From colonial time to decolonial temporalities

Abstract

In this paper, we critique the colonial conception of time and present alternative decolonial temporalities. We propose that the colonial conception of time, which is linear and scarcity centred, is limiting when it comes to the possibility of contextually theorizing trauma and healing. We offer two main arguments. The first argument explores the discourse around the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa. Focusing specifically on Winnie Madikizela and F. W De Klerk, we show that in their engagement with the TRC, the linear, scarcity‐centred and gendered nature of colonial time was animated. The second argument extends the first argument by considering how temporality is ‘captured’ by colonialism to foreground and universalize Western subjectivities and sensibilities. We use what Derek Hook calls a psycho‐societal‐diagnostic framework in conjunction with Fanon to show how subjectivities are structured in post‐apartheid South Africa. We then consider how this time–subjectivity relationship is enacted at a geopolitical level. The paper ends by considering decolonial temporalities as a way to ‘re‐cognize’ at a collective level. While the paper engages with a series of concepts and ideas, namely capitalism, politics of justice, gender and race, these are threaded by the concept of time.

We perceive a stop in time, as though we were suddenly thrown into a more original time. There is a stop, an interruption in the incessant flow of instants […] and this interruption, this stop, is precisely what gives and reveals the particular status, the mode of presence proper to the work of art. (Agamben, 1999, p.99)

INTRODUCTION

Time, often understood as an abstract, linear, universal concept not only envelopes the human experience but also offers meaning. In time we measure the duration of our existence, mark significant moments and also attach meaning to these experiences and moments. The idea of time, as we experience it, is shaped by historical and ongoing geopolitics we term colonial temporality. Colonial temporality refers to an orientation to time that fails to recognize other worldviews in favour of Western frameworks that shape reality and experience.

In this paper, we therefore seek to engage with the possibility of alternative temporalities as preferred mechanisms of dealing with trauma and engendering healing. We build our argument by considering the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa and how it was steeped in a colonial conception of time, thus allowing and disallowing certain possibilities of engaging with trauma and healing. Following this analysis, we show how at a global geopolitical level, universalized Western subjectivities continue to determine how different peoples, focusing on Winnie Madikizela and F W De Klerk, are seen and encountered through time. In response, we propose decolonial temporalities conceptualized through Ka Canham's (2023) cylindrical epiphenomenal temporality and Ramose's (2005) temporality through Ubuntu as expansive and complex ways of inhabiting time that allow for the contextual theorizing of trauma and enactment of sustainable healing.

COLONIAL TEMPORALITY

The creation of time as a tool of dominance that creates the ‘other’ can be traced back to the Westerner's voyages of discovery; embarked on as a journey to ‘discover’ the world. Through these voyages of discovery, Fabian (1983) contends that they encountered the other. In encountering the other, the other was not engaged as a unique collective. They were rather deemed to be part of the Western Historical Archive. That is, they were to be located somewhere in the Western narrative of being not as equals but as preceding the civilized Europeans. In the Coetzee (2007) sense, Africa, for example, was regarded as the old world, rather than a new one. This conceptualization meant that there was an ‘origin’ story that was created about lands and places that were previously outside the purview of the Western consciousness.

This is consistent with Said's (1975) explication of how the idea of origins underscores the West's encounter with the other. Said (1975) argues that the origin centrally dominates what derives from it in that it places the other in continuity with its discoverer, making sense of the discovered or other from the perspective of the discoverer. If the other is too ‘barbaric’ to be part of the discoverer, then the other must be located somewhere in the distant history of the discoverer to make sense of his regressive nature. The other is therefore inferiorized through time. In this, epochs are created to put on perpetual record this inferior nature of the other. These epochs are kept alive through the use of a timed language of description used by the voyagers, discoverers and ultimately colonizers. This timed language of description is captured in the words; ancient, prehistoric, primitive, contemporary and current, only to mention a few. The use of such meant that people outside the West were arrested in subjectively imposed epochs. That is, epochs created by these voyagers who existed outside the realities of the othered.

