For many cultures and societies, particularly those based in oral traditions, time is not linear. Not only does that mean time’s movement is different—cyclical, spiral, emergent—but that the very concepts of past, present, and future may not always hold. But Western means of planning for the future, predicting the future, and building systems of growth and development depend on these components. When time comprises different parts, our relations to it transform.

In this essay I look to Africanfuturism as one particular means of transforming relations to time, and particularly how it breaks from Western temporalities and development narratives. Using time against development moves us beyond the idea of the future as something only to come, and opens decolonial possibility in the now. Within an understanding of temporality that binds time to experience and memory, the past, present, and future are inextricable. I examine Shingai Njeri Kagunda’s novella & This is How to Stay Alive, Tade Thompson’s novel Far From the Light of Heaven, and Yvette Lisa Ndlovu’s story, “Three Deaths and the Ocean of Time” from her award-winning collection Drinking from Graveyard Wells[i] for how they rethink the concept of “the future” and dislodge Africans from where they have been frozen in Western developmental narratives of time.

In contrast to development logics aimed linearly toward the future, perhaps Africanfuturism is now. I do not mean this to be aspirational, a reaching to a future that doesn’t exist yet in order to bring it into being.[ii] Neither do I mean this in the sense of quantum collapse, where the future reaches back to snap the past into alignment with what has come to occur.[iii] I mean it in a way that shakes up the three dimensional understanding of time—past, present, and future—and asks what happens if the present cannot be meaningfully disentangled from the future or even the past. What kind of futures do we experience when we are not charting a progressive path upward toward a preordained goal? If there is no trajectory to be mapped, but rather relations to be explored, what might Africanfuturism entail?

When time is what we experience, what we carry and what carries us, what we make rather than what we pass through and leave behind, Africanfuturism is now. Because time in this sense only exists in relationship with people. Time is not a thing in itself, an a priori category against which we measure our being. Activated in and by relation, time itself undergoes a process of becoming. Conceptualizing Africanfuturism as co-temporaneous with the present is thus one means of delinking time and its meaning from the presumptions of Western linear temporalities, and relinking it instead to embodied and emplaced African experience in ways that open possibilities for decolonial resistance.[iv]

For, in order for there to truly be an Africanfuturism, a futurism “centered on and predominantly written by people of African descent (black people) and…rooted first and foremost in Africa,”[v] Western developmental time must be broken. Western narratives posit Africa as either a continent constantly backward, relegated to history,[vi] or in future predictions, a place that can only be pictured as “zone of the absolute dystopia.”[vii] Backward or destroyed, developmental time makes it seem like Africa is destined for dystopia, and thus now and forever in need of saving—particularly by white Westerners.[viii] Along with this comes a concomitant dehumanization. Western “history…splits humans from non-humans across the axis of developmental time.”[ix] African liberation must be sought outside these temporal bounds.

Becoming Unstuck in Time

Western epistemologies make development logics seem like the only options for survival.[x] However, in many African contexts, development leads to the opposite. Keguro Macharia explains, “we must tether the development imaginary to disposability and killability; we must begin to map more forcefully what it destroys and makes impossible; we must begin to push back against its seemingly inexorable logic.”[xi] Or, as Sarah Sharma notes, “keeping people in and out of time is a form of social control.”[xii] Western development narratives render Africans ‘untimely’: either frozen within or located outside of time, and cement this perspective as common sense. Thus “exiled from a ‘normal time,’”[xiii] Africans hold no weight within development narratives of the present, making them extraneous—and expendable—subjects. Michael Lechuga explains that untimeliness is necessary to the maintenance of colonial power: “In colonial societies, the possibility of transfer for the colonized into a class of equality with the colonizer is always postponed, organizing a permanent stratification between the groups.”[xiv] For the West to maintain colonial control, they must simultaneously maintain this temporal split.

For instance, consider how the Administrator for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Andrew Natsios, infamously argued against allocating USAID funding for HIV/AIDS treatment for Africans in 2001: “If you have traveled to rural Africa you know this, this is not a criticism, [it is] just a different world. People do not know what watches and clocks are. They do not use western means for telling time. They use the sun.”[xv] In reasoning pulled straight from the television show The West Wing,[xvi] Natsios explained that their untimeliness makes Africans unable to effectively adhere to medical schedules, instead arguing that US funding should go toward HIV/AIDS prevention rather than treatment in Africa.

