Counting years

In the second edition of African Religions and Philosophy (1989), John Mbiti says that Africans generally lack a concept of the future. Their future tenses reach only a short time into the past, and one people leave the present they are absorbed into an atemporal afterlife.

Mbiti notes as well that few African cultures have numerical time-keeping or numerical calendars. Their days are organized not by hours but by events or activities – sunrise, time for milking, time for rest in the heat, time for watering, time for grazing, time for milking again, sunset. Years are organized by wet and dry seasons, but not by a sequence of days, and even the one numerical calendar he mentions does not count years sequentially.

Obviously these two features of African time-concepts are related. Once you start counting days and years, you have a concept of the future. If you say “It’s now year 1,” then you automatically anticipate Years 2, 3, 10, 57, 1066, and 1492 (provided your numbers go that high).

There are many reasons why Christianity “creates future” (Rosenstock-Huessy), but this is one: When the gospel comes, people start counting years from the incarnation.