The frustration at the horrible time keeping of most Africans can easily drive you to suicide if you are thin-skinned.
Benin’s President Mathieu Kerekou has been known to keep participants waiting for him to open international conferences in the capital Porto Novo for eight hours. The participants sometimes won’t be fed or allowed to leave the conference hall. Kerekou, however, will offer traditional musicians and dancers to entertain them. For the eight hours the musicians would, naturally, only sing Kerekou’s praises.
In Uganda, President Yoweri Museveni kept the masses at the last funeral rites of former minister Shaban Nkutu, who was murdered by the Idi Amin military dictatorship in 1973, waiting for two weeks! Unlike Kerekou, though, Museveni kept the people supplied with drink and delicious food for all that time. It is possible some of them wished for him to be late by a month.
One of the few African Big-Man exceptions is former Uganda Vice President Dr Samson Kisekka. A conservative Anglophile doctor, Kisekka held Africa’s slothful ways in deep contempt. He was such a stickler for punctuality, it was normal for him to arrive at events where he was to be chief guest 15 minutes early.
Because the expectation is Africa’s Big Men and Women will arrive hours late, in a famous incident, Dr Kisekka arrived for a rally at exactly 10am when it was supposed to start, only to find that organisers were about to begin building the VIP pavilion! Kenya’s gruff former president Daniel arap Moi, surprisingly, was also a very punctual chap. And his programmes were made so he would arrive at something like 9.37am or 2.17pm. And he would be there. It seems he was suspicious of round figures like 2.30pm.
This tardiness has given birth to the concept of “African time” or “Black Man’s Time (BMT).” We have a duty to try and explain why this happens.
Before modern times made their way to Africa, before the calendar, and before the clock, Africans used seasons for time. Activities were not scheduled to happen at specific minutes and hours, but in bands – morning, afternoon, evening. Likewise, children were named after seasons, or the band of the day they were born. I was born at dawn, so I am Onyango (nyango is dawn in my language). My father is Obbo, because he was born in the time of year when a vegetable called bbo flowered the most.
The Africans of times past therefore, never visited on Saturday at 4pm. They did so during the rains, or the sunny period. These lasted anything between two to four months. My oldest brother is called Ochieng, because he was born during the sunny season (chieng is the name in my language for sun).
So someone who visited during the chieng season would still be on time whether he came on January 5 or March 5. If an African of that period said he was coming in the morning, he was on time if he arrived any time between 6am to 12 noon.
There was another pragmatic reason for this. There were no bridges those days, so being precise wouldn’t have worked, because you could arrive at the river and find it had overflowed and therefore you couldn’t cross. You would just have to wait for the water to recede, possibly weeks later and you continue your journey. Or there could be a man-eating lion lurking near the path. So you would lie low until it wandered off to another hill or forest.
The problem is that things that performed defunct functions don’t necessarily disappear when they fall out of use because of changes in technology.
It is the same reason why, even if men no longer breastfeed, we still have breasts (tiny ones though). Humans no longer need the appendix, but we still have it. It is inside there like a residual tail of sorts. So while we have watches, clocks, roads, cars, and everything to get us to places on time, the old habits are still in some of us.
Thus while many Africans are keen timekeepers, the majority are laggards who have not yet fully changed. Its very annoying, but it helps to understand the history.
© Charles Onyango-Obbo / twitter@cobbo3
wonderful…………..
The Americans say:
-> time waits for no man
-> time is money
But the french say it precisely “the more things change, the more they stay the same”
So mother Africa has some time to learn the hard way!
These excuses applied to all races before the modern age, but the rest have progressed ahead while we still lag behind.
Waiting two weeks for someone so that someone can be buried? Unless M7 was going to resurrect the old man. Shame. [NakeChiefs.com--No, as indicated, it was the LAST funeral rites, not the burial].
Charles,
Excellent article.
The concept of Black Man’s time has stuck in with us, it has left us totally inefficient and unable to compete in the global market place.
Government which has many big wigs who never keep time, is the greatest culprit of lost productivity for the private sector, and if all officials did was keep time then the economy would be on the way back to recovery since this would reverberate.
#wishfulthinking
Good analysis. Indeed we are all affected by historical factors.
Boo hoo….excuses, excuses, excuses……all nations have gone through these periods of development and most have progressed well enough. Why not Africa? The change has to come from the top down, but our politicians have not been exposed to the finer ways of operating. Unless you have seen the original, you cannot tell the fake. To the extent that our politicians and “big people” continue lurking in Africa and do not travel to foreign lands regularly, they will not impact change. ALL movers and shakers have had foreign stints from which they adopted better ideas. Kisekka was just the start,…Jenifer Musisi, Julie Ssebutinde, most CEO’s etc just a few examples. Enough with the excuses…
The more time we lose the more we will remain behind
Why can’t we just keep time and get over with it. It is rude not to keep time.
Well presented hypothesis, I wonder if the practical conditions on the ground make it possible to keep time in this age-lawlessness on the road, unscheduled matatus, load shedding hence dead traffic lights and uncharged phones etc. I have spent sometime with an MP and it was impossible for them to run their own schedule-constituents ‘visiting’ at 6.30 am is not strange and a typical journey from one point to another is characterised by stopovers at town centres in a bid to keep the ground soft for the next round of elections!
Serendipity! Does this explain why in Africa everybody as an expert at everything? It must be historical; we had no centres of excellence so men (and women) had to ‘perfect’ competencies at weather forecasting, politics, economics, finance, law, love, science, journalism etc.
Otherwise how do you explain the ‘expert social commentators’ on local FM stations spitting out things on global political economy, electoral law, oil economics, forensics and democracy among others?
I really like what you have acquired here, really like what you are saying and the way in which you say it