Writing on Communication in Africa , Leonard Doob 
observes: “The turban, the sword and nowadays the alarm 
clock are worn or carried to signify high rank.” Presumably it will 
be rather long before the African will watch the clock in order to 
be punctual.

     Just as a great revolution in mathematics came when 
positional, tandem numbers were discovered (302 instead of 
32, and so on), so great cultural changes occurred in the West 
when it was found possible to fix time as something that 
happens between two points. From this application of visual, 
abstract, and uniform units came our Western feeling for time 
as duration. From our division of time into uniform, visualizable 
units comes our sense of duration and our impatience when we 
cannot endure the delay between events. Such a sense of 
impatience, or of time as duration, is unknown among