Latest news with #Mudimbe
Scroll.in
12-05-2025
- General
- Scroll.in
The Congolese philosopher who liberated ‘Africa' from the chains of Western thought
Congolese thinker, philosopher and linguist Valentin-Yves Mudimbe died on April 21, 2025, at the age of 83. He was in the US, where he had lived for many years. A towering figure in African critical thought, Mudimbe's work – translated and studied worldwide – has profoundly shaped postcolonial studies. He leaves a groundbreaking intellectual legacy on the colonisation of knowledge and the condition of Africans. At a time when debates on decolonising knowledge are gaining ground, Mudimbe's passing invites us to revisit the work of a thinker who, since the 1980s, paved the way for a radical critique of imposed 'categories'. He wanted to help rebuild intellectual frameworks which imagined and defined Africa on its own terms, not through the labels or categories imposed by colonial powers. As a specialist in postmodern and postcolonial theories, I think he had considerable influence on the field of postcolonial studies. He was one of the most influential African thinkers of the 20th century. His impact did not come from activism, but from careful, sustained intellectual work. With his seminal work The Invention of Africa (1988) he profoundly disrupted African and postcolonial studies. His work went far beyond the usual east-west divide. A journey between Africa and exile Valentin-Yves Mudimbe was born in 1941 in Jadotville (now Likasi), in the Democratic Republic of Congo. His early education took place in a Benedictine monastery. Later, he pursued further studies at Louvain in Belgium. His religious education left a lasting mark on his thinking. It shaped his critical approach to knowledge. His work often explored the connections between language, power, and how ideas become institutionalised. In 1970, Mudimbe returned to the newly independent Congo. He began teaching at the National University of Zaïre. The country was then caught between postcolonial hope and growing disillusionment. Under Mobutu Sese Seko's regime, the political atmosphere grew stifling for independent thinkers. The state had adopted the rhetoric of ' authenticity ', turning it into a tool of control. Faced with this ideological stranglehold, Mudimbe chose exile in 1979. He relocated to the US, where he taught at Stanford and later Duke University. There, he continued his work of critical deconstruction. Yet, despite his physical distance, he remained deeply committed to Africa's future. Colonial library First published in English in 1988 as the The Invention of Africa, the book was translated into French in 2021 under the title L'Invention de l'Afrique, (Présence africaine). Mudimbe offers much more than a critique of colonial representations. He examined the ' colonial library '. It refers to the vast collection of religious, anthropological and administrative texts that, for centuries, framed Africa as an object to be studied, dominated and 'saved'. Mudimbe was always careful not to accept ideas just because they were passed down. Instead, he was always looking for new ways to think freely and independently. Unlike Edward Said, the Palestinian-American literary theorist and critic who exposed how the west constructed a mythologised 'Orient', Mudimbe revealed something more insidious. He showed that Africa was often imagined as a void to be filled. It was cast as a cultural blank slate, which helped justify the colonial mission. This radical deconstruction raised a crucial question: how can we produce knowledge that does not, even through critique, reproduce the very colonial frameworks it seeks to challenge? The book's impact was profound, resonating across Africa, Europe and North America. It created an intellectual foundation for thinkers like Achille Mbembe, Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Felwine Sarr, who, in turn, continued to explore what truly decolonised African thought might look like. Building something new Mudimbe was never satisfied with existing structures. He aimed to build something new from the ground up. For him, liberating Africa required a rebuilding of knowledge systems. He rejected the assumption that western intellectual frameworks alone could define Africa. He also warned against essentialist temptations – the trap of creating new conceptual prisons in the name of authenticity. His thinking followed a rigorous method: analysing discourse, questioning inherited categories, and dismantling false assumptions. This demanding work aimed to empower Africa to think for itself without cutting itself off from the rest of the world. His fiction – Between Tides (in French, Entre les eaux. Dieu, un prêtre, la révolution), Before the Birth of the Moon (Le Bel Immonde in French), Shaba Deux : les carnets de mère Marie Gertrude – embodies the same refusal to be stereotyped. His characters navigate colonial legacies, state nationalism and rigid identity politics through stories of displacement and fragmented memory. Language itself becomes a battleground for creativity in his novels. Sharply crafted, his prose captures the diversity of contemporary African experience. Through both his literary and philosophical works, Mudimbe consistently insisted that identity is never a given. It is always a construct to be questioned. Living legacy As Africa navigates complex geopolitical transformations and redefines its cultural identities, Mudimbe's intellectual legacy proves more vital than ever. His work challenges us to recognise that true liberation extends beyond political sovereignty or cultural revival. It requires the radical work of reinventing how knowledge itself is produced and validated. Mudimbe's lasting legacy urges us to remain intellectually vigilant in a world where knowledge is constantly shifting. He challenges us to reject rigid categories, embrace complexity with care, and make room for uncertainty instead of rushing to resolve it. For Mudimbe, to decolonise knowledge means relentless critique paired with creative reconstruction. It means building pluralistic and open frameworks that honour Africa's diverse experiences without nostalgia or complacency. Christophe Premat.