Blatantly consigning Africans to an imagined developmental backwardness while simultaneously impeding any movement forward on the fixed timeline of linear progress, Natsios’ argument epitomizes the way that Africans are rendered untimely within logics of Western development. And the consequences of this rendering are life-or-death. Macharia reminds us that development maps people’s killability; here, Africans who have already contracted HIV/AIDS are rendered killable by being located outside of Western uses of time. Because they are presumed to “not use western means for telling time,” there is no sense in providing them access to life-saving medication. Untimeliness becomes a socially-sanctioned death-sentence.

However, as Habiba Ibrahim urges us to remember, being untimely also provides potential.[xvii] African untimeliness also acts to destabilize developmental temporalities. By engaging time in ways that break the linear trajectories that development depends upon, African temporalities slip between the cracks of coloniality to unlock decolonial potential in the present.  Here I look to John S. Mbiti’s description of East African temporalities with two dimensions (as opposed to the Western three-fold past/present/future): Sasa and Zamani.[xviii] Sasa is the time of immediate concern, incorporating what is happening, what has just happened and occupies your mind, and what you know is about to happen. The “you” here is expansive, bringing together individual experience, family and community experience, and that which is passed down through story. Notably, Sasa can only be narrated in and through experience, whether that is of a single person or community. Zamani, on the other hand, is the deep time that extends outside of the bounds of experiential narration. Mbiti says that the Sasa “feeds or disappears into Zamani.”[xix] Zamani is what passes beyond individual or collective consciousness or memory.

Time carries people from Sasa toward Zamani. Mbiti frames this passage in Western terms as a ‘moving backward through time.’ In death, each of us approaches an interstitial space where we’re remembered for a time by our friends and community, thus kept connected to Sasa as the “living-dead.”[xx] Eventually we fade from the livings’ memory, entering the deeptime where the ancestors reside. By approaching death—ancestorhood—we move backwards in time from Sasa toward Zamani.

Mbiti’s work has been heavily criticized for saying that Africans lack a concept of the future.[xxi] However, if Zamani denotes a “reality that is neither after nor before,” it cannot be equated to only the past. To say that Zamani renders only the deep past constrains it to Western sensemaking. Only under a linear conceptualization of time can the two-dimensional configuration of Sasa and Zamani be critiqued for lacking a future.

Part of the problem is that Mbiti relied on Western linear descriptions of time to make his claims that events “‘move’ backwards from the Sasa into the Zamani” and that “the future does not exist beyond a few months.”[xxii] If Zamani is the deeptime of the ancestors, that which extends beyond the edges of lived experience and communal memory in all directions, it holds the capacity to register both the Western senses of deep past and deep future when not constrained to linearity. Although Mbiti notes that there is “no concept of history moving ‘forward’ towards a future climax,”[xxiii] this registers a lack of linear movement of time rather than a lack of future itself. Zamani incorporates all the experiences of time that pass beyond individual and community capacity to narrate and understand.

African temporalities thus include a spiritual dimension. Zamani and Sasa are not just human time, but more-than-human; they register the temporality of ancestors and spirits as much as they do the living.[xxiv] As Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki and Joshua Uchenna Omenga explain:

African cosmology recognizes two spheres of existence—the physical and the spiritual, between which there is an inseparable link and constant interactions. Every sphere of existence is connected to the other: the living to the dead, the born to the unborn, humans to the deities.[xxv]

Ekpeki and Omenga reiterate a sense that has long been expressed in African literature, and is in fact common sense in many African ways of thinking.[xxvi] In all three of the texts I will be analyzing, ancestors maintain an important role. In order to destabilize Western developmental notions of time, the interaction of beings beyond the mortal plane—that is, those that exist in the Zamani—within the Sasa must be taken seriously. This is made difficult by the power relations within which time is entangled. For African conceptualizations of time are not something which may be simply returned to, but constructs that continue to act within and through developmental time and other Western configurations.[xxvii] Understanding how Africanfuturist authors are using temporalities extended from Mbiti’s concepts in the contemporary moment can help us see ways that African temporalities may act to destabilize development imperatives, unlocking Africanfuturism now.

