A thought: John Mbiti, one of Africa’s most influential philosophers, reimagined time itself. Writing in 1969, he argued that in many African societies, time doesn’t stretch endlessly into the future. Instead, it has two dimensions: a vibrant present and a vast, meaningful past- with almost no distant future.
Using Swahili, Mbiti describes Sasa as the “now”: the present, recent past, and immediate future we can experience. Zamani is the endless past, where all events eventually settle and live on forever. Time, in this worldview, is created by events. If something hasn’t happened yet, it doesn’t fully exist as time. This is why many East African Bantu languages have no word for the distant future.
In African thought, people don’t live inside time, they produce it. Seasons, ceremonies, conversations, daily life create time. A year isn’t defined by 365 days, but by the completion of four seasons. It ends when the events have happened, not when the calendar says so.
This contrasts sharply with the Western view of time as a commodity, something to be spent, saved, wasted, or invested. That future-focused mindset fuels productivity, progress, and constant forward motion.
So when outsiders see people sitting under a tree and assume time is being wasted, African thought sees something else entirely: time being waited for, or time being created. This is captured in the Swahili phrase “pole pole” (slowly, slowly.) Not because things are slow, but because they unfold in their own time.
For Mbiti, the golden age isn’t ahead of us, it lives in Zamani, the accumulated past. The future is only a shadow until it becomes present, then flows backward into memory. Time doesn’t move forward. We don’t move into time. Time moves toward us.
Posing and modelling are super useful tools to have in the bag when being in front of camera, but for my shoots, they can sometimes be used as a mask for one's personality.
The beautiful @stephokeeffe_ joined me in studio and proved herself highly capable of using her talents as a model, but fearlessly expressing herself to camera. Just look at those eyes!
We had fantastic chats about literature, her second major at our alma mater UCT (which she somehow managed to do whil studying acting), and she gave me a very hard time for not watching the Springboks who were set to play later that day.
Break a leg for your ventures!
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