Yahoo
08-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Valentin-Yves Mudimbe: the philosopher who reshaped how the world thinks about Africa
Congolese thinker, philosopher and linguist Valentin-Yves Mudimbe died on 21 April 2025 at the age of 83. He was in the US, where he had lived for many years. A towering figure in African critical thought, Mudimbe's work – translated and studied worldwide – has profoundly shaped postcolonial studies. He leaves a groundbreaking intellectual legacy on the colonisation of knowledge and the condition of Africans. At a time when debates on decolonising knowledge are gaining ground, Mudimbe's passing invites us to revisit the work of a thinker who, since the 1980s, paved the way for a radical critique of imposed 'categories'. He wanted to help rebuild intellectual frameworks which imagined and defined Africa on its own terms, not through the labels or categories imposed by colonial powers. As a specialist in postmodern and postcolonial theories, I think he had considerable influence on the field of postcolonial studies. He was one of the most influential African thinkers of the 20th century. His impact did not come from activism, but from careful, sustained intellectual work. With his seminal work The Invention of Africa (1988) he profoundly disrupted African and postcolonial studies. His work went far beyond the usual east-west divide. Valentin-Yves Mudimbe was born in 1941 in Jadotville (now Likasi), in the Democratic Republic of Congo. His early education took place in a Benedictine monastery. Later, he pursued further studies at Louvain in Belgium. His religious education left a lasting mark on his thinking. It shaped his critical approach to knowledge. His work often explored the connections between language, power, and how ideas become institutionalised. In 1970, Mudimbe returned to the newly independent Congo. He began teaching at the National University of Zaïre. The country was then caught between postcolonial hope and growing disillusionment. Under Mobutu Sese Seko's regime, the political atmosphere grew stifling for independent thinkers. The state had adopted the rhetoric of 'authenticity', turning it into a tool of control. Faced with this ideological stranglehold, Mudimbe chose exile in 1979. He relocated to the US, where he taught at Stanford and later Duke University. There, he continued his work of critical deconstruction. Yet, despite his physical distance, he remained deeply committed to Africa's future. First published in English in 1988 as the The Invention of Africa, the book was translated into French in 2021 under the title L'Invention de l'Afrique, (Présence africaine). Mudimbe offers much more than a critique of colonial representations. He examined the 'colonial library'. It refers to the vast collection of religious, anthropological and administrative texts that, for centuries, framed Africa as an object to be studied, dominated and 'saved'. Mudimbe was always careful not to accept ideas just because they were passed down. Instead, he was always looking for new ways to think freely and independently. Unlike Edward Said, the Palestinian-American literary theorist and critic who exposed how the west constructed a mythologised 'Orient', Mudimbe revealed something more insidious. He showed that Africa was often imagined as a void to be filled. It was cast as a cultural blank slate, which helped justify the colonial mission. This radical deconstruction raised a crucial question: how can we produce knowledge that does not, even through critique, reproduce the very colonial frameworks it seeks to challenge? The book's impact was profound, resonating across Africa, Europe and North America. It created an intellectual foundation for thinkers like Achille Mbembe, Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Felwine Sarr, who, in turn, continued to explore what truly decolonised African thought might look like. Mudimbe was never satisfied with existing structures. He aimed to build something new from the ground up. For him, liberating Africa required a rebuilding of knowledge systems. He rejected the assumption that western intellectual frameworks alone could define Africa. He also warned against essentialist temptations – the trap of creating new conceptual prisons in the name of authenticity. His thinking followed a rigorous method: analysing discourse, questioning inherited categories, and dismantling false assumptions. This demanding work aimed to empower Africa to think for itself without cutting itself off from the rest of the world. His fiction – Between Tides (in French, Entre les eaux. Dieu, un prêtre, la révolution), Before the Birth of the Moon (Le Bel Immonde in French), Shaba Deux : les carnets de mère Marie Gertrude – embodies the same refusal to be stereotyped. His characters navigate colonial legacies, state nationalism and rigid identity politics through stories of displacement and fragmented memory. Language itself becomes a battleground for creativity in his novels. Sharply crafted, his prose captures the diversity of contemporary African experience. Through both his literary and philosophical works, Mudimbe consistently insisted that identity is never a given. It is always a construct to be questioned. As Africa navigates complex geopolitical transformations and redefines its cultural identities, Mudimbe's intellectual legacy proves more vital than ever. His work challenges us to recognise that true liberation extends beyond political sovereignty or cultural revival. It requires the radical work of reinventing how knowledge itself is produced and validated. Mudimbe's lasting legacy urges us to remain intellectually vigilant in a world where knowledge is constantly shifting. He challenges us to reject rigid categories, embrace complexity with care, and make room for uncertainty instead of rushing to resolve it. For Mudimbe, to decolonise knowledge means relentless critique paired with creative reconstruction. It means building pluralistic and open frameworks that honour Africa's diverse experiences without nostalgia or complacency. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Christophe Premat, Stockholm University Read more: Investigators are increasingly using technology in conflict-related sexual assault cases Why Kinshasa keeps flooding – and why it's not just about the rain Rwanda's image abroad: how western countries are beginning to turn their backs Christophe Premat is a lecturer and researcher in Francophone cultural studies at the Department of Romance and Classical Studies at Stockholm University. In 2018, he published the book For a Critical Genealogy of the Francophonie, released by Stockholm University Press. He states that he worked at the French Institute of Sweden / French Embassy in Stockholm from 2008 to 2013, dealing, among other things, with issues related to the Francophonie. He is currently a member of CISE (Confédération Internationale Solidaire Écologiste), an association of French citizens abroad founded in 2018 ( He is the head of the Centre for Canadian Studies at Stockholm University.
