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University of Bayreuth
African Studies
WORKING PAPERS
Future Africa?! Timescapes
and the Flattening of Time
in the Modern Era
Susanne Lachenicht, 2022
academy reflects 7
31
University of Bayreuth
African Studies
WORKING PAPERS
Future Africa?! Timescapes and
the Flattening of Time in the
Modern Era
Susanne Lachenicht, 2022
CC BY 4.0
The Committee and the Uncommitted
iii
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Academy reflects 7
About the Author
Susanne Lachenicht is professor of Early Modern History at Bayreuth University, Germany. She
works on Europe and the Atlantic World with a special focus on diasporas, religious migrations,
knowledge transfer and transformation as well as temporalities in the early modern world. She
has been a visiting fellow/professor at the Université de Toulouse II, the École des Hautes Études
en Sciences Sociales, Paris, the Université d’Angers, the Cluster of Excellence: Africa Multiple,
Bayreuth University, and at All Souls College, Oxford.
Her recent publications include (as ed. with Charlotte Lerg and Michael Kimmage) The
TransAtlantic Reconsidered (Manchester University Press 2018/paperback 2020), (as ed. with
Mathilde Monge) Nations et empires, thematic issue of Diasporas. Migrations, circulations, histoire
34/2 (2019), (as ed. with Marianne Amar, Isabelle Lacoue-Labarthe, Mathilde Monge and Annelise
Rodrigo) Négocier l’accueil /Negotiating asylum and accommodation, thematic issue of Diasporas.
Migrations, circulations, histoire 35/2 (2020) and (as ed. with Guido Braun) Spies, Espionage and
Secret Diplomacy in the Early Modern Period (Kohlhammer 2021).
She is (co-)editor of the following book series and journals: Oxford Bibliographies: Atlantic History
(Oxford University Press), Anthem Intercultural Transfer Studies (Anthem), Mediengeschichte -
Media History - Histoire des médias (Nomos), Forum historische Forschung: Frühe Neuzeit
(Kohlhammer) and Humanities (MDPI).
Lachenicht was an Internal Fellow at the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies from
October 1, 2021 to March 31, 2022.
susanne.lachenicht@uni-bayreuth.de
Acknowledgments
This Working Paper is the outcome of research conducted within the Africa Multiple Cluster of
Excellence at the University of Bayreuth, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG,
German Research Foundation) under Germany's Excellence Strategy – EXC 2052/1 – 390713894.
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University of Bayreuth African Studies Working Papers 31
Contents
University of Bayreuth African Studies Working Papers
iii
Academy reflects
iv
About the Author, Acknowledgments
v
Future Africa?! Timescapes and the Flattening of Time in the Modern Era
1 Introduction
1
2 Early Modern Timescapes
3
3 Conclusions
7
4 Bibliography
8
5 Latest Publications in the Academy reflects Working Paper Series
11
Future Africa?! Timescapes and the Flattening of Time in the Modern Era
1
Future Africa?! Timescapes and the
Flattening of Time in the Modern Era
Susanne Lachenicht
1 Introduction
In his 2013 Essays on the Global Condition, anthropologist Arjun Appadurai defines “the Future as
Cultural Fact”. He holds that “we cannot design the future exactly as we please”, that “it is vital to
build a picture of the historical present that can help us find the right balance between utopia and
despair” (Appadurai 2013, p.3). The “historical present” Appadurai diagnoses is that of the “global
condition”, the “age of high globalization” (ibidem), the “broadening of risk-taking and risk-
bearing as properties of human life that link distant societies, cross national and market
boundaries, and connect both the institutions of power and the agencies of ordinary human beings
worldwide” (ibidem). Other scholars such as Ulrich Beck have dubbed this dominant global social
form “risk society” (Beck 2007). The world – as these and other scholars say – is in a state of crisis.
To find solutions, Appadurai claims that we need to study how human societies construct and
organize the “future as cultural horizon”, that we should engage with “the variety of ideas of
human welfare and of the good life that surround us today and that survive in our archives of the
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past” (Appadurai 2013, p. 5). Studying how human societies construct and organize the “future as
cultural horizon” means according to Appadurai to study “three notable human preoccupations”
that is specific forms of “imagination”, “anticipation” and “aspiration” (Appadurai 2013, pp. 286-
287). Based on these premises, Appadurai calls for a “robust anthropology of the future”
(Appadurai 2013, p. 5).
