Coloniality of time
In modern conceptions of time, the future is a temporality just like the past and the present. There is linearity in this conception of time. This linearity emerges from Euromodernity and its colonization of time. At its centre is what is called ‘historicism’ as an imperial technology of subjecting the world to a singular ‘global historical time’ but at the same time denying those who were said to have been ‘discovered’, known as natives and Blacks, a dignified place in that time scale (Chakrabarty 2000: 7). At the centre of historicism are the notions of progress, civilization, modernization, development, and emancipation. Europe positioned itself as ahead of the rest in time to the extent that ‘historical time’ was posited as a measurement of ‘cultural distance’ between Europe and the rest (Chakrabarty 2000: 7). The issue of European colonization of time and the invention of the modern world is explained by Ali A. Mazrui (2005: 75) in this way:
First and foremost was the triumph of European cartography and mapmaking in the scientific and intellectual history of the world. If Africa invented man in places like Olduvai Gorge, and the Semites invented God in Jerusalem, Mt. Sinai, and Mecca, Europe invented the world, at the Greenwich Meridian. It was Europeans who named all the great continents of the world, all the great oceans, many of the great rivers and lakes and most of the countries. Europe positioned the world so that we think of Europe as being above Africa rather than below in the cosmos. Europe timed the world so that the Greenwich meridian chimed the universal hour.
How did Europe colonize time? As defined by Gurminder K. Bhambra (2007), Euromodernity constituted itself through two means. The first was ‘rupture’. The ‘rupture’ materialized through colonization of time and breaking it into premodern and modern temporalities (Bhambra 2007: 1). Europeans (colonialists) claimed and monopolized ‘modern’ for themselves. The rest of the people, who were said to have been ‘discovered’, were relegated to ‘pre-modern’, ‘pre-history’, ‘pre-political’, and even ‘pre-human’. This meant denial of a present and a future. Even the past was considered to be ‘ahistory’, if not ‘prehistory’. In this way, the targets of racism, enslavement, and colonialism were in the words of Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000: 8) frozen into the ‘waiting room of history’.
The second was ‘difference’. The paradigm of difference unfolded through social classification and hierarchization of human populations in accordance with race (Maldonado-Torres 2007). This required further explanation, as there was a colonization of being human itself, and the invention of differential ontological densities, with some people kicked out of the human family and others designated as sub-humans. The consequence is what Johannes Fabian (1983) termed ‘denial of coevalness’ and Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2007) termed the ‘impossibility of co-presence’.
Lewis R. Gordon (2021) identified four modes of denying a present and a future to those people designated as natives and Blacks, as part of invisibilizing them. The first mode was that of racialization, which reproduced those deemed to be Black and native as an unwanted quantity and a problem to be solved. Genocide was one such solution. Enslavement was another. Colonization was also part of a solution called the ‘civilizing mission’. Reinvention of those deemed to be natives and Blacks as hewers of wood and drawers of water sealed the colonial and racial capitalist deal.
The second was temporalization into an unchanging past – a mode called primitivism and premodernism. Gordon (2021: 23) explained that ‘This makes their continued presence as a ghostly one’ with the white settlers monopolizing a present and a future ‘devoid of indigenous people’. The third mode was that of rendering those designated as Black and Indigenous speechless/voiceless. This entailed ignoring whatever they said. Gayatri Spivak’s (1988) widely referenced question of whether the subaltern can speak spoke to this existential-linguistic cul-de-sac in which the oppressed and dominated found themselves. The fourth mode was epistemological. This materialized in terms of what has been termed ‘epistemic injustice’ or ‘epistemic closure’ (Fricker 2007, Santos 2014, Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018, Gordon 2021). Therefore, the African and Black utopic registers of the future cannot make sense outside a comprehension of this context of dismemberment and dehumanization involving theft of the African past, present, and future. African knowledge, as the key basis of African imaginations of the future, was subjected to epistemicides. A colonial library was created to control African imaginations of their past, present, and future.