Boston Globe
29-04-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, African scholar who challenged the West, dies at 83
Advertisement The book was a 'classic from its inception,' philosopher Séverine Kodjo-Grandvaux wrote in Le Monde in a 2021 appraisal after Dr. Mudimbe's book was translated into French. She compared it to 'Orientalism,' Edward Said's landmark text in postcolonial studies. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Dr. Mudimbe left Congo more than four decades ago. Like other African intellectuals, he found himself unable to develop, within Africa, an outlook that criticized the West's understanding of the continent and left open the question of what was to replace it. The tipping point for Dr. Mudimbe came in 1980, when the longtime autocratic ruler of what was then called Zaire, Mobutu Sese Seko, asked him to join his Central Committee, the country's second-highest political authority. Dr. Mudimbe had already won renown and prizes there as a novelist and essay writer and was teaching literature at the National University of Zaire in Lubumbashi. Advertisement At some risk, he declined Mobutu's offer and went to the United States on a Fulbright fellowship instead. He remained there for the rest of his life, teaching successively at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, Duke, and Stanford University. He returned to Duke at the end of his career. Educated by Benedictine monks, steeped in Western philosophy and literature and in French ideas about the relation between knowledge and power that had been propagated by Michel Foucault and others, Dr. Mudimbe was troubled by Africa's image in the Western mind and by how it came to be formed. The questions he asked led to 'The Invention of Africa' and 'The Idea of Africa,' its 1994 successor. It was after the publication of the first book that he was recruited to Duke by Marxist literary scholar Fredric Jameson, who died last year. Dr. Mudimbe spent much of his subsequent career expounding on those two works. 'Europeans have been in contact with Africa since the end of the 15th century,' Mudimbe explained to the African and African American literary periodical Callaloo in 1991. 'They have perceived Africa and Africans and written about them.' 'We can now read these stories, these descriptions,' he continued, 'and say, well, these are constructs which were made at a given moment, and today we can make others. So Europeans have invented Africa, but, today, Africans are inventing their own Africa.' These ideas were more fully explored in the knotty prose of 'The Invention of Africa,' a book that bristles with a formidable erudition acquired at universities on three continents. In that book, Dr. Mudimbe explored the relationship between Western knowledge and Western domination as it relates to Africa. Advertisement 'In the accounts of 'explorers' on the Continent,' Mudimbe wrote, 'the discourse on 'savages' is, for the first time, a discourse in which an explicit political power presumes the authority of a scientific knowledge, and vice versa.' He added: 'Colonialism becomes its project and can be thought of as a duplication and a fulfillment of the power of Western discourses on human varieties.' The anthropologists who shaped Western views of Africa were no more than the 'scientific adviser' of the 'colonizer,' Dr. Mudimbe wrote. Dr. Mudimbe's analysis was shaped by 'an extraordinary mastery of the European intellectual world,' Mamadou Diouf, director of Columbia University's Institute for African Studies, said in an interview. He could, he added, 'engage in the epistemological discussion from several different angles: He reflected on Africa from an African angle, and he reflected on the way in which Africa was conceived from Europe.' The concept of the 'colonial library' became Dr. Mudimbe's trademark. It has colored appreciations of the vast body of European literature on Africa since he first touched on it. These books were the foundations of 'colonial reason,' Dr. Mudimbe wrote in the 'Encyclopedia of African Religions and Philosophy,' and were critical in 'erasing African differences and their impulses.' He added that under this intellectual domination, the 'evidence belonged to the Western 'sensus communis,'' or common sense, 'supported and justified by a body of knowledge — a colonial library.' Dr. Mudimbe's approach was not without its critics. The same was true of his difficult writing style, every page larded with references to his heroes and his goats — Foucault, Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard, Sartre, Lévi-Strauss and others more obscure. Advertisement Some philosophers have faulted him for overreliance on the very Western modes of thinking and intellectual constructs that he appeared to want Africans to be liberated from. 