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Swahili Time

November 17th, 2009 by · No Comments · Africa, Tanzania

We spent two months in Morocco and never found a single working clock. Everything operated Insah’Allah. On the equator, Tanzania receives twelve hours of sunlight year round and the swahili clock was developed to measure the hours from sunrise to sunset, then sunset to sunrise. Hour one each morning is one hour after sunrise.

The historic clock towers proudly display times that you might think are wrong, but when you look at ferry schedules and adjust to swahili time, you realize otherwise. While diving, the safety checks include synchronizing our watches, but relying on the instructor, we simply go thru the motions of looking at our wrists, as if time matters, and really, as we later kick back at sunset, our feet in the sand, our beers in our hands, and the sun sinking low, there is no need for any more accuracy than that. We are right on time.

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