A Human Measurement of Time: Communal Temporalities of Waiting in Goretti Kyomuhendo’s Waiting and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart

This article considers how the theme of waiting is treated in two African realist novels: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Goretti Kyomuhendo’s Waiting: A Novel of Uganda at War. Building on recent scholarship that seeks to understand waiting as more than deferral or failure, the article develops the notion of idleness as an important aspect of waiting. It shows how the novels engage with waiting on both thematic and formal levels, thereby conveying “a human measurement of time” that is grounded in the nexus of community, nature, and storytelling. Specifically, it suggests that the communal temporalities of waiting are indebted to animist storytelling practices, which allow communities to construct themselves through their embeddedness in nature. Comparing two novels in which waiting is a communal strategy for resisting political oppression in the wake of colonialism, the article thus teases out culturally specific modes of temporality and waiting that predated colonialism and which offered — and still offer — a rejection of the binaries of productiveness/idleness, growth/stasis, and failure/success.