Kankan, Guinea · UTC+0 ☆

Kankan is Guinea’s second-largest city, a major commercial and administrative center on the Upper Niger River in the country’s east. It runs on UTC+0, Greenwich Mean Time, year-round. Guinea does not observe daylight saving.

At UTC+0 and 10.4 degrees North latitude, Kankan has its solar noon at about 12:35pm, due to its longitude of about 9.3 degrees West. The city runs slightly behind solar time, meaning the sun peaks in the early afternoon rather than at noon.

A Manding cultural heartland

Kankan is a center of Manding (Mandé) culture, the civilization that produced the Mali Empire and the Kingdom of Songhai. The city was an important center of Islamic scholarship and trade in the nineteenth century. Samori Touré, the Mandinka leader who resisted French colonization, was born near Kankan.

The griots, hereditary storytellers and musicians who maintain Manding oral history, operate on a cultural time that extends across generations. Their role is to carry the past into the present, a different relationship with time than the civil clock provides.

The Upper Niger trade routes

Kankan sits on the Upper Niger and was historically part of trade networks that moved kola nuts, gold, salt, and slaves across West Africa. The market tradition remains: Kankan’s weekly market draws traders from surrounding regions and neighboring Mali and Ivory Coast.

Convert 9am Kankan time to other cities.

Sources

• IANA Time Zone Database
• Institut National de la Statistique de Guinée
• Person, Yves. Samori: Une Révolution Dyula. Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire, 1968.