Time, it can be argued, here became a tool of dominance. A tool that would later be used by the colonizer to wield his power on the colonized. This shows in less concrete terms how time became a malleable construct to be used in colonial domination. Capitalism as the core economic political system of colonization became an ideology that informed how people related to time in the colony. Capitalism, as Shippen (2014) notes, creates abstract time. In this, time is perceived and inhabited as an independent entity on which human activities are dependent (Marcos, 2020). In this manner, capitalism has come to dominate the social meaning, value and organization of time well beyond the realm of production (Shippen, 2014, p. 1). By making time an independent concept to which human activities ought to subscribe, capitalism has introduced the scarcity of time (Schmitt et al., 2021). This scarcity commodifies time making it available for consumption. More so, through a capitalist conception of time, time continues to be a linear phenomenon that proceeds from Western subjectivities and imperial interests. This adds to what we have conceived as colonial temporality. Colonial temporality pervades all levels of society, from human experience to the study of the human experience. Psychology is learned and practised within this linear, scarcity‐centred and commodified conception of time. It is within this temporal framework that people are expected to heal, love, grow and experience joy. It is in being cognizant of this that we argue for the departure from colonial temporality to decolonial temporalities. We do so by first considering the TRC in South Africa and how it was steeped in a colonial conception of time.

THE UNDERPINNINGS OF THE TRC

Conceptualized as a platform made to enable South Africa to ‘transition’ from a past plagued by injustice and hatred to a future of hope, unity and harmony (Barnard‐Naude, 2023; the TRC was constituted by individuals from diverse political parties and civil society groups and chaired by Archbishop Reverend Desmond Tutu). This transition was premised on the full disclosure of the truth, forgiveness and reconciliation between victims and perpetrators (Horne, 2013). Forgiveness and truth were framed as fundamental to the TRC collective therapeutic intervention that sought to heal the state and individual.

A white man and Black woman meet and are met by the TRC

The constitutive process of the TRC presents a number of points we wish to discuss in relation to subjectivities and time perspectives. The first is with regard to the positioning of two figures, namely Winnie Madikizela and F. W De Klerk. The second is in relation to the conceptualization of healing which was framed within a colonial framework of time.

F W De Klerk, the president who the TRC looked up to, to be impartial, had presided over and was complicit with the apartheid government (Adebajo, 2024). To understand the complexity of De Klerk's identity and how it compromised the TRC, we can draw on Manganyi's (2019) theorization of race relations in colonial and apartheid South Africa. Manganyi (2019) notes that the white body is characterized by an implicit sense of ingenuity and objectivity. As the colonial and apartheid eras were built on white subjectivity, white sensibilities became the foundations of the modus operandi in the state. Thus, looking to a white male who had presided over an apartheid state to have the final say on who was to help the country transition into the future was self‐contradictory on the side of the TRC. The TRC's choice to position F. W De Klerk as an objective figure shows how at its primacy it functioned under a colonial temporal framework. On one hand, the President who presided over an apartheid state was not held liable and was given voice as the President where victims were supposed to dislocate themselves from their past. This dislocation was a forced divorcing of the victim from their experiences in hopes of a more promising future. As much as the ‘President’, that is, F. W De Klerk, was externalized from his past as a leader of an atrocious state, he kept the role of being a leader in the new dispensation. In this, F. W De Klerk was allowed to move into a new temporal space with a different identity but the same privileges. His past power amassed within the apartheid context allowed him access to a new future.

This seamless transitioning across identities highlights the temporal privileges granted by power. That is, power allows its possessor the temporal control to heal and ‘move on’ easily. This power, we must emphasize, is not simply an unmarked power–that is, a type of power that is not marked by racialization or class. Rather, this is a particular understanding of power that is given through a Western, white elite‐recognized body, to other Western, white elites. It is the power granted by what Maldonado Torres (2008) calls the community of masters which Sithole (2020, p. 38) extends as the patriarchal infrastructure of the modern colonial world–the world of domination and dehumanization. This patriarchal infrastructure and its granting of seamless temporal mobility had the opposite effect on Winnie Madikizela.

