Where Time and Space are Not Rationalized

In an earlier post, I made a fumbling attempt to describe local conceptions of time that can leave foreigners like me confounded and frustrated here in Ethiopia. Sociologist Donald Levine does an amazing job describing this and many other aspects of Amhara society in his 1965 book Wax and Gold. The following passage had me laughing hysterically for all the foiled attempts as making plans or soliciting information about past events that it brought to mind. Levine’s work on the Amhara peasant of 40 years ago remains relevant for understanding the urban Ethiopian of today.

In the Abyssinian world view, time is not rationalized for secular purposes.  Some peasants calculate the hour by the shadows on the mountains, but the effort is not taken very seriously. Units of time are of little concern in the workday world.  When a man says he is going on a trip ‘tomorrow,’ everyone assumes that he means he may be leaving a few days later. Many appointments are made, but few are kept literally; so that the phrase habesha qataro (“Abyssinian appointment”) has come to signify an appointment to which one comes quite late or not at all. There is little sense of time in the abstract.  When an Amhara peasant is asked how long a certain trip takes, he does not reply ‘ten hours,’ but rather; ‘If you leave here at dawn you will arrive there before it turns dark’; and his estimate of the arrival time tends to vary according to whether or not he wants to questioner to make the trip.

Historical time is still more vaguely conceived than local time. The Amhara peasant has little sense of knowledge of history. He considers all that happened before Menelik’s day as ‘ancient times,’ and more or less as an undifferentiated period. He knows very few of the earlier emperors, no historical dates, and often not even the exact year, let alone date, of his own birth.  He has no idea when the church in his area was built and no interest in preserving such historical monuments or mementos as may exist in his country…

Space, like time, is not regarded as an amoral and homogeneous continuum to be submitted to systematic measurement… The reluctance to rationalize space is conspicuous even in the capital of Ethiopia, where to this day there are no street numbers, so that places can only be identified roughly as near a certain police station or past a certain hospital. Directions are indicated with difficulty.  The points of the compass are almost never used, though there are words for the four directions.  Instead, the vague terms for ‘up’ and ‘down’ serve to answer almost every question about location.

You can probably see how this way of looking at time and space would throw a Type A New Yorker like me for a loop. It also helps explain why so many people I talked to about Ethiopia before I arrived spoke with bitter frustration about the time they spent here.

Another factor contributing to this frustration is the wax and gold poetic tradition that is the main subject of Levine’s book. Wax and gold is a poetic style characterized by double entendres.  The wax is what the words ostensibly mean and the gold is the hidden meaning.  In day-to-day communication, this tradition can manifest as active deceit that is praised as cleverness in traditional Amhara culture.  By no means do all Ethiopians espouse double-handedness, but the implications of this cultural tradition is a topic of concern for organizations like the Ethiopian Institute for Nonviolent Education and Peace Studies.  When he wrote his book, Levine was hopeful that the wax and gold tradition could facilitate modern Ethiopian diplomacy.  Unambiguous communication is only part of maintaining bureaucratic, rational systems.  The most effective administrators though have a high tolerance for ambiguity both in practices and in communication in the effort to maintain harmony and minimize interpersonal tensions.