Standing Tall to Design the Indigenous Ways of Being On/In Time: Clocktowers in the Colonial Universities ​

Abstract

Public clock towers in the colonised lands can be viewed as a feature of colonial apparatus of disciplining and controlling the colonised societies (Thompson, 1967). A tall and central clock tower as a part of the architecture of the colonial universities in the colonised lands in addition to stamping the grandeur and supremacy of the empire also introduced a westernised universal linear view of time to the indigenous epistemic imaginary. For the colonised being it is also a reminder of its temporal positioning of being left behind as it reinstates the superior industrial morality of the colonising race as being punctual and industrious (Salamé, 2016). The temporal coloniality embodied in the western linear colonial imaginary of time makes being left behind the fault of the colonised self that is usually projected as being ‘lazy’ and ‘lethargic’ and make it run faster like the sweep hand of the clock that move faster but for rather insignificant gains as compared to the minutes and hour hands of the clock. Moreover, this colonial imaginary of time embodied in the object of the clock tower enables normalisation of the language of efficiency in relation to time in the modern higher education imaginary (Bennett & Burke, 2017). Adjunct with the language of efficiency, this imaginary also introduces the idea of utilisation and wastage of time in relation to certain academic activities; thus, enabling the disciplining of academic life. This western colonial imaginary of time being a universal quantifiable entity enables framing higher education qualifications in terms of spending a specific amount of time in doing specific activities to be a scholar. It underlines by the view that same amount of time invested in a learning activity would lead to same learning outcomes that can be demonstrated through another time bound activity. In this work, I argue that this imaginary of time that is in tension with the indigenous views of time is an important aspect of temporal coloniality shaping the onto-epistemic dynamics of the Westernised university in the colonial lands.