However, what is the future, or what do scholars and non-scholars mean when they talk about
“the future”? Over the last couple of years, as a member of the Bayreuth Future Africa project and
co-PI of the subproject “Histories of the Future in modern Africa”, while working at the same time
with University of Bayreuth and University of California at Davis scholars on Cultures of
Speculation, we have become aware that we need to study the historical making of timescapes to
grasp 1) what “the future” is or could be and 2) what speculation about “the future” could mean.
3), and more importantly, Cultures of Speculation are about more than the timescape “the future”
(on the project and its research results see Cortiel et al. 2020, Lachenicht 2020).
From the history of temporal cultures and a postcolonial studies perspective, “the future” comes
as a heavily historically loaded and highly problematic concept: 1) “The future” is but one specific
and historically made timescape we can make use of to think about the world we want to live in.
2) The future, as Lucian Hölscher put it in his 1999 book Die Entdeckung der Zukunft, is a relatively
new timescape that developed according to his and other historians’ research in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries in Western Europe (Hölscher 1999, p. 9). 3) As a western invention it
was imposed on many societies in the historical contexts of colonialism and imperialism – as
Frederick Cooper and Lynn Hunt have made evident (Cooper 2005, Hunt 2008). 4) The term is
loaded with semantics such as ‘civilization versus primitive forms of life’, ‘progress versus
backwardness’, ‘development versus regression’ and other similar dichotomies. Do we, therefore,
need to drop the timescape “the future”, if we look for integrated and integrating solutions for a
world in crisis under the global condition? Critical reflection does not necessarily mean throwing
out the baby with the bathwater. On the contrary: critical and historically informed reflections on
modern, western timescapes might lead to a more nuanced understanding of how timescapes are
about constructing cultural difference and how this obstructs efforts to find collective solutions
for a world in crisis. Theorists of time have therefore suggested to study the cultural and historical
contexts of time as cultural fact, or to be more precise, of time as fact and as culturally made – as I
would put it. A “robust anthropology of the future” based on inquiries into the “future as cultural
horizon”, an analysis of the “futures we use to cultivate our futures with” and “what senses of
futurity we bring into play” – as Wilkie, Savransky and Rosengarten put it in 2017 (pp. 4-5), is not
enough. We need an anthropology of time more generally and how timescapes affect our being in
the world in order to assess – as Appadurai and many other theorists of the global condition put
it – “ideas of human welfare and of the good life that surround us today” (Appadurai 2013, p. 5).
In the following, I would like to zoom into timescapes prevalent in the early modern period. I
would like to use early modern timescapes as a background against which we can reflect on three
interrelated things: 1) the historical making and baggage of linear timescapes such as the “past,
present and future” (see also Landwehr 2016, pp. 281-287), 2) on the concept of “Future Africa”
or “Africa as the continent of the future” – as among many others such as the president of the
French Republic Emmanuel Macron put it in 2017 and 3) how this could feed into an anthropology
of time and how people relate themselves to it.
Future Africa?! Timescapes and the Flattening of Time in the Modern Era
3
2 Early Modern Timescapes
Most obviously, timescapes of the early modern period built on and transformed older timescapes,
biblical ones, ones coming out of Greek and Roman Antiquity, out of medieval times, out of Islam
and Judaism with which we share important parts of “the Book”, especially Genesis. Nonetheless,
with the Renaissance, the age of ‘discoveries’ and the rise of the New Sciences concepts of time,
timescapes, changed – or to put it differently, the plurality of concepts of time increased
(Brendecke et al. 2007, p. 13). Many Renaissance theologians and philosophers started thinking
and speculating about time.
