Time and Watch in Africa About a Little-known Study by Georges Balandier

Abstract

In the early 1960s, a large number of African states had just gained independence. With it opens a potentially promising market for Western industries, especially watchmaking. In the context of increasing exchanges of all kinds on a global scale, wage labor, the expansion of capitalism and the machine, the formation and construction of national communities, the Swiss Watch Federation entrusts the anthropologist Georges Balandier, already known for his sociology of the “colonial situation”, a study aimed at determining the potential of the watch market in Africa. It is a question here of putting into perspective this text, never published, which, by the entry of an apparently banal object, imposes itself both as a pioneering analysis as well as a historical source to grasp the relationships maintained by Africans with time... and power.