South Africans' concept of time, its understanding and impact on everyday life

Abstract (English)

Africans joke that Europeans have watches but they have time. This attitude can be observed not only in relation to their current life situation, but also in their myths and religious beliefs. When Christian missionaries came to Africa, they tried to identify one god who could be comparable to Jesus or Yahweh. That would make the conversion process easier. In many cases, such as in southern Africa, this was impossible. Africans asked for help not from gods but from ancestral spirits. When missionaries asked where the spirits came from, most people had no answer. Spirits have always been there, no matter where they came from or who the first ancestor was.
The belief in ancestral spirits permeates Christianity, as does the perception of time. It is not linear as in the West, not divided into past, present and future. It is more like a sphere into which sangomas and other shamans can travel. The spherical idea of time means that they can travel in all directions: to the past, the future, sideways to other families. Thanks to this, they can find the answer to the question of where current problems come from and what measures to take to remedy them.
In my presentation I will show how the approach to time and how the power of shamans helps contemporary Christianised Africans understand life and plan for the future.