Winnie Madikizela, popularly presented as Mandela's wife, was an anti‐apartheid activist who was respected by her contemporaries and the masses. Winnie stood as both a victim and perpetrator (Hassim, 2018). She was convicted of her crimes of abduction and torture (Hassim, 2018). Winnie's situatedness as a Black woman in a violent and patriarchal world was not considered. More glaringly, unlike F. W De Klerk, Winnie was not allowed to externalize herself from her problematic past (Msimang, 2018). Msimang (2018) contends that Winnie was painted as a violent object to be feared. Winnie, in Manganyi's (2019) terms, was encountered through the negative Black sociological schema that sees the Black body and its constitutive consciousness as wholly bad. All the atrocities committed by Winnie's bodyguards were attributed to her and not the bodyguards directly. On the other hand, the white President enjoyed an individual schema of navigating the world that externalized him from the acts of violence he was complicit in as he presided over apartheid South Africa. This parallel of how Winnie is encountered by the TRC compared to President De Klerk is telling of the underlying power dynamics that drove the TRC. These were power dynamics steeped in the order of apartheid.

There is a different way in which Winnie was allowed to inhabit time compared to De Klerk. Winnie's negative past seemed to inform the present seamlessly. When Winnie was considered, it seemed objective to consider her past wrongs in such a way that led to her receiving jail sentences informed by the TRC (Hassim, 2018). Through the temporal sensibilities that informed the commission, Winnie carried the burden of her past into the future. On the other hand, De Klerk had continued his previous privileged role of being the President. A role that dislocated him from being complicit with the apartheid government. One can note how even though De Klerk did more injustice in the form of complicity given the power of his position (Adebajo, 2024), he was ‘liberated’ from the burden of his past through his temporal privilege as a white man. A privilege that was not granted to Winnie Madikizela as a Black woman.

This juxtaposition between Winnie Madikizela and F. W De Klerk symbolizes a racialized and gendered nature of remembering. Black people are discouraged from engaging in discourse about the atrocious past they suffered (Dladla, 2023). Having lived under a system that was built across decades, Black people are told, more than a decade since the system abated, to think about the future and ignore their traumatic past (Moon, 2009). There is a forced repression in the Black community that continues to make Black people internalize images of inferiority in modern‐day South Africa. This animates a fundamental paradox in the treatment of individual Black people such as Winnie, and Black people as a collective and community. On the other hand, Winnie, as an individual Black woman who was, as made explicit above, both victim and perpetrator, was not allowed to move away from the past and enter a ‘different time’ and future but was instead held accountable to her past. In other words, the temporal continuity or discontinuity is to some extent dependent on how the actions of the past reflect onto the dominant white patriarchal power–if the past is one that is problematic for the white elites–they want to forget it. Where it is one that highlights the wrongdoings of others, making the image of the perpetrator in the story of the past more complex, they want to highlight and make an example of it (i.e. Winnie).

The temporal dimension of history is therefore, almost always, mobilized to be continuous or discontinuous depending on the purpose it serves in the present. While historical/temporal continuity is generally argued to be positive from within a Western conception of time and history as in the concept of perceived collective continuity (Sani et al., 2007), the appeal to discontinuity can serve important ingroup functions such as avoiding continuity of historical blame or affiliation with a shameful past (Obradović & Bowe, 2021). For De Klerk, discontinuity ‘in time’ served the purpose of allowing him to maintain power despite ‘time changing’. This was symbolically and ironically captured by him being awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. For Winnie, this was not allowed. She would continue to live a life fraught with people questioning her anti‐apartheid activist credentials.

Considering the identity complexities animated in the TRC leads us to more interesting thoughts. The first is that interrogating how people inhabit time in a society might give us an idea of who has power in that society. Second, and most importantly, is that how people engage and experience time is indicative of the foundational subjectivities that drive a society. To make more sense of these two core findings and usher us into the possibilities of decolonial temporality, we will make use of the Fanonian perspective of the psychoanalytic theory.

