Pole Pole: That's swahili for "slowly, slowly." As in, everything in Zanzibar runs pole pole.
I've been thinking a lot about time, especially since I reading one passage from Barbara Kingsolver's "The Poisonwood Bible." In this lovely piece of fiction, in which an American missionary family moves to Congo during the 1960 Independence from Belgium, one of the protagonists describes how time and creation are intertwined. She says, "trust in Creation,which is made fresh daily and doesn't suffer in tanslation. This G-d doesn't work in especally mysterious ways. The sun here rises and sets at six exactly."
This observation about time is particularly relevant to Zanzibar, where the sun rises and sets between 6 and 7 daily. The days and the nights are about 12 hours long, which is due to Zanzibar's location near the equator. I think this evenly divided day gives rise to the Swahili system of time.
In Swahili time, 7 am is counted as 1 or "moja." The days are still the same here--Friday will turn into Saturday during the night--but it actually makes more sense that time would be dependent on sunrise and sunset here. If the days are so regular without any need for Daylight Savings time, then why should the time correspond with an unfixed night marker like midnight?
This reminds me of how the Jewish days and holidays startat sundown because I would think that during the days of the bible, the third star int he sky after sunst was more reliable than the time-keeping systems of contemporary societies (like the Egyptians, who used water clocks). The Muslim calendar, like the Jewish one, is a lunar calendar. The dates of the two calendars don't corresond year to year because of how each religin assigns leap years (Muslim holidays get about 11 days earlier every year, while Jewish holidays are more fixed within a period).
The issue of time has crept into some of our cultural interactions. We've had to specify morning and afternoon with many of our contacts here, especially since they use 24-time when talking to tourists. Let's face it, between 24-hour time and Swahili time, am and pm mean nothing. It's all just very confusing.
The first time I went to Streeter's, the students were tested on time. I couldn't even begin to udnerstand at the time how hard this task was forthem because I didn't know about Swahili time. At the time (ha!) I thought the teacher was testing the students' knowledge fo time words like "o'clock" and "quarter after four." But I know know it was also an exercise in converting Swahili time to Western time. I feel so bad for those students.
I had not really considered before how the system of time used inicats a lot about the culture and the enironment in which that culture exists. In the Western World, we have artificial mechanisms called watches and clockes that reliably keep track of of time. People are expected to always be aware of the time. Our lives function in both day and night ecause of reliable, widespread electricity. Time in our culture is a paradox: It matters to us, but it doesn't affect us.
In Zanzibar, the spread of electricity came much later than in the United States, and for most Zanzibaris, it's neither widespread nor reliable. Zanzibari businesses can only really functino between sunrise and sunset, so does it matter what time of the night it is? No. Only the time between sunrise and sunset really matters. Many restaurants here clse early and open early, corresponding with this idea of daylight-dependent time. Time runs pole pole here, or as people might say about the Caribbean--"island time." If you're late for an appointment, someone will wait if they're not running late themselves. The transportation systems and other forms of infrastructure are not reliable, so people learn patience. Time is very straightforward in this sense. If it's light, then it's time.
Time is more than just how we keep track of the hours, but it's also how we manage our calendars. As I mentioned above, the Jewish and Muslim calendars are based on lunar cycles. In the society Kingsolver describes in "The Poisonwood Bible," the week was only five days long because it could be counted on one hand...1,2,3,4,5. I have read primary source documents from early civilizations that say things like, "it was 200 years and five days since Joe Bob's rule ended by flames and forty-five rotations since..." This is how these sources recorded time, and while they create headaches for historians trying to piece together dates, these time-markers meant something to the people who lived through them or lived in that society. They recorded time and history based on common memories. It was probably very reliable and accurate for them. Other calendars are marked by the harvest and the seasons.
When you get down to it, the American and Western systems of time seem downright unreliable and fake.