Narrating Non-linear Time

I examine three texts here: Shingai Njeri Kagunda’s & This is How to Stay Alive, Tade Thompson’s Far From the Light of Heaven, and Yvette Lisa Ndlovu’s, “Three Deaths and the Ocean of Time.” Kagunda’s novella follows a young Kenyan woman named Nyokabi in the aftermath of her brother Baraka’s suicide. At the funeral, a mysterious relative gives her a tonic that allows her to travel back in time to when her brother was still alive. We follow Nyokabi back and forth through time as she struggles with her (in)ability to change the past and save her brother. The novella takes place in contemporary Kenya, and the ability to travel through time is activated through traditional healing rather than reliance on science and technology.

Although Thompson’s Far from the Light of Heaven places us in a far-future world in which humans have colonized other regions of space, African spiritualities remain integral. The main plot of the novel centers on a mass murder that has taken place on the starship Ragtime. The Captain, Michelle “Shell” Campion is frantically trying to figure out what happened, assisted by an investigator and his Artificial partner, before time runs out and the ship crashes into a nearby planet. They are joined by an old friend of Shell’s father and his daughter Joké, who is the character I will focus on here. Joké is half-human and half-Lamber. We first believe the Lambers to be aliens, before coming to discover that they are actually the embodied form that ancestors take in the mortal realm. Because Joké exists both in the human and ancestral planes, she is able to slip in and out of time as we know it.

Ndlovu’s story is interesting not only for its use of time travel, but also for the meta-references that it makes. The story introduces us to Nomaqhawe, a Zimbabwean university student who has been having unexplainable blackouts. When her doctor runs out of Western options, she points Nomaqhawe toward an African healer, Gogo Pentshisi, for help. Throughout the story, Ndlovu not only explicitly references John S. Mbiti and the formulation of Sasa and Zamani time, but also incorporates Kagunda as a character. After leaving the healer with instructions to complete the task that her ancestor has set for her, Nomaqhawe attends a lecture given by Kagunda on her novella, & This is How to Stay Alive, and the way it relates to Mbiti’s conceptualizations of time. Nomaqhawe must then travel back in time to find her ancestor.

I highlight four particular ways that these works use African temporalities to disrupt Western development narratives and move toward decolonial possibility: disrupting decontextualization through experiential time; disrupting control through spirituality and fragmentation; disrupting progress narratives by moving backward with time; and disrupting the idea that the future is only to come by finding the future in the past.

Disrupting Developmental Temporality

Disrupting Decontextualization through Experiential Time

Time in the West is external to embodiment. It is an objective thing that can be measured, split into increments that we can observe and denote. With or without relation to you or those whom you know, time is thought to inexorably march on.

This is not the case for Sasa and Zamani, where time does not exist outside of relation to those who experience it. It is something that comes into being in and through the events we experience. Kagunda demonstrates this by having time act as a narrator in parts of her novella. Time, a particular time, comes into being only through Baraka’s readiness to die by suicide. Time itself narrates that moment:

And this is how it went. On this day when Baraka thought of his mum’s burnt pilau, on this day when he first really considered, not just thought—many people tease the thought—but really considered what it would look like to die, I begin somehow. Here they are at their destination, no, at a destination. Their would imply intention and traveling through me will not, cannot, demand a particular space or place.[xxviii]

Time begins, at least this time does, at the moment that Baraka conceptualizes the potential of dying by suicide. This time comes into being through Baraka’s relationship with it; by connecting himself in a certain way to time, this time enters the world. It does not exist without relation to Baraka, and Baraka’s life from here does not exist without it.

Time is intimately felt throughout Kagunda’s novella because it is radically embodied. It weighs on Nyokabi, shortened to Kabi, as she travels through it. Each time she travels through time, it takes a bodily toll. Njeri, who provided her with the potion, checks in on Kabi:

“Tell me, when you went back did you feel anything? In your body?”

Now it is Kabi’s turn to be quiet, but Njeri insists. “Look at me, Kabi. You felt it, didn’t you? Ehh?”

