It’s time to take time: for so long, most of the colonized world – including Africa – has been educated into the idea that there is only one time, and that this time stretches from an unsophisticated past to the glittering future, one which only the raptured few may occupy. We have been taught that we are inconsolably late, and that we must strive for a seat at the table.
This patriarchal time has fostered “earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption”; it has destroyed ecosystems, and generated feel-good green activisms that silently propagate consumerism while shipping waste to Africa. It has nurtured the notion that we are in control. We the historically disenfranchised continue to subscribe to these ideas at our own peril – and the collective peril of the planet. We can seek more than integration. The promise of inclusion and integration juggled by the status quo in the faces of the occluded simultaneously powers the violence of exclusion; there must be something other than this unyielding dialectic of inclusion versus exclusion. Something messianic that blasts open the container.
