On Being in Time: Modern African Elites and the Historical Challenge to Claims for Alternative and Multiple Modernities

Abstract

This chapter examines the ways in which African elites define their relation to the Europe with which they were confronted by the settlers in both appreciative and combative terms. It considers how scholars might use the idea of temporality — identified by both C. A. Bayly and Peter Wagner as being central to a subject's experience of modernity — to engage critically in debates about what Shmuel Eisenstadt has called ‘multiple modernities’ and Dilip Gaonkar has referred to as ‘alternative modernities’. Drawing on a specific historical case, involving a group of Christianised African elites in colonial South Africa from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, the chapter demonstrates the importance of temporality as a dimension of what it meant to be modern.