Africans, both home, and in the diaspora, handle time. Time is central, critical, and crucial to our human existence. The Creator-God respected time very much in the creation account in Genesis Chapters 1 and 2. Maximum utilization of time leads to development and progress. Conversely, the misuse and misappropriation of time are “friendly” to poverty. The twenty-four hours divided into three segments of discussion and analysis in this book tell the full story. Time is priceless and most valuable. It is key to our survival as a people. What is “African Punctuality?” It is more than you think. Read more about it in this book. Lord Chesterfield, a British Statesman (1694-1773), says, “Know the true value of time, snatch, seize, and enjoy every moment of it. No idleness, no laziness, no procrastination. Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today. Whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well. I recommend you to take care of the minutes, for the hours will take care of themselves.”

The Colonisation of Time is a highly original and long overdue examination of the ways that western-European and specifically British concepts and rituals of time were imposed on other cultures as a fundamental component of colonisation during the nineteenth century. Based on a wealth of primary sources, it explores the intimate relationship between the colonisation of time and space in two British settler-colonies (Victoria, Australia and the Cape Colony, South Africa) and its instrumental role in the exportation of Christianity, capitalism, and modernity, thus adding new depth to our understanding of imperial power and of the ways in which it was exercised and limited. All those intrigued by the concept of time will find this book of interest, for it illustrates how western-European time’s rise to a position of global dominance—from the clock to the seven-day week—is one of the most pervasive, enduring and taken-for-granted legacies of colonisation in today’s world.

Established in 1911, The Rotarian is the official magazine of Rotary International and is circulated worldwide. Each issue contains feature articles, columns, and departments about, or of interest to, Rotarians. Seventeen Nobel Prize winners and 19 Pulitzer Prize winners – from Mahatma Ghandi to Kurt Vonnegut Jr. – have written for the magazine.

In the first book which deals entirely with the subject of time in Africa and the Black Diaspora, Adjaye presents ten critical case studies of selected communities in Africa, the Caribbean, and the American South. The essays cover a wide spectrum of manifestations of temporal experience, including cosmological and genealogical time, physical and ecological cycles, time and worldview, social rhythm, agricultural and industrial time, and historical processes and consciousness. The studies confirm the continuity of temporal experience among Africans from pre-colonial times, through the colonial period in Africa, across continents through slavery and Maroon societies, to present-day communities like the Gullah of the Sea Islands of South Carolina. The subject of time, now recognized to be relative rather than uniform, draws together evidence from a variety of disciplines, specifically history, linguistics, political science, anthropology, and philosophy.

Is time a natural reality that social symbols such as clocks and calendars merely contingently represent? Lateness protocols seemingly exhibit such contingency, for not all cultures regulate synchronization identically. Just as social/cultural time structures are interpreted to diverge from time’s natural rhythm, body modifications are often presented as social productions that divert human bodies from their naturally originated, corporeal temporality. A similar separation informs climate change discourses, supposing a natural rhythm that industrialized culture has invaded, the effects of which humans might be too late to arrest. Interrogating this conceptual separation matters, given that if certain times are considered to be more natural than others, a situated politics emerges regarding the associated cultural structures. Furthermore, our personal investments in experiences of lateness, which are embedded within social time, seemingly contradict the constructionist impression that social time is merely a contingent misrepresentation of what time actually is. Through Derridian deconstruction, Merleau-Pontian phenomenology, and Bergsonian time-philosophy, complemented with voices from fields including object oriented ontology, new materialism, and new criticism, this book re-evaluates the timing of times from a philosophical perspective.

This is the first time an author has listened to pastors in Africa and compared her findings with pastoral counseling from a Western perspective. Pastoral Counseling in Africa and the West presents a practical record of pastoral counseling in Africa. It accounts for the wide difference between pastoral counseling in Africa and the West considering that pastoral counselors in Africa received Western theological training. It presents a theological perspective of the pastoral counseling ministry in Africa and the West. It also presents both perspectives as professional partners in conversation with each other. “Thank God for providing trained experts like Dr. Daramola to enlighten His people. I have every confidence this publication is only the first installment. More GRACE to her elbows!” Emmanuel Oladipo Former International Secretary Scripture Union