THE ID, SUPEREGO AND EGO OF POST‐APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA

We have established above that the TRC forgot the meta‐narrative of the apartheid era, hence it went on a therapeutic tangent that was aimed at healing a collective that it imagined without grappling fully with history or allowing their healing to be situated within a particular history. As the meta‐narrative of apartheid was the sub‐humanness of all those who were not white, that is, Blacks, the therapeutic intervention of the TRC was supposed to be built on the narrative that would centre the trauma of Black people who were ‘othered’ during the apartheid era. The forgetting of this meta‐narrative only means that the TRC was not established to heal those who were ‘othered’ and abused during apartheid. The TRC was created to allow those in power to forget the wrong they were complicit in doing. Barnard‐Naude (2023) provides evidence for this by noting how the TRC was saturated by forgiveness. The burden was laid on the victims, majority of whom were the Black marginalized, to forgive. There was no implicit or explicit expectation of the perpetrators to consider their crimes and how they could engage in reparations as a way of providing material healing for the collectively abused. This basing of the TRC's processes on white subjectivities and sensibilities was the fundamental failure of the commission. Power, as noted above, determines how one accesses, experiences and contends with time. Access to power allows or restricts a person or group of people the temporal space necessary for healing. This is because the temporal autonomy granted by power allows those who possess power to engage with their past, present and envisioned future without invalidation.

Fanon (2008) in Black skins, white masks, makes sense of this dilemma by borrowing from the psychoanalytic theory and using it at a collective level. Underlying Fanon's theorization is the fact that in a world built on white subjectivity, Black sensibilities and subjectivities are repressed. For in a world built on white subjectivity, the Black person must work to forget their self and adopt a persona that closely estimates whiteness to survive. He states that a normal Black child, having grown up with a normal family, will become abnormal at the slightest contact with the white world (Fanon, 2008). Thus, according to Fanon, Black subjectivities are repressed and become an object of the collective unconscious. In Freudian terms, they become part of the collective id that is always to be controlled by the white superego (Fanon, 2008). Because society is built on white sensibilities, it means that even the ego is an expression of whiteness. That is, as the ego functions as a compromise between the id and the superego, the collective ego becomes an expression of white sensibilities. This happens because in a society where white subjectivity permeates all levels of being even into the imagination, the ego will tilt towards the superego. Meaning that there is no compromise, rather the ego functions to express the needs of the superego, that is, whiteness at the expense of the id, that is, Blackness.

A white subjectivity‐centred and Black subjectivity‐phobic structuring of society allows us to make sense of the TRC and how its failures inform South Africa's current situation. Black people's subjectivities framed as the society's id remain repressed to the present. Black people are not allowed to mourn the loss of their dignity through land dispossession. The question of land has ultimately been construed as a divisive subject (Dladla, 2023). Discourse on land, which is a material and psychological centre of Black subjective‐hood and identity thus lies repressed in the collective unconscious of society. Black people's ways of emoting, loving and inhabiting joy have consciously been obscured and vilified in a world dominated by white subjectivity. All these fundamental ways of being in the world have been deemed a collective impulse that might destabilize the society if allowed expression. Black people's move towards total emancipation and humanization is seen as impulsive and threatening to destabilize the peace of the nation (Fanon, 2008). Collective healing therefore would need to be underscored by a reframing of Black subjectivities in time. Healing of the repressed Black collective trauma ought to be built on Black sensibilities. Acknowledging and centring Black subjectivities as a start would create a societal climate that validates the collective pain of Black people and thus provides possibility for healing.

THE GEOPOLITICS OF TEMPORALITY AND SUBJECTIVITY

At this point, this paper has made explicit how time is not an objective phenomenon. Drawing on the difference between Winnie and De Klerk's experiences with time, we have shown how time is created and how it reveals the subjectivities that create and sustain temporal inequality. This temporal inequality is evidenced by how the ‘Black and powerless’ inhabit time, juxtaposed with how the ‘white powerful’ use and own time through a reigning collective subjectivity. This juxtaposition has also allowed us to glean the dynamic relationship between time and subjectivity. That is, time as revealing of the collective subjectivities that make it and also how belonging to a certain subjective hood is telling of how a person inhabits time. We will now move forward by drawing on Ndumiso Dladla (2023) to show how this time–subjectivity relationship is enacted at a geopolitical level.