The most important time regime in Christian worlds was and is God’s time or rather untime – also
called eternity. The Church’s Fathers such as Augustine (1987, pp. 354-430) and theologians ever
since have debated why God had created the world and as such time. While God’s reasons behind
Creation remained unknown to Christian believers, it became clear for Augustine that beings who
owned a soul were subject to two-time regimes, the temporal and the spiritual, “time in motion”
and the “immutable”, so eternity. Furthermore, with Augustine time is not endless, time means
that there is a beginning (Creation) and an end which is the end of the world. In Augustine’s
thought, human consciousness is capable of experiencing time. Time for Augustine – as some
scholars have put it – is a fleeting instant of the present, which is real while the before and the
after are illusory. In human consciousness, the past exists as “memoria”, while what we today
would call “the future” exists as “providentia” (Augustine 1987, pp. 353-382).
An interpretation of God’s time regime building much on Augustine thought remained most
powerful not only in the early modern period but far into the nineteenth century – and for
Christian believers up to the present day. Time was divided into this world and the hereafter, life,
death and eternity. Quite contrary to modern, western visions of the future of mankind, which all
seem to share great uncertainty about what the future might look like, Europeans of the early
modern period could be sure about the end of history. The Bible seemed to be clear about the
destiny of mankind. Humans would live through four ages (the Babylonian, Persian, Greek and
Roman), followed by the fifth age which would include the arrival of the Antichrist, the battle
between good and evil, the very likely victory of Jesus Christ, the Last Judgement and the end of
the days. While Christians could not be sure of the exact beginning of the fifth age, they knew,
thanks to the revelations of St. John, what would await them (Gallois 2007, p. 244). Uncertainty
reigned with regard to who would be among God’s elect and who among them would be eternally
condemned. Speculating about the future of mankind seemed not necessary, as God had provided
a teleological and orderly history of man (Gallois 2007, pp. 33-35).
While human beings depended on God’s will, His pity, compassion and grace – the Renaissance
claims to have made the first fundamental efforts to measure God’s world and reign over His
resources. The Renaissance understood itself as “les temps modernes” (Thevet 1558) – in sharp
contrast to what later would be dubbed the Middle Ages (see e.g. Hunt 2008, pp. 119-20). Today,
especially history of science scholars emphasize that the process of European expansion between
the 1400s and the twentieth century brought about contact, uncertainties, knowledge transfer
and (trans-)formation on a scale previously not known from a European perspective (e.g.
MacKenzie 1990, Jardine et al. 1996, Rice 2000, Parrish 2006). This – the narrative goes –
triggered major efforts to understand God’s creation, His laws of nature, His laws of history, the
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development of man and his world. European knowledge about the world as it came to be
institutionalized in the European Republic of Letters, its academies, royal societies,
correspondence networks, universities and media such as major collections of objects, maps,
natural histories, encyclopedias, travel narratives and dictionaries was the result of Europeans
speculating on the ‘new’ and how the ‘new’ fitted into God’s creation, into ancient Greek and
Roman knowledge and into God’s word, that is, the Bible. Some scholars hold that motives behind
knowledge production and codification changed fundamentally between the fifteenth and the late
eighteenth century: from describing God’s creation (e.g. Armstrong 2000), people became in the
eighteenth century more interested in using natural resources to improve the human condition,
the economy and the early modern state’s prowess (e.g. Koerner 1999); it was more and more
about making “progress in history” – a master narrative that needs adjustment. As many
specialists of the Enlightenment have shown over the last two decades, the long eighteenth
century was about reconciling faith and reason, about reconciling the old and the new. For much
of the early modern period, the Bible and other ancient texts remained the authoritative texts
(Sheehan 2007) even though the New Sciences became a competitive and challenging second
powerful narrative to explain the world – which, however, had not been meant to be competitive
and challenging. As Francis Bacon put it in his 1620 Instauratio Magna, New Sciences “could affect
the course of nature in useful ways, knowledge about how to ward off disease, improve crops,
extend the span of life, and enhance the general welfare” (Grafton 1992, p. 197). Temporal
cultures with regard to these aspects of life fostered an understanding of “the flight of time’s
arrow” or a clear timeline on which events and facts could be clearly marked as much as – maybe
even more importantly – progress of mankind and specific cultures within.
