African time lacks teleological history or expectation of the world’s end

Evidence

Mbiti insisted that in African thinking there is no concept of history moving towards a future climax or towards an end of the world. This affirmation of his confirmed the assumption that the future, in the proper sense of the word, did not exist except for the time-lapse of a few months. Thus, it is inconceivable to await a golden age or a radically different state of life from what is in sasa and zamani. — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 272

Categorization

• XREF: Mirrors the famous philosophical question of whether the future tense can really be used in Kikuyu/African languages, and contrasts with Judeo-Christian eschatology.
• QUESTION: Is there scholarly consensus that ‘future’ is genuinely absent, or was this a contested universalizing claim about all African peoples?