Understanding the arithmetic of East African time

By MUNGAI KIHANYA

The Sunday Nation

Nairobi,

03 January 2021

After writing about the length of a year last month, I started thinking about the length of a day, but then remembered that I had written about it a long time ago (you never forget what you write): on 14 September 2003 – over 17 years ago!

That article was inspired by a foreigner who was trying to learn Kiswahili. He had a Kiswahili-English learner’s book and one of the entries was about asking the time. It went like this:

“What time is it” = “Ni saa ngapi”

“It is 8 o’clock” = “Ni saa 2”

So, the foreigner asked me what was going on: “is this a misprint”, he asked. I laughed and explained that this is how we read time in Eastern Africa – we add 6 when the hour is less than 6 and subtract 6 when it is greater than 6.

Thus, 8:00 o’clock becomes “saa 2:00” (because 6 is greater than 6), while 5:00 becomes “saa 11:00” (because 5 is less than 6). When you live here long enough, the translation is automatic! But this question remains: why do we do that?

 The answer is simple and ingenious: we count the hours of daytime separate from the hours of night time. Since we are an equatorial region, the length of our days and nights remain fairly constant throughout the year. The sun rises at around 6am and sets at around 6pm.

Of course, there are slight fluctuations from month to month but these are not as dramatic as they are in temperate regions of the world. In Kenya today, 3rd January, the sun rose at about 6:40am and it will set at 6:40pm (East African Time).

By comparison, in England, the sun rose at 8:05am (GMT) and it will set at 4:05pm (GMT). That is, the sun will be in the sky for just 8 hours and then disappear under the horizon for the remaining out of sight 16 hours. I guess this is the reason these regions are called “temperate” – they are very temperamental! But I digress…

In East Africa, sunrise is around 6am, and this is where we start our counting. At 7am, we will say it is “saa moja (1)” meaning, “it is 1 o’clock” because this is one hour since sunrise. It makes sense now, doesn’t it?

But one question still remains, why are there 24 hours in a day? Why not a nice round number like 10 or 20? That is a story for another day.