African Concepts of Time

Mbiti maintains that an understanding of the African concept of time can help to explain the beliefs, and behaviors of the African people. Similarly, an understanding of the African concept of time is also key to understanding the mind-set of the early African slaves and offers entrée into the creation of the spirituals.

A person experiences time partly in his own individual life, and partly through the society which goes back many generations before his own birth….[Time] moves 'backward' rather than 'forward'; and people set their minds not on future things, but chiefly on what has taken place….Time has to be experienced in order to make sense or to become real.
John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy

For the African, time is equivalent to and can only consist of actual events – events that have just occurred, events that are taking place now, or events that will likely occur very shortly. Theirs is a two-dimensional concept of time that only minimally corresponds with Western ideas of the "present" and the "past." Mbiti identifies these dimensions as the Sasa period, which encompasses the recent past, the present, and the very immediate future, and the Zamani period, which corresponds with a deeper, more infinite past.

The Sasa generally binds individuals and their immediate environment together. It is the period of conscious living. On the other hand, Zamani is the period of the myth, giving a sense of foundation or "security" to the Sasa period; and binding together all created things.…[h]istory moves "backward" from the Sasa period to the Zamani, from the moment of intense experience to the period beyond which nothing can go.
John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy

Thus, for the African there is a past and a present, but there is essentially no such thing as a future. The African examines what is happening around him and looks back at things that have occurred in order to make meaning and orient himself in time. Events that have not yet occurred and are not imminent are situated in the realm of "No-Time."

The future is virtually absent because events which lie in it have not taken place, they have not been realized and cannot, therefore, constitute time. If however, events are certain to occur, or if they fall within the inevitable rhythm of nature, they at best constitute only potential time, not actual time…Actual time is therefore what is present and what is past.
John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy

Traditionally, Africans are most concerned with what is near; therefore the Sasa is the period of the most consequence because it is "where" or "when" they actually exist. The Sasa of the African slaves would have included the following events: "I was home. I was taken from my home. I have lost my ancestors and my village. My village and my ancestors have lost me. We are lost." If, for the African, time moves backward rather than forward, and time must be experienced in order to be real, then the only legitimate points of reference were things that were immediately happening or things that had already occurred. Therefore, in order to survive, the slaves were driven to create new events to inhabit their Sasa, in effect creating new time in order to deal with the trauma of slavery. Like the need for functional music, this temporal need might also be viewed as "characteristically African." It is this view of time, bounded by a spiritual ontology and the need for musical functionality, which caused the creation of the spirituals.

Another important point to understand, according to Mbiti, is that the community is also bound by these same temporal views: "The community also has its own Sasa, which is greater than that of the individual. But for both the community and the individual, the most vivid moment is the NOW point" (Mbiti).

Naturally, holding such temporal and communal views would profoundly affect the way captive Africans understood and dealt with what was happening to them. And it might be said that the African slaves dealt with their situation in three "characteristically African" ways. First, they created new events by coming together as a community and promptly formulating a functional body of music for that community. Second, they used the songs to tap into the spiritual realm for sustenance. And third, they invoked the model of Sankofa, calling upon the wisdom of the past to help them cope with the present.

It is important to note that to say the early slaves behaved in "characteristically African" ways is somewhat misleading. Historically the various peoples inhabiting the continent of Africa did not hold a view of themselves as "Africans." That is, there was no sense of national solidarity. Solidarity came in the form of identification with one's specific ethnic/tribal group, and more expressly, through identification with extended village communities, also known as "kinship ties."

The kinship system is like a vast network stretching laterally (horizontally) in every direction, to embrace everybody in any given local group…each individual is a brother or sister, father or mother, grandmother or grandfather, or cousin, or brother-in-law, uncle or aunt, or something else, to everybody else…everybody is related to everybody else, and there are many kinship terms to express the precise kind of relationship pertaining between two individuals.
John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy

Central to an understanding of the African drive toward community is a saying that can be found in one form or another in almost every ethnic/cultural group on the African continent, which eloquently expresses the sense of interdependence between the community and the individual: "I am because we are; and since we are, therefore I am."

In traditional life, the individual does not and cannot exist alone except corporately. He owes his existence to other people, including those of past generations and his contemporaries. He is simply part of the whole. The community must therefore make, create or produce the individual; the individual depends on the corporate group.
David Abdulai, African Proverbs: Wisdom of the Ages

Although drawn from different villages and tribal groups, captive Africans shared many basic values, and especially ontology, that demanded the existence of a community in order to affirm the existence of the individual. This fundamental principle of intercon­nectedness made it vital that the early African slaves come together as a community.

Finding themselves far removed from all that they had ever known and faced with conditions that were inhumane at best, it is not surprising that the slaves would seek comfort by turning towards ritual music making and attempt to recreate the kinship communities they had lost. They were, in a sense, hard-wired to form a new tribe, a tribe that would eventually be known as African Americans

It is natural and predictable that Africans taken unwillingly into bondage would employ that which was most familiar to them: the strengthening of tribal, kinship and spiritual bonds through the power of music and dance. This was the same power that would appear, a century after emancipation, in the freedom movement led by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and his African American tribes-folk.
Arthur C. Jones, Wade in the Water: The Wisdom of the Spirituals

Another way the African captives dealt with the trauma of slavery was by using the music to tap into the spiritual realm for sustenance. As noted earlier, spirituality is equivalent with African ontology; the African sense of being in the world is as a religious, spiritual being. Although somewhat backward in her reasoning on how the spirituals came to include Christian content, Christa K. Dixon is nonetheless accurate in her assessment of the slave's tendency to seek out a spiritual solace through reinvention of African tribal practice.

The Africans [who were] carried away captive to a distant land, came from a quite different religious tradition, one which contributed immensely to their spiritual survival. For the African it was an accepted custom to subject oneself to the local deities whenever one entered a new territory; one obeyed, so to speak, the local 'traffic rules.' The ancestor religion and local tribal deities of Africa had been left behind. Moreover, family traditions could no longer be shared anyway because members of the same tribe and language were systematically separated from one another by the slave traders. The basic structure of belief remained, however, and was filled with new content.
Christa K. Dixon, Negro Spirituals: From Bible to Folksong

The primary challenge to the formation of the new tribe of African Americans was the problem of communication with their God, with the spirits of the ancestors, and with each other. The captives came from differing ethnic groups that did not necessarily share a similar language, and even if they did, the common practice of slave traders was to separate members of the same tribe whenever possible. The need to communicate is another reason that the spirituals were born.