Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, regarded as the pioneer of postcolonial studies in Africa, never ceased to be a voice of the continent. Photo: Michael Runkel/Robert Harding Heritage/AFP
Modern African discourse did not develop in a vacuum. It developed in a context of contestation. Every African thinker had Europe in the background — West, colonialism, Hegel — a whole European archive of discourse about Africa. When African writers, especially those who were born and subjected to colonialism, try to represent themselves, they have to navigate the pre-existing categories, archive and philosophical and anthropological texts.
So, Léopold Sédar Senghor, writing on Negritude, was in contestation and conversation with the whole tradition of Enlightenment Thought. Chinua Achebe, writing about African culture or writing about the image of Africa or Conrad, was in contestation with ideas of Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness. Ngugi speaking, about the debate on African language, he is in contestation and conversation with the whole history of denigration of African languages in colonial context.
The intellectual formation of Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, 83, was no different from theirs. Like his peers and predecessors, he was born into, and grew up in the Christian dominated environment where he was trained to be a monk in his homeland, the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
He had been alienated through the colonising mission, which later helped him debunk the colonial system. Later he realises that Christianity is a “cultural phenomenon that, in Africa, actualises the experience of conflict”. He studied classics in Congo, and did his doctorate in philosophy in Belgium.
Mudimbe is widely regarded as a pioneer of postcolonial studies in Africa. Along with Edward Said, he established a strong hold against the Eurocentric and Western knowledge system. He never ceased to be a voice of Africa, paving the way for the African intellectuals to engage with their own culture while cleaning out built-up assumptions and debris from the gutters.
Mudimbe’s seminal work, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (1988), garnered significant scholarly attention and placed him alongside Said, whose work inspired subaltern studies.
Both scholars are known for their critiques of Eurocentric discourses and the construction of the “other”. Their work has had a lasting effect on various fields such as postcolonial studies, African studies and cultural studies.
Mudimbe is preoccupied with the discourse of Africa, and he devoted most of his time to understanding the damages it caused to the continent. His task was not only to challenge the discourse, but to demonstrate and problematise its epistemic foundations. Most importantly, this discourse on Africa is marked by “incompleteness and inherently biased assumptions”. This discourse of competence is completely based on textual production which is summed up in his own term “colonial library”.
To Mudimbe, the body of knowledge on Africa is invented by the colonial library and exemplified by primitivist anthropology. Through these primitivist strategies Africa had been denied access into world history or rational domain.
“Colonial Library” as a political project refers to the body of texts and epistemological order which construct Africa as the “other” and inferior — even more than that, “a primitive entity”. It is a discursive formation in which a set of representations and texts, thoughts, tropes, concepts, archives and images are foregrounded to generate and to invent Africa.
The main objective of Mudimbe was to Africanise the knowledge system by debunking dichotomies promoted by Western formative discourse or Eurocentrism. His works seek to reconfigure the geography of discourse around Africa, challenging dominant Western narratives and promoting a more nuanced understanding of African identity.
Mudimbe also writes about African images in the paintings and reception of African objects from 15th century to 19th century anthropology. He harshly critiques anthropological discourses for objectifying Africa and perpetuating negative stereotypes. He notes that African images in paintings and the reception of African objects were often distorted, associating Africans with “savagery” and “primitiveness”. The tendency was to assimilate the history of native people to a myth.
Mudimbe identifies three stages in the restructuring of Africa as follows. “Exploitation of land”, where colonisers exploited Africa’s natural resources; “domestication of natives”, where colonisers imposed their control over African populations; and “integration of local economic histories”, when colonisers integrated African economies into the Western perspective. Because this domesticating system is problematic and characterised by binary oppositions such as traditional versus. modern, oral versus written, agrarian versus urban.
Mudimbe argues that these binary oppositions are misleading and that there is an intermediate space between African tradition and colonial modernity that characterises marginality. This space generates tension between modernity and tradition and is a product of the colonising structure.
Though he borrows from Claude Levi-Strauss and Jean-Paul Sartre, Mudimbe is obsessed with discursive formations and most of his analysis tends to be discursive reading of narratives or ideas. He extensively draws on Michel Foucault’s work. Even in his last book in English, The Scent of the Father, in which he follows psychoanalysis threads to trace the idea of the “absent father” in Africa, he brings Foucault into the debate.
He maintains: “For Africa, to truly escape from the West presupposes an exact appreciation of the price we have to pay to detach ourselves from it; it presupposes knowing to what extent the West, perhaps insidiously, has drawn close to us; it implies a knowledge, in that which permits us to think against the West, of all that remains Western; and a determination of the extent to which our recourse against it is still possibly one of the tricks it directs against us, while it waits for us, immobile and elsewhere.”
Mudimbe warns us about tricky positions that should be taken to be situated on the verge of possessing knowledge. This is an epistemic dilemma all African scholars have to confront.
Mudimbe’s work highlights the need for an epistemological paradigm shift to create a new understanding of Africa. The question remains: how can African genesis be created without such a paradigm shift, despite individual efforts?
Ahmet Sait Akcay is a literary critic and African Studies scholar, he is teaching at the Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town.