Dladla (2023, p. 47) contends that ‘time in relation to Blacks, time according to Blacks, or Black time offer a most concrete example of the ontological implications of race. The apparently universal notion of “human life” with its partner, “lifetime,” are the very parameters and boundaries that provide the framework within which human constructs such as ethics and politics gain their meaningfulness’. In engaging with what he calls Black horology, Dladla (2023) foregrounds the idea that Black people around the world live shorter lives compared to whites. This, Dladla (2023, p. 48) extends, ‘…is not a result of any natural process but of the human‐made cruelty of racism (white supremacy), which finds expression in the realm of politics and economics’. It is safe to opine that there exists a global discrepancy in how time is inhabited by different groups of people. Blackness as a material subjective experience is constrained in the amount of time it has to exist. It is further constrained by being a subjective experience that groups must abandon for whiteness in order to survive in a world run by white subjective hood.

Building on Dladla's work, we argue for the need to move from colonial temporality to decolonial temporalities. This enables us to move beyond ‘time’ as a singular constructed, defined and ‘owed’ by Western white subjectivities and used as a tool of dominance, to instead consider multiple temporalities, as expansive and complex ways of inhabiting time that allow for the contextual theorizing of trauma and enactment of sustainable healing.

To expand on our argument for decolonial temporalities as a tool for social justice, we would like to focus our attention on a more recent example; the media reporting on the International Court of Justice (ICJ) hearing of the invasion of Palestine by Israel. The hearing was spread over 2 days (11 January 2024 and 12 January 2024), with South African lawyers presenting their submissions on the 11th and Israeli lawyers on the 12th. As South Africa presented their submission on the 11th there was no coverage by the big Western news media outlets. There was no live stream on Sky News, MSNBC, Fox News, BBC, CNN, CBS and NBC, to name a few. We propose that this censoring was intentional given how on the next day all the Western news outlets provided full coverage of Israel's submission in response to South Africa. Time was frozen to allow Israel's subjective experience supported by the West to take precedence. To them, Israel was not responding, for if they were it would be logical to air South Africa's initial presentation. Israel was presenting an unchallenged narrative of what was taking place in the Gaza Strip. The West's insistence on democracy at all levels of society was ‘forgotten’. Israel's submission was the only universal truth. Thus, beyond revealing the propagandistic nature of Western media, this disparity in airing the ICJ case is indicative of how the powerful can ‘adjust’ time to give precedence to their subjectivities.

Juxtaposing this with the treatment of Ukraine reveals another temporal disparity that is enabled by differences in subjectivity. The time taken for the Western world to respond to Ukraine is markedly shorter compared to Palestine. Understandably knowledge about the genocide in Palestine is more easily known to more people around the world due to the increased accessibility of social media today. Yet it has taken 76 years of persecution before it has reached the state where Israel is (more commonly) viewed as perpetrator of genocide. In comparison, Russia was swiftly denounced upon its first attack on Ukraine.

RE‐COGNIZING TEMPORAL HEGEMONY AND MOVING TOWARDS DECOLONIAL TEMPORALITIES

Hook (2012) opines that it is possible to use a psycho‐societal‐diagnostic framework to make sense of the collective psychological impact of colonialism and apartheid. This means we can use this psycho‐societal‐diagnostic framework to theorize potential interventions. Leaning on this, we contend that we ought to return to our borrowing of Fanon to chart a way forward.

The psycho‐societal‐diagnostic framework is a mechanism by which we can make sense of shared and collective psycho‐social phenomena (Hook, 2012). It is a lens that seeks to go beyond the Western‐centric individualistic psychological frameworks that fail to make sense of shared psychological phenomena that are enacted at a collective level. But before we proceed it is important to consider a critique of this approach. Hook (2012) concedes that this approach has received much criticism as many contend that it yields to psychological reductionism. That is, it reduces the complex enactments of race within colonization and apartheid through understanding them through a single theoretical framework. As much as he considers this critique, Hook (2012), through considering Fanon and others, invites us to consider the potentialities of psycho‐societal‐diagnostic approach that withstand the psychological reductionism critique. Thus, as one reads, it is important to note that this is not a totalizing theoretical formation of transcending subjective hegemony created by temporal inequality.

Through engaging the critiques of the Black Consciousness Movement's theoretical underpinnings, (Hook, 2012, p. 98) salvages the potential of ‘psychoanalysis in the field of the political’ and social. This salvaging makes diagnostic tools available for making sense of collective subjectivities of suffering. Having made this justification and clarification, we will therefore move to positing how we can transcend hegemonic white subjectivity in time.

