How Has the Traditional Anthropocentric Traits of Africans Influence Their Time Expressions?

Abstract

This paper aims to establish some salient anthropocentric traits that influence African existential expression of time. This paper arose due  to the preposterous claim that Africans are lousy, indifferent and terrible timekeepers. Many scholars have linked this indifference to  Mbiti’s claim that Africans have a limited idea of the future. I argued in this paper that in traditional African society, Africans were  good managers of time because they manipulated time to their advantage. I however observed that this uneasiness in time management  arrived with the missionaries and the colonialists. Hence, Africa’s inability to conceive their indigenous time and the  contemporary Western time at the same time gave rise to this crisis of time conception in Africa. Despite this crisis, I maintain that time is  like a language spoken differently and understood differently in each tradition. I conclude that to understand African time conception,  one has to understand their pre-colonial anthropocentric traits which inform their existential expression.