'Mudimbe's project is a circle; he criticized the Western discourse on Africa, even while making use of this discourse,' Cameroonian philosopher Jean-Godefroy Bidima wrote in 'La Philosophie Négro-Africaine' (1998). And in an interview, Stephen Smith, an emeritus professor of African studies at Duke, said that 'there is some contradiction' in Mudimbe's books, adding, 'If you say the truth of Africa is in the eye of the beholders, you have to ask: Why do so many beholders hold that truth?' Dr. Mudimbe was unapologetic. 'To the question 'What is Africa?' or 'How to define African cultures?' one today cannot but refer to a body of knowledge in which Africa has been subsumed by Western disciplines such as anthropology, history, theology or whatever other scientific discourse,' he told Callaloo. 'And this is the level on which to situate my project.' Valentin-Yves Mudimbe was born Dec. 8, 1941, in Likasi, in the Katanga province of what was then the Belgian Congo, to Gustave Tshiluila, a civil servant, and Victorine Ngalula. At a young age, he said in 1991, he 'began living with Benedictine monks as a seminarist' in Kakanda, in pre-independence Congo. He had 'no contact with the external world, even with my family, and indeed had no vacations.' When he was 17 or 18, he recalled, he decided to become a monk, this time among the Benedictine 'White Fathers' of Gihindamuyaga, in Rwanda. But in his early 20s, already 'completely francophonized,' he abandoned the religious life and entered Lovanium University in Kinshasa, graduating in 1966 with a degree in Romance philology. In 1970, he received a doctorate in philosophy and literature from the Catholic University of Louvain, in Belgium. He then returned to Congo to teach. Advertisement In the 1970s, Dr. Mudimbe published, among other writings, three novels, all translated into English: 'Entre les Eaux' (1973), published in English as 'Between the Waters'; 'Le Bel Immonde' ('Before the Birth of the Moon,' 1976); and 'L'Écart' ('The Rift,' 1979). The principal characters in these novels 'find it impossible to tie themselves to anything solid,' scholar Nadia Yala Kisukidi commented in Le Monde. At the end of the 1970s, when the offer came from Mobutu to be 'in charge of, I guess, ideology and things like that,' as Dr. Mudimbe put it to Callaloo, he reflected that 'I didn't think of myself and I still don't think of myself as a politician.' After he established himself in the United States, his focus turned to essays and philosophy; among other books, he wrote 'L'Odeur du Père' (1982), 'Parables and Fables' (1991) and 'Tales of Faith' (1997). Dr. Mudimbe is survived by his sons, Daniel and Claude; a brother, Achille Ngoie; a sister, Josette Shaje; and two grandchildren. His marriage to scholar Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi in 1966 ended in divorce in 2022. 'He said that the tragedy of African thinkers was not to be able to get out of the colonial library,' Diouf said. 'He was looking for ways to think about Africa outside of the colonial library.' But perhaps, he added, 'he didn't take into enough account other libraries.' This article originally appeared in Advertisement
New York Times
27-04-2025
- General
- New York Times
Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, 83, Dies; African Scholar Challenged the West
Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, a Congolese-American philosopher, cultural historian and novelist who questioned the West's intellectual tools for appraising Africa, identifying them as part of what he deemed a colonizing apparatus, died on Monday in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 83. His death, in a private care facility, was announced by the official news agency of the Democratic Republic of Congo. At his death, Mr. Mudimbe was an emeritus professor of literature at Duke University in Chapel Hill. Mr. Mudimbe's landmark 1988 book, 'The Invention of Africa,' which became a standard text in African studies courses, deconstructs what he called 'the colonial library': the 19th- and 20th-century accounts of Africa by European anthropologists, explorers and missionaries whose aim, in Mr. Mudimbe's view, was to further colonialism. His ambition was to call into question the basis for European understanding of Africa. The book was a 'classic from its inception,' the philosopher Séverine Kodjo-Grandvaux wrote in Le Monde in a 2021 appraisal after Mr. Mudimbe's book was translated into French. She compared it to 'Orientalism,' Edward Said's landmark text in post-colonial studies. Mr. Mudimbe's 'The Invention of Africa,' published in 1988, became a standard text in African studies courses. It was, one appraisal said, a 'classic from its inception.' Credit... Indiana University Press Mr. Mudimbe left Congo more than four decades ago. Like other African intellectuals, he found himself unable to develop, within Africa, an outlook that criticized the West's understanding of the continent and left open the question of what was to replace it. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