Much of the New Sciences meant to explain the objective laws of nature building on and discussing
a number of metaphysical assumptions: inter alia Descartes’ (1596-1650) “absolute separation of
[the] thinking subject from [the] material object” (Wilcox 1987, p. 30) which served as a premise
for Newton’s mechanics and his models of absolute time and space. According to Isaac Newton
(1642-1727) in his 1687 Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy “absolute, and
mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature flows equably without regard to anything
external, and by another name is called duration” (quoted from Wilcox 1987, p.16). Not only
absolute time but also absolute space existed – according to Newton – independently of any
observer. Absolute time thus progresses at a consistent pace throughout the universe. These
models were highly debated in Newton’s time: Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) held that space
could only be understood as the relative location of bodies, and time as the relative movement of
bodies. Absolute time, then, was an invention of the 1720s, based on a metaphysical system
important to some models within the developing New Sciences. It was a highly contested
timescape, criticized not only by rationalists such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz but also by
empiricists such as David Hume (Wilcox 1987, pp. 17-18).
Zedler’s Universal-Lexicon published between 1732 and 1751 is a rather good indicator for these
eighteenth-century debates about time. The article on “Zeit” introduces time as the dwelling and
movement of the heavenly bodies which define years, months, weeks, days, hours and minutes. It
is not Newton’s absolute time. It is relative time. According to Zedler, time is, therefore – based on
the dwelling and movement of the stars – measurable, there is a measurable past or a measurable
future in relation to a given present. Time is about the birth, duration and death of things in
relation to the dwelling and movement of the heavenly bodies. Time can be cyclical, time is also
Future Africa?! Timescapes and the Flattening of Time in the Modern Era
5
one event following another and following out of the other, so consecutive and causal. With regard
to other nations, Zedler holds that those peoples who cannot read the stars and measure time are
“simple” or “primitive” (Zedler, pp. 725-740). Being capable of measuring absolute time, then, is
about progress and civilization. All of this, however, is still embedded into God’s time, as the world
and time had been created by God.
For quite some time, God’s time regime (Gallois 2007, p. 243) integrated “models of linear and
measurable time” (Le Goffs’ famous “merchant time” 1980, p. 198) as much as “absolute time”
which was, as Newton himself acknowledged, a model for specific uses in the developing sciences
and co-existed with many other timescapes, religious, economic and social ones.
As mentioned above, according to some Europeans, not all humans had history and not all humans
were equally advanced in the “course of history”. At the latest with the age of ‘discoveries’, it
became clear for Christians/Europeans that they lived in present and civilized times while non-
Christian/non-European cultures – according to their degree of “barbarism”, of “savagery” and
“lack of civilization” – lived in the ‘past’ (Fabian 2002, p. 75). This past, however, was different
from European Antiquity (e.g. Thevet 1558, p. 54). According to many European authors, non-
Europeans and Europeans did not share the same moment in history nor did they share the same
past. For many missionaries such as André Thevet (1516-1590), a French Franciscan friar,
explorer and cosmographer who traveled to the Eastern Mediterranean and Brazil, Europeans
lived in “modern times” (“temps modernes”), indigenous peoples, however, were closer to man’s
origins, so to paradise (Thevet 1558, pp. 54, 87, 95). At the same time, non-Europeans lived in an
immutable present: Thevet’s descriptions of indigenous peoples rarely come with a distinction
between past and present; in most cases, they are generally “timeless” descriptions that suggest
that what Thevet qualifies as “savage habits” have always been this way – which is similar to what
Johannes Fabian has dubbed the “ethnographic present” (2002, p. 76). Furthermore, for Thevet
and many of his contemporaries, most non-Europeans had no history – at least not prior to the
arrival of Europeans (Thevet 1558, pp. 84, 101-103, 106, also Labat 1722, vol. IV, pp. 222-223,
317, 332). From the perspective of European scholars, indigenous people had entered human
history and ‘progress’ only with conquest, colonization and Christian missions; they turned into
‘objects’ that now had a past, present and, as we would call it today, a “future” (Fabian 2002, p.
78). At the latest with the Renaissance, we see time and civilization coming together, civilization
and progress develop into one timescape, into what Johannes Fabian has dubbed for other
contexts marked by coloniality “evolutionary time” (Fabian 2002, pp. 17, 29). This timescape was
closely related to the context of ‘discoveries’, conquest, colonization and the increasing
exploitation of New World resources, human and non-human; it was a colonial concept which the
colonized could not escape (Hunt 2008, pp. 94-96).
