The Meaning of Time

Experiencing Rhythms and Cycles

The meaning of time is based largely on how you measure it. In the village of Sirasso, and throughout traditional rural communities they did not rely on a clock to count off the seconds, minutes, and hours. The concept of time that I came to learn was built into the environment and their language. The clock was the sun, and the name for “sun” was “tere” which also meant “day” and “noon.” Time was noted by the greetings, and by the terms for morning, noon, afternoon, and night. The rhythms of time were based on the rhythms and rituals of daily life, unambiguous markers in the day.

The word for week was “market day,” month was “moon,” and year was “rain.” In the northern Côte d’Ivoire there was one rainy season and one dry season. So to ask someone’s age in Dyula you would, say “sanji jòli b’i fe wa?” (“How many rains do you have?”). Preparing the fields, planting, growing, harvesting, celebrations, and home building were all governed by the rainy season and the dry season. The stages of life were governed by cycles of seven years. People designated themselves as older or younger relative to each other, or as “very old” referring to the generation of elders.

In the afternoons after work, when villagers returned from the fields, washed and donned their robes, it was time to stroll about and visit. We would go and visit some elders in their family compound who sat in their place of honor in front of their hut or beneath a tree to receive guests and talk. It was a time for villagers to exchange news, and stories, ask for favors, and for us to get acquainted, and share. Often it was difficult to bridge the experience, culture, and language gaps in order to understand each other.

In all my time in Sirasso it was rare to see a passenger jet pass above. In fact, we could count more satellites moving across the starry night sky than passenger jets passing overhead. One afternoon when I was visiting a chief and some elders, we saw a jetliner overhead cruising silently at a high altitude with some vapor trails behind. It was a tiny silver arrow in the sky. One of the elders asked if there were people in the plane. I answered, “Yes, probably about two hundred,” and that we came from our country to the Côte d’Ivoire in such a plane.

He then asked, “Au be se ka Allah ye yen fe?” (“Can they see God from there?”) I answered, “Ayi, mogo te se ka Allah ye, nga au be se ka Allah lon, nka ni be Allah lon, au be se ka Allah ye.” (No, people can’t see God, but they can know God, and if they know God, they can see God.”) The men stroked their beards and nodded at my simple answer in rudimentary Dyula, exclaiming, “A be marabout, kan fo.” (“He is speaking the language of holy teachers.”) Such things sound so profound when said with simple words, and viewed from an Animist-Moslem perspective.

For me, a jetliner was a time machine. A place that I entered in one era, experienced noise and vibration, and after many hours exited in another time and place. Then came the final transition into the past, the shake, rattle, and roll of the gray Peugeot pick-up with a trail of red dust following us up country over increasingly undeveloped roads, and back in time. I found myself living in a communal agrarian society, where the traditional life was much like the Iron Age 2,500 years ago.

So-called modern Africans, who called themselves “evolved,” distained the traditional people of Sirasso as “primitive.” However, I discovered that “civilization” with its materialism, wars, prejudices, and environmental destruction, often lacked the basic human traits that people recognize as civilized. Regardless that the material culture was Iron Age, the moral culture that I experienced in Sirasso was highly civilized.

The year I left the states, the end of 1968, marked a global confrontation of vision and values. In the U.S. and abroad, it was the dawn of movements for a more humane, just, tolerant, and environmentally respectful culture, which continues to the present. In the U.S. there were civil rights, anti-war, environmental, and women’s, movements, and even President Lyndon Johnson called for a “War on Poverty.” There was also, equally strong opposition to these values and vision.

Many of my peers were seeking a more spiritual connection with themselves, nature, and community. They were experimenting with creating intentional communities based on a self-sufficient, communal agrarian model. At that time they were rejecting the material, suburban culture in which we were raised, and upon which we had become dependent. More than simply a “generation gap” separating us from the path that our parents took to adulthood, there was also a gap in how we defined our purpose and how to reach it. Our urge for independence took forms often alien to our parents and their generation.

When I “landed” in Sirasso, I found myself in the “utopia” that my peers had been seeking by “dropping out.” I was to be living and working in a communal, agrarian, self-sufficient society. I had a moral crisis realizing that my role was to change and modernize it. That was the wave of African independence that I was riding, and it was driven by cold war interests of the capitalistic West, competing for influence with communist Russia, and emerging China. However, the people I was living with and serving, especially the young people, knew that there was a modern world beyond their village in the bush, and they didn’t want to be left behind. This was their time of revolution too.

It was undeniably a time of change, and I realized that change came both by evolution and revolution. I found myself in the Peace Corps in a place and time where these concepts were meeting, and where they meet is called “transition.” Therefore, I came to terms with my role as a change agent to help their way of life transition in such a way as their traditions and social structure were honored, and the change was gradual, appropriate, and would build a strong foundation for the future. I also realized that change could come in jumps, and that people in the developing world were not condemned to repeat the mistakes of the developed world. They didn’t have to experience industrialization and dirty manufacturing; they could evolve from an agrarian society into a post-industrial society.

In Sirasso, I experienced time like never before, as a rhythm integrated with all of nature and with the human rhythms of living close to the earth. Of course I read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, which was philosophy and handbook for the back to nature life of simplicity and integrity, then resonating with many in my generation. In a way I was living on the shore of my own Walden Pond, with its unique human and biological ecosystem. Often in the evenings, I would sit on the edge of my front porch and contemplate the sun setting, a red-orange backlight for the silhouette of the sacred forest. The light would mix with the haze of smoke from cooking fires and the tom-tom music of grains or yams being pounded for dinner, punctuated by the animal sounds of evening, and by the fragrance rising from the village and the earth.

In the beginning days of my stay, when I would be sitting alone in the evening, my koro tchie (older brother), Coulibali, the souspréfet’s cook and our neighbor, would come over to sit with me. He said that it was not good to sit alone, and I learned that solitude is mistaken for loneliness in the communal life of the village. He called me little brother, and he adopted me with our mutual agreement through a heartfelt connection. I discovered yet another meaning of time – relationship.

Another aspect of time is timelessness. On the human level it translates as patience and expectation, and it taps an inner sense that heightens communication. During my Peace Corps service I was not near to any telephone or other fast means of mechanical or electronic contact with the world beyond the village. I regularly wrote letters home but the time between posting it and receiving an “immediate” answer was normally three to four weeks.

In Sirasso I experienced non-linear time. In the schedules of the busy twentieth century, our deadlines, education, entertainment, transportation, work and play were done habitually according to the clock, minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour, day in, and day out. I finally had the chance to experience time as rhythms, as music fusing with different notes and syncopations, as cyclical human and celestial events, and ultimately as a spiral that holds the key to evolution. I literally lived with time, lived through a repeating and ascending arc of time where change is organic, season by season, year by year; where growth evolves and mutates over time; where each turn of the spiral comes back, but on a higher level, more mature, more refined, transformed.

He is Not a Person 

Learning the Dyula language was more than simply learning the words and phrases I would need to communicate and survive. Dyula is a trade language, a lingua franca, throughout West Africa with roots in Bambara of Mali. The Senufo have their own language, but Dyula was the main way we could communicate as we learned rudimentary Senufo. Most second languages amongst rural Ivorians, whether it be Dyula or French, transliterated their indigenous sentence structures and concepts, using words from the borrowed languages. (Read more >>)