Ghana Man’s Time (GMT): The Spirit of Waiting, Time, and the Serendipity of Processions

Abstract (English)

This paper explores Ghana Man’s Time (GMT) as both an epistemological and methodological framework, offering a radical rethinking of temporality that foregrounds the relational, contingent, and emergent properties of waiting. Drawing from my fieldwork on processions in Ga Mashie, Accra, Ghana, the paper examines waiting, delays, and moments of stillness where the seen and unseen, the spiritual and the sensuous, the individual and collective intersect. I argue that waiting or better put GMT is not an interruption but rather integral to the unfolding of knowledge, allowing for the negotiation of social, spiritual, and sensory engagements. In this way, GMT challenges the dominant, linear conceptions of time that prioritise efficiency and immediacy, instead embracing a decolonial temporality that resists universal structures of knowledge production. To ground this argument, I analyse the epistemic significance of GMT, and position it as an alternative methodological framework that resists the rigid demands of Western academic structures. I contextualise GMT within broader historical and postcolonial discourses on time and temporality, while at the same time interrogate how waiting as a form of attunement can serve as an intervention in research methodologies. Drawing from ethnographic methods, including participant observation, fieldnotes, walking, interviews, and autoethnographic reflections, this paper situates GMT as an embodied research experience. It highlights the serendipitous encounters that emerge in moments of waiting that shape research insights and social connections in ways that rigid schedules and institutional timeframes often overlook. Ultimately, this paper challenges the dismissal of GMT as inefficiency, reframing it as a radical resistance to capitalist and colonial impositions of time discipline.