Sasa, Zamani and Financial Markets

   In traditional African thinking, time doesn’t move forward, towards a climax or an end of the world, but it rather falls back into the pool of memory. There are two categories of time, Sasa and Zamani, Swahili words for the designation of what seems to be the present and the past. On a closer look, Zamani includes its own past, present and future, so we oversimplify calling it the past. Time moves from Sasa to Zamani, from the present moment of vital experience, to a kind of macrotime of mythical experience, self-contained more than strictly cyclical. Sasa is a lineal microtime based on the experience of economic activities, while Zamani is the narrative time where meaning is created. One could say that the weight of Zamani annihilates Sasa, or better, that Sasa is a mere security buffer where the unpredictability of vital experience is differed until is valuated and interpreted. Myth functions in its more basic levels as a homeostatic force for the individual and the group, closing and objectifying human experience into language.

  We literally live in the past. As Gerald Edelman said in relation to our neural mappings, we remember the present. In Swahili terms, we place Sasa experience within a narrative frame work of Zamani. This is not exclusive of mythologies of the plane of the anima mundi. Even the narratives of the plane of human law of the present (well not all narratives of the present are of human law) play on that edge of time. Financial markets valuate constantly future economic scenarios, in fact, they never live in the present but create a narrative, with a past, a present and a future that are projected forward, where the meaning for the unintelligible and escaping economical present will be unveiled. Both the idea of a meaning in the future and the idea of a meaning in the past have an equivalent mythical homeostatic function. Our images of the future are as self-deceiving as those of the past. They are both memory variations for the generation of social order.