CULTURE AND RELIGION
Reggae music has its sources from Ethiopian culture. Ethiopia is a multicultural country, where christians, muslims and traditional religions coexist.
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Reggae music has its sources from Ethiopian culture. Ethiopia is a multicultural country, where christians, muslims and traditional religions coexist.
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What is time? Time is born along with the emergence of the perception of the world. It is the fourth dimension, which moves the three previous dimensions forward and in infinite cycles. Perceiving time allows us to position the past, the present and the future in the lived and recorded memory (orally or symbolically); it allows us to be and be in a moment and materialize the cause and consequence relationship.
The perception of time in different societies and at different times varies widely. The century and social changes change our record and control of time, be it calendars, clocks, seasonal markers. The desire to control time created fundamental advances: astronomy (to count time from the skies), mathematics and alphabets (to record time), engineering (equipment to identify the moment). And we control the time to, in summary, produce work, manual or intellectual. The calendar and the clock are two tools of time present in human societies. The control of the time of the day, and the control of the days of a cycle are fundamental knowledge to produce work. In Western society we count time in hours and days. |
The hours of the day are based on the world time zone, a time convention that divides the surface of the world into 24 bands; there are 24 hours in a day, with 0h equivalent to the middle of the night and 12h the equivalent to the middle of the day, each hour with 60 minutes, and each minute with 60 seconds. Days are cycles of one day and one night; we count 365 days in a year (with an increase of 1 day every 4 years), divided into 12 months, and 7 days in a week, whose first day is shortly after the beginning of summer in the southern hemisphere and winter in the northern hemisphere. This calendar, whose year 0 is equivalent to the birth of the mythological figure of Jesus, we call Gregorian, since it was consolidated in 1582 by Pope Gregory.
This set of temporal conventions influences how we perceive reality. Commemorative dates, the idea of “business hours”, weekends, the astrological sign, the moments of being awake and sleeping, the rhythms and moments of meal, the perception of one's own age. It is so ingrained in our existence that we take the conventions created to mark it as natural, as if since the world is the world we have 12 months, 24 hours in a day, birthday or the habit of eating at noon. There are, however, societies that mark time differently from ours.They are calendars that have survived colonization and the imposition of time in the western way. |
In Ethiopia the counting of time, both in hours and in the division of months, differs from the western one. The current calendar is the Eritrean Calendar (in amaric: የ ኢትዮጵያ ዘመን አቆጣጠር; yä'Ityoṗṗ ya zëmän aḳoṭaṭär) . It is divided into 13 months: 12 of 30 days and the last one of 5 or 6 days, and starts on 11 or 12 September (depending on whether the previous year is a leap year), just before the beginning of autumn. Meat is not eaten in the country on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and not at certain times of the year, for religious reasons. Ethiopia is a nation with a Christian tradition of its own, and just like the Gregorian counts the years based on the birth of Jesus, but they consider that the birth took place 7 years after that recorded in the Western calendar. With that, their year is 7 years "behind", let's say: when it is year 2020 in most western countries, in Ethiopia it is year 2013.
The hours count differs from the western one: for an Ethiopian, 0 hour is equivalent to the time of sunrise (6h in western time), and the 12th hour is the time of sunset (18h in western time). The idea of starting the day different from ours is strange, but I invite you to reflect: waking up at sunrise, at western time, points out that 6 hours ago the counting of that day started; in Ethiopian time, it means that time has just begun. |
We dedicate this space to our audience. Ethiopia is home to a strong people, with stories of life and resistance, as well as welcoming people from all corners of the world who have fallen in love with its enchanting lands.
If you own or know someone who wants to share their Ethiopian history and experiences, send it to us and we will share it! |