Considering our earlier engagement with Fanon where we theorized the ID, ego and the superego of post‐apartheid South Africa, we can now engage in the process of re‐cognizing. Here, re‐cognizing is used to denote a proposed psychological overhaul of the way in which subjectivities are structured in our societies. Re‐cognizing denotes the intentional protest against the valorization of white subjectivities in the collective psyche. Moreso, re‐cognition here refers to the awareness of pluriversal ways of seeing and existing which are possible outside white subjectivities.

To engage in re‐cognizing, we must revisit how white subjectivities become universal and normative. Ramose (2005) is here instructive in tracing how white subjectivity becomes normative and universal. In his critique of the primacy of Western philosophy, Ramose (2005) engages Aristotle's answer to the question of what a human being and/or man is. Aristotle's famous answer ‘man is a rational animal’ is considered extensively by Ramose within its historical milieu and context. Ramose (2005) contends that the adage ‘man is a rational animal’ was not said of the African, Australasian, Amerindian and women. ‘Man is a rational animal’, was primarily said of the white man. The white man therefore becomes, at that historical juncture, the ultimate image of what the ‘other’ must become to be considered human. That is, he curates a subjective hood that must be inhabited by all who seek to be conferred the title ‘human’. Ramose (2003) builds on this by proposing that this affects how whites or the West engage the broader world. Ramose (2003, p. 548) calls it the ‘meridian line that decides truth and defines justice’. In commenting on Ramose's (2003) conceptualization, Dladla (2023, p. 42) says:

The line for Ramose is a geopolitical construction differentiating the limits between Being and Nothingness. Between beings and nothings, between the territories occupied by those who, according to themselves, had human value and so were among themselves and between themselves subjects of morality and law, and on the other side of the line, those of nothings, demarcated zones which it was said were occupied by those without the value of life, the barbarians, the savages, those falling outside the boundaries of morality and law and thereby unworthy of its protection…It was the burden of those with reason, then, those with order and culture, to introduce it to those without, to conquer, colonise and ‘civilise’ them.

This assertion is consistent with (Massey, 2005, p. 23) who posits that:

[t]he current governments in the UK and the USA (and plenty of other current governments besides) tell u a story of the inevitability of globalisation […] and if you point to differences around the globe, to Mocambique or Mali or Nicaragua, they will tell you such countries are just ‘behind’; that eventually they will follow the path long which the capitalist West has led. […] one of the crucial manoeuvres at work […] to convince us of the ineluctability of this [neo‐liberal capitalist form of] globalisation, is a sleight of hand in terms of the conceptualisation of space and time. The proposition turns geography into history, space into time, and this again has social and political effects. It says that Mocambique and Nicaragua are not really different from ‘us’. We are not to imagine them as having their own trajectories, their own particular histories, and the potential for their own, perhaps different, futures. They are not recognised as coeval others. They are merely at an earlier stage in the one and only narrative it is possible to tell. That cosmology of ‘only one narrative’ obliterates the multiplicities, the contemporaneous heterogeneities of space. It reduces simultaneous coexistence to place in the historical queue.

From here, we can thus make a point that there is a need to depart from this universality if we are to usher in healing of the collective wounding enacted by the hegemony of white subjectivity. In the introduction to the theorization of Mpondo theory, (Ka Canham, 2023 p. 13) notes that ‘when villagers resist Western civilization as the only version of the future, they make room for different ontological possibilities’. Refusing Western civilization is thus the departure from the implicit and explicit acceptance of white subjectivities as the norm for all to aspire to. It is a negation that Campt (2019) contends is generative of the possibilities that lie beyond the status quo. It is a refusal that is underscored by Fanonian sociogeny which asserts that ‘all cultures are lived locally rather than universally’ (Ka Canham, 2023 p. 12). After refusal, we need to heal and imagine within alternative decolonial temporal frameworks which allow for sustainable long‐term healing.

