The Zamani

I’m trying to re-learn Swahili. Once, I knew it well but now it’s rusty. My intentions are good, but it’s hard to stay disciplined and study it regularly. The hardest thing to nail down is noun classes. Every noun in Swahili belongs to one of fifteen noun classes and all modifiers, including plurals, change according to their class. For example, kitabu (book) and kiti (chair) are in the KI/VI class so their singular and plural forms are kitabu/vitabu and kiti/viti.

Last week I noticed that the word for time (wakati) is in the noun class of long thin objects like walls or forks. Is there a universal, intuitive sense of time as long and thin? Maybe so. One of the ways that we depict it is as a timeline – long and thin. Poets and writers refer to it as a cord or thread, swiftly passing by.

So, that little language lesson got me thinking about other Swahili words involving time. John Mbiti’s classic African Religions and Philosophy explained a traditional (and now defunct ) concept in East Africa that divided time into a near past and a far past. People who died in living memory were considered to be in “the near past.” As long as anyone alive remembered them, these loved ones stayed “near.” When no one alive remembered them anymore, they became part of the far past or the Zamani. People who are always remembered (like Abraham Lincoln, for example) were always “near” and never moved into the far past. But most people eventually pass into a time when no one on earth remembers them and they become part of the Zamani, that storehouse of memory of those who are beyond memory. These people are honored as “the ancestors” because of their humanity and the collective gifts they gave to their children, many generations down the timeline.

This concept of time is long gone in today’s East Africa but it seems natural that this is the place that developed a concept of past time that encompassed every person who ever lived. This is, after all, the region of the world where we find the first known historical presence of human beings. The fact that there is a respect for the unknown ancestors here and a sense of being part of some long thin line of time seems all of a piece with what we know of our origins as human beings on this pale blue dot in the universe. The Zamani concept connects us to everyone who has gone before, those who are near and those already in the great Zamani. My parents are no longer living but I like to think of them as “near” and, when I am gone, I hope that those who knew and loved me will think of me as “near,” too.

So, here’s a brief ode of gratitude for those unknown multitudes of people who worked diligently all over this earth for thousands of years, patiently improving each crop of maize from season to season, selecting the best rice seeds for next year’s planting, learning how to spin and weave fibers and coaxing colors from myriad plants to dye them with, figuring out how to build simple irrigation devices, learning to use the stars to navigate the seas, developing geometrical skills and thereby figuring out accurately, over 2,500 years ago, that the earth was round with a circumference of about 25,000 miles.*

The awareness, in this part of the world, of the nameless and seldom-heralded people who lived before us and bequeathed to us so much may have prompted what we in the West think of as Africa’s respect for all ancestors everywhere. And the motives that inspired our ancestors from time immemorial to work diligently to create this enormous bequest of improvements that make our lives better every day were likely similar to ones that motivate us, their descendants, today: wanting to create a better life for our children and future generations, striving to build a world more just, equitable, fair.

* The fact that the earth was about 25,000 miles around has been known around the world for at least several thousand years. People in the Americas also figured that out and accurately identified the cause of lunar eclipses (only a circular object casts a circular shadow) long before Columbus washed up on their shores. We have the American fabulist Washington Irving to thank for creating the myth (in the 1820s!) that Columbus’ contemporaries thought the earth was flat. Columbus thought the earth was only about 6,000 miles in circumference because that is what his Bible indicated. So, he erroneously concluded that, heading west from Europe, Asia was no more than several thousand miles away and he could go all the way there, across the Atlantic Ocean, without perishing. But the scientists were right and he was wrong. The earth was, in fact, not 6,000, but 25,000 miles around and Asia was ten thousand miles away. It was not possible then to carry fresh water in sailing vessels across more than ten thousand miles of ocean – the distance from Europe to Asia. Had the Americas not been there to save him, Columbus would surely have perished at sea – lost in the Doldrums, anonymous forever in the Zamani.