Time & Perspective Quote by Abdullah Ibrahim

A line like this lands the way a minor chord does: familiar, inevitable, and suddenly accusatory. Abdullah Ibrahim isn’t lamenting late buses or busy schedules. He’s describing a cultural swap made under pressure: lived, communal time traded for measured, owned time. “Time” here is organic - seasonal, social, improvised, held in stories and gatherings. “The clock” is time made legible to power: standardized, audited, sold back to you in shifts, deadlines, and “productivity.”

The genius is the grammar. “They took away” frames time as something that belonged to “us” in the first place, something intimate enough to be stolen. “They gave us” turns the clock into a consolation prize, the kind you hand to someone after confiscating the real inheritance. It’s a neat capsule of colonial and capitalist logic: extract the self-determined rhythm of a people, replace it with a device that enforces someone else’s rhythm, then call it modernity.

Coming from a musician - and Ibrahim’s South African context matters here - the line also reads as a critique of what apartheid and its economic machinery did to everyday life: pass laws, labor discipline, the carve-up of neighborhoods, the bureaucratic slicing of days. Jazz, with its elasticity and refusal of rigid meter, becomes the counter-argument. The clock clicks; Ibrahim swings. In one sentence he makes “progress” sound like what it often is: theft with better branding.