Kabi does not want to talk about the headaches, the searing pain that felt like a thousand needles pricking her brain repeatedly. She does not want to contemplate what that might mean.[xxix]

Later, Njeri remarks: “It is not easy on the body, Kabi, this carrying of time.”[xxx] When time is not something that simply exists in the world, but something created in and through relationship with us, moving through it affects us as well as time itself.

Time, here, is inextricable from the context of its emergence: it’s emplaced. Thompson demonstrates this in the character of Joké. Although Joké can slip in and out of time and place, she cannot simply emerge anywhere or anywhen. When their spaceship is heading towards a crashlanding, she is unable to help them contact the planet below:

“Joké, if you can survive outside a spaceship is there a chance you can…I mean, can your kind..we need someone on Bloodroot,” says Shell.

“I’m exploring options, Captain. I have to figure it out,” says Joké. “I’ve never been to Bloodroot. I have no mental anchor there.”[xxxi]

Joké cannot move through spacetime to the planet Bloodroot below because she has no contextual understanding of it. She needs some relationship to it, some experience of that emplaced time, in order to do so.

This is why Ndlovu’s hero must travel back through time in order to achieve the task her ancestor has set for her. Time has to be experienced in order to be woven into the narrative of the story’s Sasa. The very problem that Nomaqhawe must solve is that her ancestor has fallen from the communal memory carried in the Sasa to the deeptime of Zamani. Nomaqhawe explains that in her blackouts, “Each time, a woman stood over me, a battle-axe in hand. She pointed the axe towards me like an accusation and said, “Come to the Zamani.”[xxxii] Nomaqhawe must experience the time of her ancestor, feel it in her body, in order to move its memory from Zamani into the Sasa of her present.

Disrupting Control through Spirituality and Fragmentation

African spiritualities recognize ancestors as actors, breaking the linear control desired by development. When time includes the spiritual, the dead, and the inexplicable, it exists beyond the realm of human understanding.

Thompson highlights resistance to spiritual understandings of time in the character of the detective, Fin, who finds the existence of aliens to be a more plausible explanation for unfamiliar beings than the truth: that they are ancestors.

“Fin, you shouldn’t be worrying you head about me,” says Joké. “I don’t fear death.”

“You don’t fear death.”

“I don’t. But you do. So we should, um, talk about that. Find comfort for you.”

“Is this because you’re part alien?”

Joké looks at Fin like he’s an idiot.

“Lambers aren’t aliens, Fin. They’re our ancestors.”

“What?”

“They’re, um, they’re humans. Translated humans. Some humans, at any rate.”

“You’re telling me Lambers are ghosts.”

“No.”

… “They manifest as those gaps in reality you call Lambers.”

“So, ghosts.”

“Not ghosts.”[xxxiii]

Even once Fin is told by someone who is half-Lamber herself that the Lambers are ancestors, spiritual beings that interact with the mortal realm, Fin cannot conceptualize it without resorting to the idea of “ghosts.” Ghosts do not overly disturb developmental temporalities—they cannot act, do not belong in this plane. Ancestors, on the other hand, have a hold over mortals. They cannot be banished or commanded, but must be related to and respected. A spiritual understanding of time breaks the Western developmental imperative to forecast and control, imploring us instead to respect and listen.

Disrupting Progress Narratives by Moving Backward in Time

One way that experiential time disrupts progress narratives is by appearing, as Mbiti wrote, to move backward. Gazing into the Zamani is simultaneously a gazing into the past and the future. And in both, what we see there is death. In Thompson’s novel, Joké’s father takes it upon himself to save the lives of the others by embarking on a mission from which there is little hope of return. Joké watches as his ship recedes from view:

“I loved him,” says Joké.

“He might make it,” says Shell. Sounds false even to her.

“Um, no. This is where he dies, this is how he dies. I’ve seen it. I saw it a long time ago,” says Joké.

“If you knew he would die here, why did you let him come?”

“…Time may be spherical, but it’s not mutable. If it’s happened, it’s happened, Anything else is silly stories for children.”[xxxiv]

The Zamani connects Western understandings of deep future and deep past in such a way as to be “spherical, but…not mutable,” disrupting Western messianic hopes that the future is something that can be saved. Instead, the deeptime is. As something intimately connected to all that we are and experience, time is not so simply changed.

