notes that two conditions stand outside ordinary human time. In the realm of the ancestors, time is believed to move slowly, unburdened by the urgencies of mortal life. Beyond even this lies the period of creation, which exists outside time altogether. This is not a scientific claim but a metaphysical one, pointing toward a sacred horizon where sequence, measurement, and causality dissolve.
Within this framework, human beings understood that they held no dominion over what was yet to come. What they could shape was the present—through right action, moral conduct, and fidelity to inherited wisdom. The future would take care of itself; the past would judge.
𝐂𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠
Time does not run ahead of us.
It gathers behind us.
What we do today becomes the ground on which tomorrow stands.
𝐀𝐬𝐞̀.
𝐉𝐮-𝐚𝐚̀-𝐧𝐚𝐚𝐧.
𝐙𝐞𝐞-𝐦𝐚-𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐧.
𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐀𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐬 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐰𝐢𝐬𝐞.