Thus, some timescapes of the Renaissance, the Baroque and the Enlightenment not only served to
construct civilizational differences with times past but also to mark the state of civilization of the
respective ‘modern era’. Building on ancient Greek and Roman timescapes to define the ‘self’ and
the ‘other’, both in time and place, early modern timescapes also served to construct what Homi
Bhabha has dubbed “cultural difference” in colonial contexts. The course of history, in a temporal
or worldly perspective and the development of humankind was – according to many Europeans –
marked by different degrees of civilization, of advancement, of progress – which could according
to early modern authors be measured through Christianization (or not), political and social
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organization, forms of economic production, rituals and came together with timescapes in words
such as backwardness and other. In these interpretations, Europeans figured as the ‘present and
modern’ people and were considered to be able to speculate on their own and other cultures’ state
of civilization. Only Europeans thought they were capable of improving man, of making progress.
In the logic of this discourse, it was therefore up to Europeans to bring humanity closer to a Golden
Age, a worldly one. The New Sciences and new technologies, developed by Europeans, as many
proponents of the Enlightenment claimed, could guide mankind back or forth into a new Eden on
earth, while Christianization was meant to prepare humanity for the Last Judgement and eternity.
With scientific insights into the history of the earth and of mankind, the time span of the existing
universe became much larger and became – for some time – infinite. The end of the world or
apocalypse became increasingly banned to the religious sphere so that encyclopedias of the later
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries such as Krünitz’ Oeconomische Encyklopädie (1773-1858)
could define time as – among other definitions in the same article – as two infinities, the past and
the future.
While the so-called European pre-modern period developed more “models of linear and
measurable time” (Nagel and Wood 2005, p. 408), while timescapes came into being that Newton
and other natural scientists would call “absolute time”, all of this was only two of a plurality of
ways of organizing time and of being in time in early modern Europe and its overseas colonies.
It is important to state that the coexistence of (from our perspective) overlapping (“evolutionary
time”) or clashing temporalities (Nagel and Wood 2005, p. 404), so a plurality of temporalities, as
parallel, contextualized experiences but also as coming together in one moment, was rather typical
of the early modern period, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in particular – as Lucien
Febvre already diagnosed in 1942 (pp. 393-400). Despite the challenges of the developing New
Sciences and their a priori of measurable, linear and – in some contexts – absolute time, God’s time
regime (as mentioned above) was the one that embedded and integrated all other ones. This is
particularly true for the visual arts: what Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood have dubbed
“Renaissance Anachronism” (2005), is rather typical far into the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. Artifacts and monuments, especially if used in sacred/ritual events, were on the one
hand “embedded in history”, on the other hand, their “spiritual meaning […] lifted the event out
of the flow of history”. “Visual artifacts collapsed past and present”, “they proposed an unmediated
present-tense, somatic encounter with the people and the things in the past” (Nagel and Wood
2005, p. 408).
While on the one hand biblical narratives about the beginning and the end of the world as much
as natural sciences strengthened linear and teleological temporalities, humans in the early
modern period lived with plural concepts of time. In comparison with the varieties and
simultaneities of early modern timescapes and with non-European timescapes (Gallois 2007) as
well as considering the imposition of absolute, measurable time almost everywhere in the world,
we seem to face a period of flattening of time – as Frederick Cooper and Lynn Hunt have put it
(Cooper 2005, p. 127; Hunt 2007, pp. 107-108). Or – we have grown unaware of the plurality of
timescapes with which we live today.
What I have tried to sketch out for the early modern period, has been described by theorists of
time who looked at a variety of temporal cultures in synchronic and diachronic ways in a more
Future Africa?! Timescapes and the Flattening of Time in the Modern Era
7
holistic perspective: not only do different societies produce different – even if related or entangled
– temporal cultures; temporal cultures also are in a constant process of change as much as we deal
within one and the same society with a variety of timescapes. Looked upon from a history of
temporal cultures perspective, “modern western time” “which describes itself as being rational,
observational, chronological, universal, unambiguous, fixed, natural, constant” becomes a
“historical anomaly in human culture” (Gallois 2007, pp. 221, 246-247).
