Time

The kind of history known as scholarly and objective can never arise here, because the African past has no documents or records, and each generation, listening to the version being transmitted to it, changed it and continues to change it, transforms it, modifies it and embellishes it. But as a result, history, free of the weight of archives, of the constraints of dates and data, achieves here its purest, crystalline form - that of myth.

In these myths, instead of dates and mechanical measures of Time - days, months, years - other designations appear, like "long ago", "very long ago", "so very long ago that no-one remembers." Within these Time frames everything can still be placed and arranged in a temporal hierachy, only that within it Time will will not evolve in a linear fashion, but will mimic the circular, uniform revolutions of our planet. In this view of Time, the notion of development does not exist; it is replaced by the notion of the abiding. Africa is eternal abiding.