Table of Contents
Standing in Samoa, I thought about my upcoming trip further east to French Polynesia in the coming days. I was looking forward across the sea, as the world turns, but I realised that I was about to go back in time. The imaginary dateline that the Europeans created and drew like a three-year old child who hasn’t yet gained control of their motor functions, was messing with my head. Since arriving in New Zealand, only a couple of hours ahead of SouthKorea (my home for the last 18 months), I’d stopped understanding time and started calling everyone at exactly the wrong time. I’d never woken anyone up in the middle of the night over the last year and a half, but now suddenly I could never manage to call anybody when they were actually awake. Why was I turning with the world but yet going back in time? Did I get younger when I crossed the dateline a few weeks later? Or did I age faster? Is this nonsense what maths and physics are based on? Are they nonsense too? Anyone who understood it must be an imbecile or to be mistrusted.
I had recently come to the conclusion, after reading about how the branch of mathematics that informs the modern world was once know as a cult and Pythagoras its leader, that maths was a lie. In fact, I’d already had an inkling. And if I were right, then time no longer made sense.
A friend of mine, as I was complaining to her of this very predicament, sent me an anecdote about how pensioners drink alcohol in the morning because they had divorced themselves from the concept of time that the ‘others’ adhered to because they no longer worked or had to be anywhere. I’d noticed my mother, a retired anaesthetist who always had to be somewhere and whose patients’ health and recovery was measured in time, struggle in retirement. What was the point of a clock when you no longer had to be anywhere? But it wasn’t until her dementia progressed to a certain point when I realised that time was really bullshit. My mother would often occupy multiple points in the past simultaneously over the space of a minute or more. In and out, in and out, flying around like a time traveller in front of my eyes, never leaving her chair. I realised that the secret of time, whether it’s linear or not and all of that theory and debate, is held within the mind of someone who has dementia. And they are petrified of being forcefully divorced from our draconian obsession with numbers, Pythagorean mathematics, chronology, being somewhere when the clock points at certain numbers, always talking about the past being behind us and the future in front. And none of it makes sense.
Africans have long been made fun of by Europeans for being late. And Africans have long made fun of Europeans for not understanding why they’re ‘late’. Unfortunately, to fit in with what Europeans, now holding many African lands to ransom, wanted, Africans (and others) conformed. Westernised education, a legacy of empire, and the desire to seek favour are rapidly rendering most of the world almost devoid of any other way of being. Europeans, even those working in so-called humanitarian aid, would do well to remember this. I once read a quote from the Taliban (reportedly) that said about European invaders, ‘You have watches, but we have time’. I smiled; they had entirely and accurately summed up the number one current problem with the world in my opinion: time. I listened to podcasts about how intelligence used to be based on being able to farm and when industrialisation brought in large scale education, rural people were deemed unintelligent because the whole concept of life and its measurements was now dependent on a new understanding of time. Some of those people still exist beyond the westernised measurements of intelligence. Some societies in Brasil, Australia, and Papua New Guinea don’t even have the language for counting past the number five. They say that mathematics is the universal language, but I think that it may just be the catalyst that has globalised the world so rapidly and destroyed the solutions to many of our current problems.
Before the Babylonians came with their love affair of the number 60, humans used to decide time by the placement of the stars, by the number of full moons after the rains, by the sun’s position, or the movement of animals. And many of us, the Tuareg, Pirhã, Bemba, Haida and Māori, to name but a few, still do. Imagine if the very people trying to figure out this climate disaster were to do so using that conceptualisation and language. Because currently the very people who say they’re the experts in figuring out this climate disaster can’t plant crops or sail the seas or set a meeting by just looking at the sun, the moon, the stars, or the movement of the very animals they say they are protecting. Isn’t that a lack of intelligence based on the very thing, the environment, that they work so busily to protect? When Polynesian navigators steered their vaka across the Pacific with nothing but stars, winds, and swells, their precision outstripped any clock; when the Dogon told the time by Sirius before telescopes confirmed it, they were dismissed as primitive; yet who was primitive?
And yet, the very institutions tasked with saving the environment insist on measuring progress in hours, days, and deadlines, a framework born in European observatories and industrial factories, utterly disconnected from the rhythms of the ecosystems they aim to protect. When NGOs demand that communities account for success by reporting against schedules and metrics derived from this Europeanised time, they are asking them to succeed inside a system that erases the very knowledge which could actually help them survive and thrive.
What is the point of your measurements, and financial justifications in your cultish numbers, if you can’t count in shadows or when the heat rises? And if NGOs don’t wake up to this problem, then they will continue to be part of the problem and never ever able to conduct any meaningful and lasting programme that would eventually put themselves out of business (because surely that is the point, right?).
Eventually I sat, confused in time, on a white beach on the eastern coast of O’ahu looking at the suntan-lotion-cloudy turquoise sea with not a blade of sea grass to be found. A dead zone. Life here had been erased except for the plague of humans ensuring it stayed gone in this spot. I had learnt about the seriousness of the dead zones on beaches affecting the Pacific islands in the Whangarei climate change conference led by the Māori community and other locals. The irony, and my consequent irritation, is that the ecological knowledge of indigenous people in Pacific islands would have prevented this and could reverse this, but it has been almost wiped out by the empires who promote the mathematics-first worldview of time. It is that worldview which governs the global struggle with climate and development. Some communities have adapted and others are like a broken marionette dancing disjointedly to foreign music.
Dr HAFEAT Abbam