DECOLONIAL TEMPORALITIES

Decolonial temporalities are any notions and theorizations of time that lie outside the hegemonic nature of linear, colonial/Western conceptualization of time. They are temporalities that are built on an understanding that time is determined by the human experience and not the other way around (Shippen, 2014). Decolonial temporalities are pluriversal. They are built on the acceptance of the multiplicity of subjective hoods and the need for their coexistence. Consistent with Reddy and Amer (2023), decolonial temporalities are drawn from the pluriversal archive that exists outside of the colonial canon. They are also the ‘fight for time [that] demonstrate…that the colonization of time is neither automatic nor unavoidable, but contestable and political’ (Shippen, 2014, p. 9). Decolonial temporalities are timescapes that gesture towards a reorientation towards rhythm (Barnard‐Naude, 2023). A reorientation that takes seriously what Agamben (1999) terms the human's poetic status on Earth. That is, our unique ability to be creative beyond what we know and have been forced to acculturate to. To use (Barnard‐Naude's, 2023, p. 187) thinking, decolonial temporalities are a dispositif of time where ‘reparation or the reparative [or healing] occurs or should occur in a moment of rhythm that interrupts the smooth operation of (irreparable neoliberal) [colonial] time’.

KA CANHAM'S CYLINDRICAL EPIPHENOMENAL TEMPORALITY

Ka Canham borrows from Abrahams (2000) and Wright (2015) to theorize Mpondo's theory within cylindrical epiphenomenal temporality. This form of temporality, in (Wright's, 2015, p. 16) terms, sees time as ‘not [being] tripartite but consisting of one moment’. At its primacy, cylindrical epiphenomenal temporality departs from compartmentalized colonial time as it sees the here and now as constitutive of the past, present and future (Wright, 2015). Cylindrical epiphenomenal temporality thus collapses the structure of dominance inherent in colonial time by undermining its foregrounding past and contemplative future. Within this form of temporality, the ‘past, future, and present coexist productively…In this conception, temporality refuses stasis and latches on to the movement of social actors’ (Ka Canham, 2023, p. 18). Cylindrical epiphenomenal temporality thus projects time as dependent on human activities. It seeks to allow people a space to have what Shippen (2014) calls temporal autonomy. This form of temporality is true to the experience of the people concerned. It refuses to debate people on their material conditions and their causes. Rather it gives them adequate temporal space to engage with the terribleness of their lives while seeking healing (Ka Canham, 2023). Cylindrical epiphenomenal temporality is ultimately ‘a longer timescape that is intimately tied to the environment‐person interface’ (Ka Canham, 2023, p. 17).

It is accurate, then, to contend that this temporality is capacious enough to allow Black people (those whose subjective hood contradicts universal white subjectivities) to deal with their collective woundedness/trauma. Concomitantly, it ushers them into a liberation from a colonial temporality that constricts their imagination. Cylindrical epiphenomenal temporality gives Black people space in time to form communities of resistance where people can return to themselves more easily and where conditions are such that they can heal themselves and recover their wholeness (Nhất Hạnh, T & Berrigan, 2001).

Within the TRC, this way of inhabiting time could have been used to collapse the present and future into a perpetual present to engage in healing. Let us consider the fourth point of the commission's Chairperson (TRC, 1999) to accentuate the point:

The work of the South African Commission has also been far more extensive than that of other commissions. The volume of material that passed through our hands will fill many shelves in the National Archives. This material will be of great value to scholars, journalists and others researching our history for generations to come. From a research point of view, this may be the Commission's greatest legacy.

The above, among many other examples, shows how the TRC had a vested interest in the future. This represents the malady of colonial temporality. That in its failure through scarcity to offer a longer timescape in the present, it uses escapism through envisioning a future of possibility. Colonial time sees the present as too congested and irreparable to be contended with. In contrast, through a collapsing of the past and future into the present, cylindrical epiphenomenal temporality would have given a more capacious timescape. The inhabiting of cylindrical epiphenomenal temporality would animate what (Barnard‐Naude, 2023, p. 188) terms the ‘presencing’ of past contradictions or traumas so that they are engaged with in a perpetual manner. This ‘present‐perpetual’ manner enabled by cylindrical temporality would make reconciliation (dealing with trauma) a continuous exercise that transcends finality.