Kabi heartbreakingly slams into this limit of time. After traveling back and returning each time to find her brother is still dead by his own hand, she is desperate to find the key to changing the past:

“Tell me how to fix it.”

Ma Nyasi looks at her sadly. “That is not the way it works, Nyokabi.”

“No!” She doesn’t want to hear it. “I have to go back! I can save him!” Baraka’s words echo in the back of her mind. Her last memory of him—You don’t always get to save me Kabi.

“Did it change anything?” Ma Nyasi asks her now. She does not step toward or away from Kabi—she looks like she is an extension of the earth, rooted to the ground. “He is still dead, is he not?”[xxxv]

Kabi cannot save her brother. No matter how many times she is carried back in time to relive moments with him, she will not be able to change what has happened. Time, like Ma Nyasi, is rooted.

But the inability to change what has occurred is not fatalistic. There is no saving the future, but there is also no cataclysmic possibility that we require saving from. People do not need to be saved. On one journey to the past, Baraka tries to help his sister understand:

“You can’t save me,” he says softly.

Kabi’s heart beats faster, louder, in her ears—intensifying the growing migraine. “What?” she whispers. Does he know?

He raises his voice. “You don’t get to always save me, Kabi!”

… “Kabi, I am not something to be fixed, you know?”
“I never said you were—” she stops herself, listen listen listen.

“You’ve always made it your responsibility to save me. Always making decisions for me—speaking on my behalf—you never gave me room to just—to just fucking be, Kabi.”[xxxvi]

Developmental time posits African and Africans as perpetually needing to be saved. However, in this understanding of time, “the notion of a messianic hope, or a final destruction of the world, has no place.”[xxxvii] Instead, through embodied relationships to time, Africans have the agency to claim their space to “just fucking be.”

Disrupting the Idea that the Future is Only to Come by Finding the Future in Re-narrating the Past

Narrating Africans as without agency is a core component of developmental time, one that I have described elsewhere.[xxxviii] Within developmental time, agency to affect change is communicated as the ability to save, and white Westerners depend upon an imagined lack of African agency in order to access their own. Embodied time reframes what agency feels like.

The characters in these stories do not change the events of the past. Joké could not save her father and Kabi could not save her brother. If the Zamani is deeptime—encompassing both past and future reconfigured in relationships that cannot be reduced to cause and effect—it does not answer to linear Western logics. Rather, such logics must be conceptualized in the same vein as other narrative devices we use: as fiction. Kagunda repeats over and over in her novella, “Memory is fiction.” As such, agency is accessed through storytelling—what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o terms “re-membering,” or placing fragments of experience into narratives that reclaim liberation.[xxxix]

We may not be able to change events, but we can re-narrate them, and that can have meaningful effects. Kabi is reminded of this:

“You said you can hear him still, can smell him, feel his skin, if you close your eyes? …You carried parts of him back with you, parts that are still alive to you now, and you are a storyteller, so you can articulate those parts of him for those who might forget. That is healing.”[xl]

Traveling back in time may not have prevented her brother’s suicide, but it allows her to re-narrate experiences, carve them deeper into her own memory, and carry them within the Sasa.

Kagunda at one point describes lives as “lived and repeated.”[xli] The repetition of travel within time, of experiencing something again and again, opens possibilities of doing so with a difference. In Ndlovu’s story, Ntungamili Thandiwe explains to Nomaqhawe, “You cannot change the past, child…To do so would break the present.”[xlii] Her inability to change the past at first frustrates her to tears:

“I should do something to help,” I said. “I should be able to use my knowledge—"

“What is past is gone,” Ntumgamili Thandiwe said. “What is hoped for is absent. For you there is only the hour in which you are.”

…

“So what was the point of coming here?” I said, tears gathering in my eyes.

“Have you not been listening to what I’ve been saying?” Ntumgamili Thandiwe said.

It was then that everything clicked. I knew what I must do. “Before we go, tell me everything you know about Queen Lozikeyi.”

I took out my notebook and began writing, burning every word into my memory.”[xliii]

She wakes up in the present without her notebook. But it was not the notebook itself that was important, but rather the act of “burning every word into [her] memory” through the writing. Because upon her return to the present, everything has changed. Not the historical events, but the memory of the people. Queen Lozikeyi is remembered, and that is enough to remake the world.

