In a recent New Yorker piece, Emma Green writes of attending a conference in Nairobi organized by the Rafiki Network, which is in the business of exporting a particularly American brand of ‘classical’ K-12 education to a growing number of African countries. Inspired by the Idaho-based Association of Classical Christian Schools, the Network aims to promote Great Books-style pedagogy in countries like Kenya and Uganda, bringing Plato and Aristotle into sub-Saharan classrooms alongside Christian authors like Augustine and Aquinas. Aspiring to avoid grim reminders of the specter of colonialism, Rafiki-trained pedagogues are eager to position Augustine as an indigenous African. From a certain vantage point, this is a defensible claim, given that he was born in what’s now Souk Ahras in Algeria. At the same time, however, the claim might retain an air of bad faith.

Green recounts the following critique shared by Melissa Wakhu, a Kenyan advocate of the Classical Conversations curriculum:

Throughout the conference, American speakers kept bringing up Augustine, who lived and wrote in what is now Algeria. “He’s northern Africa, which has a completely different experience than the rest of us,” Wakhu told me. The implication, in suggesting that Augustine is the closest thing to an African thinker that the classical tradition has to offer, is that “there was no philosophical thinking” in places like Kenya, Wakhu said. “It’s a challenge for this group of foreigners to try and come and convince us of something that is beautiful, but is also Western.”

The desire to claim Augustine for Africa, well intentioned though it may be, stands as inadequate next to the cultural diversity and living pluralism manifested across the African continent, from Algeria down to the Cape. One part of Africa doesn’t necessarily speak for another.

As someone whose interest in Augustine arose out of a fascination with his philosophy of time in the eleventh book of the Confessions, I’ve sometimes fallen prey to the illusion that we can simply detach Augustine from his geographical context and cast him up into the heavens as one of the stars populating various constellations in the history of ideas. In the past, when I’ve told people that I’m writing about different philosophies of time, they’ve often assumed I mean different culturally situated perspectives on temporal experience: some ancients used water-clocks, whereas we’re accustomed to mechanical or now digital clocks; Christians ended up using a different calendar than the Hebrew calendar; and so on.

My actual interest was in what I’d call Augustine’s objective account of time. When I read Confessions 11, I see Augustine doing cosmology by interpreting Genesis. Whereas others might see in those same pages a subjective account of time, according to which our souls create time, I see Augustine as staying true to his basic sense that God creates the world and its time. But if I’m right about that—and I could always be wrong—then key Augustinian concepts like distentio animi (the “stretching-apart of the soul”), the threefold present, and a timeless eternity ought to be objective features of the universe, rather than subjective add-ons.

This could raise some issues when it comes to bringing Augustine back into conversation with his fellow Africans. At long last, I’m now trying to do a better job of responding to the interlocutors who’ve been asking me to talk not just about abstract philosophies of time but also about concrete modes of temporal experience as they’re given shape by specific cultural contexts. If we’re going to tackle this project, though, we’re going to need to avoid any tendency to essentialize “African-ness,” in keeping with Melissa Wakhu’s warning.

Instead of recasting Augustine’s account of time as quintessentially African, then, we should place it alongside countless other African ways of thinking and talking about temporality. To do this, we’ll need to embrace a pluralistic framework, according to which there are many Africas—and presumably also many Augustines. There’s the Augustine recounted by dry histories of the philosophy of time (of the kind I’ve tended to write). But there’s also the Augustine found in the books of modern Algerian writers like Assia Djebar or the Augustine written of by Black theologians in America. A pluralistic take on Augustinian temporality would invite all these varied Augustines into a shared conversation, so that we can do a better job of figuring out how many Augustinian temporalities are actually out there today, whether in Algeria or Kenya or even Idaho.

Sean Hannah is the author of On Time, Change, History, and Conversion (Bloomsbury, 2020) and co-editor (with John Doody and Kim Paffenroth) of Augustine and Time (Lexington, 2021).