TEMPORALITY THROUGH UBUNTU

(Ka Canham, 2023, p. 14) holds that Mpondo theory ‘assembles Black being as an orientation that is less about precision but more oceanic. Located in motion’. This is consistent with Ramose's (2005) Ubuntu‐ness. Ramose (2005) coins the term Ubuntu‐ness as opposed to Ubuntu‐ism to escape the rigidness of the latter. Ubuntu‐ness, in Ramose's (2005) terms, captures the complexity and ipsative process of ‘be‐ing’. Ramose further suggests that be‐ing within Ubuntu means inhabiting a perpetual state of motion. That is, a person is a ‘be‐ing becoming’ (Ramose, 2005). This perpetual state of motion is extended by Ramose (2005) when he aligns it with the rhythm of the African drum. The drum as the central piece of the African cultural experience allows all to converge in the co‐creation of a shared existence (Ramose, 2005). In this consideration, Ubuntu disrupts the notion of individualism and foregrounds collective co‐existence. Ramose's conceptualization of be‐ing therefore adequately captures the complexity inherent in being human.

This notion of being and existence troubles the notion of colonial time. If being a person is to be in a perpetual state of becoming, it follows that there is no point in one's life where they become the envisioned perfect self. Importantly, the colonial promise inherent in valorizing the white man as the ultimate figure of humanness becomes an unattainable fallacy. This in turn disrupts the foundations of colonial time. Temporality through Ubuntu allows Black people the space to empathize with their past suffering that survives to the present. As it sees the person as a ‘be‐ing becoming’, it makes clear that being humans must not be reified. It reminds one that there are many ways of existing in the world beyond being white.

Another important aspect of Ubuntu philosophy to consider here is the Ndebele and/or Zulu proverb: icala aliboli. This directly translated means a crime or injustice does not rot. At its metaphorical level, it connotes that an injustice stays alive until it is dealt with materially. This is a radical turn from colonial time because according to the proverb, time stops at injustice. The proverb implores us to contend with the fact that injustice does not age with its victims. It does not yield to redundancy. Inter‐generational trauma research is impeccable evidence to the truth of the proverb (Marsh et al., 2015). Collective, historical and violent pasts live on in the collective psyche (van der Kolk, 2014). They do not give in to memory decay.

Temporality through Ubuntu therefore allows us the power and liberty to halt time to allow for healing. Its embeddedness in collective memory gives us the foundational tools to sit and heal from the violence of colonial time and imagine more humane possibilities. In the case of the Palestinian people, for example, temporality through Ubuntu would afford Palestinian people visibility on the universal timescape by rejecting the universal timescape. This is because temporality through Ubuntu rejects the valorization of one universal subjectivity in time. It, rather, would allow for the consideration and ceasing of the genocide in Gaza in a more urgent manner. That is, Palestinian people would not need to suffer for longer to be seen, heard and liberated.

CONCLUSION

In this paper, we have managed to engage extensively with the need for the radical transition from the universal and unidimensional colonial way of inhabiting time to the pluriversal and fluid ways of inhabiting time through decolonial temporalities. By foregrounding our core argument on how colonial time is created, we presented a contextual and historical basis of how colonial time is created and how it becomes a totalizing force in determining how we engage with the world. Using the TRC as a case in point to further interrogate how colonial time is animated, we unearthed the gendered, scarcity‐centred and power‐imbued nature of colonial temporality. We saw how colonial time determines how different racialized and gendered bodies have different temporal mobilities. This allowed us to theorize the connection between time and subjectivity, leading us directly to the global geopolitical implications of colonial temporality. Using cylindrical epiphenomenal temporality and temporality through Ubuntu as examples, we theorized decolonial temporalities. We noted their characteristics that make them preferred ways of inhabiting time if we are to engage in sustainable healing. Ultimately, our paper is not an all‐encompassing theorization of decolonial temporalities but a foundation for future deliberations on the subject.

AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

Thabolwethu Tema Maphosa: Conceptualization; writing – original draft; investigation; formal analysis; writing – review and editing. Refiloe Makama: Supervision; writing – review and editing; validation; resources.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST STATEMENT

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Maphosa, T. T. , & Makama, R. (2025). From colonial time to decolonial temporalities. British Journal of Social Psychology, 64, e12817. 10.1111/bjso.12817

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study.