Tackling Time in Rwanda

This week, I decided to tackle how to tell time in Kinyarwanda, Rwanda’s local language.  Because telling time in Rwanda is not an easy task and procrastination is my strong suit, I’d been purposely putting off learning how to tell time, hoping that it would come to me through osmosis and without any effort.  Not surprisingly, that didn’t happen.  So, I told Olivier, my new Kinyarwanda teacher, that I was finally ready to dive into the subject of time.

Most of us are used to English, French, Spanish and other languages, where the day starts at midnight and thus the next hour is 1 a.m.   However, in Kinyarwanda and Kiswahili (known in the West as Swahili and spoken throughout East Africa), the first hour of the day is when the sun is up and people are moving about.  That actually makes sense.  Why begin the day in the middle of the night?  Why not begin the day when the sun is up and we are, too?  Thus, instead of 7 a.m., for Rwandans, it’s one in the morning.  Our 8 o’clock is 2 o’clock for Rwandans, our 9 o’clock is their 3 o’clock or third hour, our 6 o’clock is their 12 o’clock and so on.  Fortunately, like our time system, they only use twelve numbers and repeat the same numbers to get to 24 hours, so I only had to learn 12 ways of saying the time.

This different concept of telling time was so hard for me to wrap my head around that I resorted to the time-honored way of learning (remember elementary school addition and subtraction) of making flash cards to try to memorize the various times of the day.  After considerable effort, I can now haltingly tell time.  So, when someone says “Ni saa nagahe?” (pronounced nee-san-ga-hay)  (What hour is it? Or literally, “It is hour what?”) or “Ufite saa nagahe?” (Do you have the time?), I can, with a bit of hesitation, answer: “Ni saa kuminimwe” when it’s 5 o’clock.  For 7:35, it would be “Ni saa moya n’iminota mirongo itatu n’itanu.

Note that the word for minutes (iminota) is similar to the English word, which made me jump for joy.  Finally, a word that did not take considerable effort on my part to learn!  Ah, I tell myself, perhaps these mental gymnastics that I’m putting my brain through will help to ward off Alzheimer’s.