Who Owns Time? Calendars, Colonialism, and a Movement to Reclaim an African Calendar…

Time is not neutral. The way societies mark days, months and years encodes values, agricultural cycles, religious rhythms and political power. Today the Gregorian calendar — the Roman Catholic reform of 1582 that became global through empire, commerce and administration — is treated as if it were a universal truth. But calendars are cultural technologies. They are invented, modified, imposed, resisted and sometimes reclaimed. This editorial asks a blunt question: what was displaced when the Gregorian order was elevated to global default, and why are growing numbers — especially across Africa and in the Diaspora — reconsidering whose time we live by?

A short corrective to origin myths

There is no single “original” calendar for all humankind. Human societies across Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas developed sophisticated systems to track the sun, moon and stars long before European expansion. Ancient Egyptian, Nubian, West African, Ethiopian, Berber and other African calendrical systems governed agriculture, ritual and civic life. These calendars were locally adapted and often combined solar and lunar elements, intercalations tied to rivers and rains, and rites that tied the people’s identity to seasonal cycles.

The Khoisan: evidence of an ancient calendrical intelligence

Importantly, some of the earliest documented calendrical practices on the African continent are found among us the peoples commonly referred to as the Khoisan (often called “Bushmen” in older literature). Ethnographic and oral histories, and the lived knowledge preserved in Khoisan communities, show highly attuned seasonal systems that predate much of the continent’s later political reshaping. These systems were not abstract numbering schemes but deeply ecological calendars built on close observation of moon and sun phases and movements, the heliacal risings and settings of key stars and constellations, and finely calibrated signs in plant phenology and animal behavior.

For many of my people across the Khoisan groups, the rising or disappearance of particular stars signaled the availability of key food resources, the start of hunting seasons, or windows for ritual activity. Lunar cycles were used to count time for social and reproductive rhythms. These temporal practices were embedded in story, song and tracking knowledge, transmitted across generations by elders and hunters. In short, our story as the Khoisan people reveals an ancient, place-based calendrical sophistication that oriented people to their landscapes long before the imposition of foreign timekeeping systems, and that continues to inform cultural identity and ecological practice today.

What happened next was not purely technical change but political and cultural transformation. The Gregorian calendar was a papal reform of the Julian system, intended to correct the drift of the Christian liturgical year. Its spread beyond Catholic Europe occurred over centuries by conversion, trade, colonial administration and the practical demands of empire: taxation, conscription, legal codes, maps, shipping, global finance and schooling. Using one “standard” calendar facilitated imperial governance and international exchange — but it also displaced local temporal systems and subordinated other knowledge systems to a new temporal norm.

How a global standard was imposed

Adoption of the Gregorian calendar was uneven and gradual. Protestant states resisted for decades; Orthodox countries switched only in the 19th–20th centuries; many non-European polities adopted it later for administrative convenience. During colonial rule, European powers often required colonized peoples to use the colonial calendar for official records, land registries, tax rolls and schools. Missionary schools introduced Christian holidays and Gregorian dating as part of conversion and “civilizing” programs. In short: the calendar that facilitated empire became part of the machinery of control.

The consequences were not trivial. Calendars structure life. Changing the calendar can:

- Shift agricultural timing and disrupt traditional seasonal practices when official markets and relief schedules follow a different system.

- Reorder religious and cultural observances when official school and work calendars conflict with local ritual calendars.

- Reframe national memory by standardizing which dates are commemorated in public life.

- Embed foreign temporalities into legal and property systems, making indigenous claims legible only in colonial terms.

The Gregorian calendar and the world today

The result is that today most of the globe uses the Gregorian calendar for civil, legal and commercial purposes. Yet many peoples retain their own calendars for religious life, agriculture and community rites: the Islamic lunar calendar, the Hebrew calendar, the Buddhist and Hindu lunisolar calendars, the Chinese calendar, the Ethiopian and Coptic calendars, and numerous indigenous African systems. In many places there is a dual time — the official Gregorian year for passports, contracts and taxes; a local calendar for planting, weddings, funerals and festivals.

This duality creates tensions. In some regions, people chafe at a regime that forces them to live by a calendar alien to their seasonal logic or spiritual life. Farmers whose planting calendars are keyed to local rains must nevertheless align with market deadlines set by Gregorian dates. Religious communities negotiate between liturgies timed by lunar reckoning and state holidays fixed to Gregorian dates. Diaspora communities find their local commemorations calendarized differently from host-country schedules, complicating cultural transmission.

Resistance, reclamation and the rise of calendar consciousness

There is growing public interest — scholarly, activist and popular — in “decolonizing time.” This takes many forms:

- Legal and institutional recognition of alternative calendars (for example, some countries use multiple official calendars: civil Gregorian alongside national or religious calendars).

- Grassroots and cultural movements that revive or popularize indigenous calendars as a matter of identity and ecological practice.

- Academic and community projects documenting local temporal knowledge, seasonal rites and the agricultural wisdom embedded in non-Gregorian systems.

- Political movements that link calendar reform to broader demands for cultural autonomy and reparative recognition.

Two striking contemporary realities:

1) Ethiopia already uses its own calendar (and an alternate new year) in daily life and liturgy, highlighting that non-Gregorian systems can exist at the state level.

2) Across Africa and in the Diaspora there is renewed interest in reclaiming ancestral temporalities — not as mere nostalgia but as a corrective to the alienating effects of a single hegemonic time. This is visible in cultural festivals, publishing, education curricula and social-media campaigns that teach traditional seasonal markers and anniversaries.

What would wider reclamation mean?

If more communities formally prioritized indigenous African calendars, the effects would be complex and profound:

- Civic administration would need to accommodate multiple dating systems (as some states already do).

- Commerce and international relations would confront translation costs and logistical complexity — but they would also recognize that “one-size-fits-all time” is a political choice, not an inevitability.

- Cultural and ecological knowledge encoded in traditional calendars could be revived, helping communities better sync civic life with local environments — a potentially important adaptation in a warming world.

A challenge to the reader

Calendars make visible what societies privilege. The global dominance of the Gregorian calendar is a historical fact, shaped by empire and utility. But it is not the only possible way to organize time. The growing movements to reclaim African and other indigenous calendars are not mere romantic gestures; they are acts of cultural reassertion, ecological wisdom and political critique.

Ask yourself: whose festivals are on the public school calendar where you live? Whose holy days dictate public holidays and which are marginalized as “other”? If a calendar change could better align civic life with local climates, spiritual needs and cultural memory, would that be a loss of convenience — or a recovery of agency?

Conclusion

Timekeeping is a site of contestation. Recognizing the historical displacement of Africa’s many calendrical systems, including the ancient, place-based calendars of us the Khoisan peoples by a single Western standard opens a window on how cultural dominance is reproduced through mundane technologies. Reclaiming alternative calendars is part of a broader project to redefine sovereignty, knowledge and rootedness in a world still organized by colonial inheritances. If calendars can be invented, they can also be reimagined. The question for our generation is whether we will keep accepting the bias, unfair and oppressive single global clock as inevitable or whether, in the spirit of pluralism and ecological attunement, we will give space for other ways of counting and living time to flourish. As a proud and unapologetic Khoisan / Bushman, I demand, insist and busy doing whatever it will take to ensure that we reclaim and restore that which is of my people, regardless of what the current unjust and no matter the cost, if need be, I am prepared to die keeping to this stance because it is part of my calling. I do not excuse everyone to understand and or approve of this, a calling is not for everyone…