To examine the knowledge of time in the African novel, we start with an observation: epistemology is fundamentally determined by method: how we know determines what we know. This ‘how we know’ covers a great deal more than method, for it encompasses history, culture and, for most of us, modernity itself. We ‘know’ the earth travels around the sun, we know it abstractly, and we know it because we have learned it. But who does not ‘know’ also that the sun travels from horizon to horizon, frames our day from dawn to twilight, gives shape to our lives, as well as heat and life, travels, also, around the earth? The knowledge that we may have outside ‘epistemology’ – a knowledge gained in our bodies, our senses, our moods, our unconscious – never finds its way into epistemology because, according to science, the idea that the sun travels around the earth, an idea that has generated centuries of myth, Classification: ‘less of a pigeonhole, than a pigeon’

In this chapter, I explore the ways in which systems of classification contribute to producing the knowledges that they are supposedly designed simply to store. I ask how classification contributes to producing Africa-centred knowledge or to inhibiting its production. Specifically, I explore some of the consequences of placing Africa (as traditional and archaic) in one pigeonhole and modernity (meaning Europe) in another, which presents the challenge of how to confront and dismantle this binary in the service of creating Africa-centred knowledges. There are many different ways of rising to this challenge. As we shall see, some projects retain the binary of modernity versus the pre-modern, but shuffle the content of which falls under what heading. Other projects work towards obliterating the binary and contesting its existence as a tool for understanding history. In describing some of the latter, I particularly emphasize the manipulation of the English language and its capacity for facilitating the invention of new sub-languages. I do this in terms of the fiction of Helen Oyeyemi, whose diasporic language gymnastics are exemplary of some of the dismantling endeavours in the field of African literature.

Finally, I suggest that these different ways of challenging the determining power of entrenched classification codes do not deal with the conundrum presented by the following two statements: i) classification is a necessary tool for meaning making; and ii) classification inhibits meaning making.