Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, a Congolese-American philosopher, cultural historian and novelist who questioned the West\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His death, in a private care facility, was\u00a0announced\u00a0by 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mr. Mudimbe\u2019s landmark 1988 book, \u201cThe Invention of Africa,\u201d which became a standard text in African studies courses, deconstructs what he called \u201cthe colonial library\u201d: the 19th- and 20th-century accounts of Africa by European anthropologists, explorers and missionaries whose aim, in Mr. Mudimbe\u2019s view, was to further colonialism. His ambition was to call into question the basis for European understanding of Africa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The book was a \u201cclassic from its inception,\u201d the philosopher S\u00e9verine Kodjo-Grandvaux\u00a0wrote\u00a0in Le Monde in a 2021 appraisal after Mr. Mudimbe\u2019s book was translated into French. She compared it to \u201cOrientalism,\u201d\u00a0Edward Said\u2019s\u00a0landmark text in post-colonial studies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s understanding of the continent and left open the question of what was to replace it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The tipping point for Mr. 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\u2019s second-highest political authority. Mr. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At some risk, he declined Mr. Mobutu\u2019s 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. He returned to Duke at the end of his career.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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, Mr. Mudimbe was troubled by Africa\u2019s image in the Western mind and by how it came to be formed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The questions he asked led to \u201cThe Invention of Africa\u201d and \u201cThe Idea of Africa,\u201d its 1994 successor. It was after the publication of the first book that he was recruited to Duke by the Marxist literary scholar\u00a0Fredric Jameson, who died last year. Mr. Mudimbe spent much of his subsequent career expounding on those two works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cEuropeans have been in contact with Africa since the end of the 15th century,\u201d Mr. Mudimbe\u00a0explained\u00a0to the African and African American literary periodical Callaloo in 1991. \u201cThey have perceived Africa and Africans and written about them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe can now read these stories, these descriptions,\u201d he continued, \u201cand 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These ideas were more fully explored in the knotty prose of \u201cThe Invention of Africa,\u201d a book that bristles with a formidable erudition acquired at universities on three continents. In that book, Mr. Mudimbe explored the relationship between Western knowledge and Western domination as it relates to Africa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIn the accounts of \u2018explorers\u2019 on the Continent,\u201d Mr. Mudimbe wrote, \u201cthe discourse on \u2018savages\u2019 is, for the first time, a discourse in which an explicit political power presumes the authority of a scientific knowledge, and vice versa.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He added, \u201cColonialism becomes its project and can be thought of as a duplication and a fulfillment of the power of Western discourses on human varieties.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The anthropologists who shaped Western views of Africa were no more than the \u201cscientific adviser\u201d of the \u201ccolonizer,\u201d Mr. Mudimbe wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mr. Mudimbe\u2019s analysis was shaped by \u201can extraordinary mastery of the European intellectual world,\u201d Mamadou Diouf, director of Columbia University\u2019s Institute for African Studies, said in an interview. He could, he added, \u201cengage 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The concept of the \u201ccolonial library\u201d became Mr. Mudimbe\u2019s 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 \u201ccolonial reason,\u201d Mr. Mudimbe\u00a0wrote\u00a0in the \u201cEncyclopedia of African Religions and Philosophy,\u201d and were critical in \u201cerasing African differences and their impulses.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He added that under this intellectual domination, the \u201cevidence belonged to the Western \u2018sensus communis,\u2019\u201d or common sense, \u201csupported and justified by a body of knowledge \u2014 a colonial library.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mr. Mudimbe\u2019s 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 \u2014 Foucault, Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard, Sartre, L\u00e9vi-Strauss and others more obscure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cMudimbe\u2019s project is a circle; he criticized the Western discourse on Africa, even while making use of this discourse,\u201d the Cameroonian philosopher Jean-Godefroy Bidima wrote in \u201cLa Philosophie N\u00e9gro-Africaine\u201d (1998). And in an interview, Stephen Smith, an emeritus professor of African studies at Duke, said that \u201cthere is some contradiction\u201d in Mr. Mudimbe\u2019s books, adding, \u201cIf 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?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mr. Mudimbe was unapologetic. \u201cTo the question \u2018what is Africa?\u2019 or \u2018how to define African cultures?\u2019 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,\u201d he told Callaloo. \u201cAnd this is the level on which to situate my project.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Valentin-Yves Mudimbe was born on 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 \u201cbegan living with Benedictine monks as a seminarist\u201d in Kakanda, in pre-independence Congo. He had \u201cno contact with the external world, even with my family, and indeed had no vacations.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When he was 17 or 18, he recalled, he decided to become a monk, this time among the Benedictine \u201cWhite Fathers\u201d of Gihindamuyaga, in Rwanda. But in his early 20s, already \u201ccompletely francophonized,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the 1970s Mr. Mudimbe published, among other writings, three novels, all translated into English: \u201cEntre les Eaux\u201d (1973), published in English as \u201cBetween the Waters\u201d; \u201cLe Bel Immonde\u201d (\u201cBefore the Birth of the Moon,\u201d 1976); and \u201cL\u2019\u00c9cart\u201d (\u201cThe Rift,\u201d 1979). The principal characters in these novels \u201cfind it impossible to tie themselves to anything solid,\u201d the\u00a0scholar\u00a0Nadia Yala Kisukidi\u00a0commented\u00a0in Le Monde.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At the end of the 1970s, when the offer came from Mr. Mobutu to be \u201cin charge of, I guess, ideology and things like that,\u201d as Mr. Mudimbe put it to Callaloo, he reflected that \u201cI didn\u2019t think of myself and I still don\u2019t think of myself as a politician.\u201d After he established himself in the United States, his focus turned to essays and philosophy; among other books, he wrote \u201cL\u2019Odeur du P\u00e8re\u201d (1982), \u201cParables and Fables\u201d (1991) and \u201cTales of Faith\u201d (1997).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mr. Mudimbe is survived by his sons, Daniel and Claude; a brother, Achille Ngoie; a sister, Josette Shaje; and two grandchildren. His marriage to the scholar Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi in 1966 ended in divorce in 2022.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHe said that the tragedy of African thinkers was not to be able to get out of the colonial library,\u201d Mr. Diouf said. \u201cHe was looking for ways to think about Africa outside of the colonial library.\u201d But perhaps, he added, \u201che didn\u2019t take into enough account other libraries.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, a Congolese-American philosopher, cultural historian and novelist who questioned the West\u2019s 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\u00a0announced\u00a0by the official news agency of the Democratic Republic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":40418,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,263],"tags":[7,30,264],"class_list":{"0":"post-40417","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture","8":"category-literature","9":"tag-apie-project","10":"tag-culture","11":"tag-literature"},"yoast_head":"\n