Spiritualizing Reality

These texts demonstrate that spiritualizing reality offers a way to open decolonial possibility in the present. African spiritualities are rarely recognized as an aspect of reality within the rationalistic logics of the West. African spiritualities are read as folklore and myth, the “magical” part of magical realism, rather than the “realism” itself. Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki and Joshua Uchenna Omenga echo many African voices in reminding us that relegating African engagements with spirituality and cosmology to the realm of fantasy rather than reality is a “mislabel,” as “they are fantasy only insofar as the channels of their passage are dismissed.”[xliv] Instead, African spiritualities and cosmologies need to be recognized as a part of African realities.

Importantly, spiritualizing reality asks us to reconceptualize what can and cannot be changed within time. Although each of the characters examined here run into limits, the material conditions restricting transformation of events are more fungible when incorporating spirits and ancestors, when unconstrained by Western rationality’s boxes.

At the end of her novella, Kagunda writes:

It is difficult to explain what to do with the juxtaposition of coming to terms with what one cannot control and being brought into a world of possibilities, understanding that the only constant thing in life is change.[xlv]

Anti-developmental temporalities disrupt Western notions of control over time at the same time as they open “a world of possibilities” for what the future can be and become, and how we live it now. The deeptime of Zamani overlaps with and interacts with the Sasa, meaning the deeptime of the ancestors that is both behind us and where we are heading also tinges the present.

Perhaps, then, Africanfuturism does not require a Western sense of the future, because Africanfuturism is also now.

[i] Shingai Njeri Kagunda, & This is How to Stay Alive (Washington D.C.: Neon Hemlock Press, 2021); Tade Thompson, Far From the Light of Heaven (New York: Orbit, 2021); Yvette Lisa Ndlovu, “Three Deaths and the Ocean of Time,” in Drinking from Graveyard Wells (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2023).

[ii] I’m thinking of adrienne maree brown’s work on emergent strategy, and the ways that envisioning futures provides pathways for creating them. adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Chico: AK Press, 2017).

[iii] Quantum collapse is one strategy that Black Quantum Futurism draws upon in order to manipulate space-time through justice-centered epistemologies that aim toward making better futures possible through labor in the present. Rasheedah Phillips, “Constructing a Theory & Practice of Black Quantum Futurism: Part One,” in Black Quantum Futurism: Theory & Practice, ed. Rasheedah Phillips (Afrofuturist Affair/House of Future Sciences, 2017).

[iv] The concept of delinking comes from the work of Walter Mignolo, providing one means to advocate for what Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni calls “epistemic freedom,” or “the right to think, theorize, interpret the world, development own methodologies and write from where one is located and unencumbered by Eurocentrism,” such that it “restores to African people a central position within human history as independent actors.” Walter D. Mignolo, “Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-coloniality,” Cultural Studies 21, nos. 2–3 (2007): 449–514; Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization (New York: Routledge, 2018), 3; 2.

[v] Nnedi Okorafor, “Africanfuturism Defined,” Nnedi’s Wahala Zone Blog, October 18, 2019. http://nnedi.blogspot.com/2019/10/africanfuturism-defined.html.

[vi] Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

[vii] Kodwo Eshun, “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 2 (2003): 292.

[viii] This temporality thus undergirds what I have elsewhere written about as a fantasy that fashions Western subjectivities. Jenna N. Hanchey, “All of Us Phantasmic Saviors,” in The Center Cannot Hold: Decolonial Possibility in the Collapse of a Tanzanian NGO (Durham: Duke University Press, 2023), 58-87.

[ix] Habiba Ibrahim, Black Age: Oceanic Lifespans and the Time of Black Life (New York: New York University Press, 2021), 16.

[x] Keguro Macharia, “The Development Imaginary: Tracks*,” The New Inquiry, April 12, 2017, https://thenewinquiry.com/blog/the-development-imaginary-tracks/.

[xi] Macharia, “The Development Imaginary: Tracks*.”

[xii] Sharma, In the Meantime, 25.

[xiii] Sarah Sharma, In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 73.

[xiv] Michael Lechuga, Visions of Invasion: Alien Affects, Cinema, and Citizenship in Settler Colonies (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2023): 13.

