African Time (and What It Might Mean for South Africa)

South Africa struggles with its tendency to operate on “African time.” Brother Timothy at Mariya uMama weThemba describes African time this way: whatever needs to be done, “it will happen, when it happens, if it happens.” Many South Africans (business people mostly, I suspect) are trying to push their country to move away from African time so it can meet the requirements of efficiency and productivity that drive Western businesses.

That is all well and good: South Africa’s standard of living depends on it. But I also think there are lessons to be learned from African time.

The personal lessons are clear enough. After just two weeks in a culture where things take extra time and often happen imperfectly, I’ve found myself learning to accept it with an easy grace. I’m not sure I would react the same way in the U.S. I know many Americans wouldn’t: we are, by culture, an impatient people.

Right now, so are many poor South Africans. It has been 12 years since the ANC took the reins of government, and the lot of the poor has improved little, if at all. Coping with poverty takes a terrible toll on one’s psyche, so the impatience is understandable—and leaders surely need to respond.

And yet I wonder whether African time, in another way, applies to South Africa itself. One thing I have begun to appreciate while here is just how slowly social change takes place. After the exhilaration of dramatic reversals—whether the end of apartheid or the fall of the Soviet Union—comes the hard, grinding work of making life better. Maybe the sheer immensity of the task makes the slow pace of change inevitable. Even the U.S. took a couple of decades after 1776 to get its government down pat.

So what’s the import of all this? How do you convince a people that social change “happens on African time”? Is it even moral to do so? Can you do it and still hold leaders strictly accountable to improve the lot of their people with all due speed? And how important is this balancing act of managing expectations to keep an entire nation on course?