SOURCE:

Faculty: Arts
Department: Department Of Philosophy

CONTRIBUTORS:

Osita, G.N;
Ogugua, P;

ABSTRACT:

Time is an integral aspect of life because life itself means understanding and experiencing the duration of consciousness. In African worldview, time is the key in understanding African ontology, their attitude and general way of life. Since the arrival of mechanical time model with mathematical precision, this important key of understanding Africa and her way of life has been abandoned for western pattern of time. Consequently, Africans were categorized as lazy, indifferent, tardy, and people with faint idea of time especially with regards to future projections. This “epistemic injustice” and “danger of single story” made this dissertation to employ the method of analysis to enquire into: the reality of time in Africa, the measurement of time in Africa, the transmission of time in Africa, the cyclicity of time in Africa, the reality of future time in Africa, the fatality of time in Africa and the flow of time in Africa. The findings show that time in Africa is subjective because it has to be experienced for it to be real and time is made manifest through event. Also, African measure time by the cycles of the moon and setting of the sun and in terms of social and economic activities like the market cycles of four days. Time is transmitted through proverbs, riddles, songs, narratives, folklores, poetry, and town criers. Finally, the finding shows that time as a succession of events “moves” not forward but backwards. A review of some cultures show that time is cyclic in Africa because of repetitive occurrence witnessed in nature, individual and African social life. Time in Africa is not the clock tickling here and there with mathematical precision that is fast and ongoing and hurrying one from this activity to another. Time is tied to an event and this event is lived naturally and rhythmically. This work concludes that a humanization of time in Africa which will give a human face to Africa’s fast gripping technical society. This will restore the mad rush to keep schedules that has robbed them their relationships and health.