[xv] The United States’ War on AIDS, Hearing before the Committee on International Relations, House of Representatives, One Hundred Seventh Congress, p. 68 (2001) (Andrew Natsios, USAID Administrator).

[xvi] John Donnelly, “Activists wonder is life imitates televisions in U.S. policy on AIDS,” The Globe and Mail, June 18, 2001. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/activists-wonder-if-life-imitates-television-in-us-policy-on-aids/article18415510/.

[xvii] Ibrahim notes that “untimeliness contains the radical promise of a future world comprised of undifferentiated humanity.”[xvii] Ibrahim, Black Age, 19-20.

[xviii] John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (Second Edition) (Oxford: Heinemann, 1989).

[xix] Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy, 22. Osita Gregory Nnajiofor, “Justification of the Concept of Time in Africa,” Ogirisi: A New Journal of African Studies, 12 (2016): 259.

[xx] Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy, 25.

[xxi] For instance: Moses Òkè, “From an African Ontology to an African Epistemology: A Critique of J.S. Mbiti on the Time Conception of Africans,” QUEST: An African Journal of Philosophy / Revue Africaine de Philosophie, XVIII (2005): 25-36; Nnajiofor, “Justification of the Concept of Time in Africa,”; Kwame Gyekye, An Essay on African Philosophical Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995); Kibujjo M. Kalumba, “A New Analysis of Mbiti’s ‘The Concept of Time’,” Philosophia Africana 8, no. 1 (2005): 11-19.

[xxii] Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy, 22 & 23.

[xxiii] Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy, 23.

[xxiv] Marimba Ani narrates this as “sacred time,” which “is eternal and therefore it has the ability to join past, present, and future in one space of supreme valuation.” Marimba Ani, Yurugu: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior (Africa World Press, 1994), 60.

[xxv] Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki and Joshua Uchenna Omenga, “Introduction to Afropantheology,” in Between Dystopias: The Road to Afropantheology, eds. Ogehenechovwe Donald Ekpeki and Joshua Uchenna Omenga (Caezik SF & Fantasy, 2023), 1.

[xxvi] For instance, Chinua Achebe reflected over the intimacies between the spiritual and human realms in his memoir, There Was a County, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o describes the devastating effect of missionary colonizers on spirituality and art in Decolonising the Mind. Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country (Penguin Press, 2012); Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Heinemann, 1986).

[xxvii] Noami Terry, Azucena Catro, Bwalya Chibwe, Geci Karuri-Sebina, Codruta Savu, & Laura Pereira ,”Inviting a Decolonial Praxis for Future Imaginaries of Nature: Introducing the Entangled Time Tree,” Environmental Science & Policy 124 (2024): 1-11.

[xxviii] Kagunda, & This is How to Stay Alive, 46.

[xxix] Kagunda, & This is How to Stay Alive, 81.

[xxx] Kagunda, & This is How to Stay Alive, 85.

[xxxi] Thompson, Far From the Light of Heaven, 123-124.

[xxxii] Ndlovu, “Three Deaths and the Ocean of Time,” 100.

[xxxiii] Thompson, Far From the Light of Heaven.

[xxxiv] Thompson, Far From the Light of Heaven, 299.

[xxxv] Kagunda, & This is How to Stay Alive, 75.

[xxxvi] Kagunda, & This is How to Stay Alive, 51-2.

[xxxvii] Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy, 23.

[xxxviii] Jenna N. Hanchey, “Agency Beyond Agents: Aid Campaigns in Sub-Saharan Africa and Collective Representations of Agency,” Communication, Culture & Critique 9, no. 1 (2016): 11-29; The Center Cannot Hold.

[xxxix] Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2009), 39.

[xl] Kagunda, & This is How to Stay Alive, 88.

[xli] Kagunda, & This is How to Stay Alive, 82.

[xlii] Kagunda, & This is How to Stay Alive, 112.

[xliii] Ndlovu, “Three Deaths and the Ocean of Time,” 113.

[xliv] Ekpeki and Omenga, “Introduction to Afropantheology,” 1 & 2.

[xlv] Kagunda, & This is How to Stay Alive, 97.

Editor: Gautam Bhatia.

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department.