This is even more so if we take into account Einstein’s special theory of relativity. The New
Sciences of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries makes clear that Newton’s absolute and
mathematical theory of time which flows equably without relation to anything external (Gallois
2007, p. 237) was wrong. Einstein’s special theory of relativity destroyed the singularity of time;
it also made clear that to divide time into the past, present and future was illusory. Or as some
theorists of time hold: there is only the present past, the present future and the present itself –
somehow echoing Augustine (Landwehr 2016). “Time is not a singular, natural and uncontested
entity, but is viewed outside the discipline [History] as both plural and as being constructed in
varied manners in different cultures” (Gallois 2007, p. 242) and periods of time.
Could the “pluralization of time” (Gallois 2007, p. 242) or a growing awareness of pluralities of
time concepts in all cultures and periods in human history open up new horizons in speculation,
in critically assessing our own times and in producing new possibilities and opportunities for
humans and the world at large?
Theorists of time and anthropologists have made efforts to uncover the lost temporal cultures of
humans. It might be up to historians to think further about time, to have their share in the analysis
of past and present temporal cultures and how they relate humans to each other and the world.
To put it differently: for a robust anthropology of time, we need anthropologists, physicists,
sociologists, linguists, philosophers, theologians – and historians. The latter, however, would need
to reflect on 1) timescapes in a global perspective in an etic and emic synchronic and diachronic
perspective as much as on 2) the implications of modernity and modern scientific approaches to
time to co-build anthropologies of time and to explain humans and the world in time (see also
Landwehr 2016, p. 301).
3 Conclusions
In this paper, I have tried to show that modern western concepts of “the future” developed out of
European epistemes and their need to understand God’s creation, to understand God’s laws of
nature to create a better present for mankind and to further progress and civilization. While
theorists of time today distinguish between scientific, religious and philosophical understandings
or definitions of time, it is important to state that much of this developed out of Jewish and
Christian religious systems and specific historical needs to explain God’s world.
With European expansion, colonization, the development of western, modern timescapes
enshrined in the development of the New Sciences came the imposition of these timescapes on
other societies. From de-/postcolonial perspectives, these are today looked upon as forms of
domination of “alien civilizations” which have not only destroyed other temporal cultures but
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cultures and societies at large (Hunt 2008, pp. 95-96). Furthermore, the imposition of western,
modern timescapes integrated an understanding of other civilizations as lacking history and/or a
future or as not being developed and part of the same moment in human history.
If we readily adopt the concept of “the future” for Africa or – as Appadurai claims – opt for a
“robust anthropology of the future”, we also adopt its Christian and colonial baggage. We risk
measuring the entire African continent against narratives of progress and “the future” which
might run counter to what Appadurai calls “the variety of ideas of human welfare and of the good
life that surrounds us today and that survive in our archives of the past”. These ideas, experiences,
practices are inextricably tied to specific temporal cultures, temporal and spiritual ones which are
– as much as western Sciences – embedded into and/or coming out of religious belief systems.
Does our global society, our risk society need one universal temporal culture, a universal concept
of history, of the past, the present and the future? Moving beyond Appadurai, I would think we
need to study temporal cultures of humans, in a synchronic and diachronic perspective, in their
specificities, their entanglements, how they imagine the world not only in the past, present and
future but also in other timescapes, such as untime, eternity, immutable time or dreamtime. We
need to acknowledge – as Barbara Adam put it – the “multitude of times which interpenetrate and
permeate our daily lives” (1995, p. 12) and the lives of others in time and space. We might also
need to acknowledge that – to some extent – we do live in the immutable present ourselves –
which historian Reinhart Koselleck associated with the pre-French Revolution, so the pre-modern
period (Koselleck 2004, p. 58) while others wonder whether we have ever been “modern” and
“future orientated” at all (Latour 1993). Modern, western notions of measurable and/or absolute
time, as developed by Newton and others in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, replaced by
Einstein’s re-description of time and the world, need to become self-reflexive, they need to face
their own and other different temporalities in which people live and relate themselves to the
world and out of which they develop ideas of well-being and human welfare.
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University of Bayreuth African Studies Working Papers 28
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https://doi.org/10.15495/EPub_UBT_00005987
