Rethinking Africa, with Congolese Valentin Mudimbe
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Novelist, poet, essayist, Valentin-Yves Mudimbe is one of the most influential African intellectuals of his generation. Éditions Présence Africaine has just published his opus The Invention of Africa.
© African Presence
By: Tirthankar Chanda Follow
14 mins
Congolese Valentin-Yves Mudimbe is a philologist, novelist, poet, anthropologist, philosopher and teacher.
He is above all one of the most influential African intellectuals of his generation, whose theoretical works have become essential classics of African studies around the world.
He has to his credit an atypical work, composed of novels, poems and essays.
His opus
The Invention of Africa
has just been translated into French by Présence Africaine editions.
Publicity
Valentin-Yves Mudimbe likes to recall that if Greece remains the cradle of philosophical thought, the non-Western continents have also produced knowledge systems worthy of the name, which in turn attempt to explain the enigma of universe, the surrounding world, Good and Evil or the power relations that govern our human societies.
“
Philosophy is Greek in terms of tradition, its conceptual foundations and its diffusion,
” he said in an interview with a Portuguese scholar.
However, he adds, “
non-Western civilizations are not without knowledge systems either.
In Africa or Latin America, for example, there are knowledge systems, organized according to the rational requirement of unity and coherence.
".
A philosopher himself, Mudimbe is considered one of the most brilliant thinkers of his generation. His work goes beyond the
stricto sensu
borders
of philosophy and is as much a part of philosophy as of literature, anthropology, sociology, philology. In short, an unclassifiable author, despite a thematic continuity from one book to another. His works focus on the conditions for the liberation of knowledge about African man and his environment due to Western domination on the scientific, cultural and ideological levels. Mudimbe reflects on the methods of building knowledge in Africa and on Africa, freed from the weight of the colonial gaze.
This is the theme of his essay
The Invention of Africa, Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge
, which the Congolese philosopher has just published in French by Présence Africaine. As Mamadou Diouf, historian and author of the preface to the French version of the essay, explains,
The Invention of Africa
is an “
investigation into the foundations of discourse on Africa
”. Mudimbe goes further and does not hesitate to underline the persistence of negative discourse on Africa, thought of as the reverse of Europe, even in the most radical Afrocentric ideologies born out of the enthusiasm of the fights against colonization.
Released in English in 1988,
The Invention of Africa
has become a classic of African studies in English-speaking countries.
However, it took thirty-three years for this seminal text, compared to
Orientalism
by Édouard Saïd, to finally appear in French.
This belated publication is an opportunity to return to the journey of the Congolese writer, little known in the French-speaking world, while his thought is nourished by French-speaking intellectual traditions.
Rebel to identity ideologies
Philosopher, but also novelist and poet, Valentin-Yves Mudimbe was born in 1941, in Likasi, in what was called at the time the Belgian Congo, which will become, after the departure of the Belgians in 1960, Zaire, the DRC then. Trained in a school run by Benedictine fathers, the future writer studied classical letters, but the teenager devoted himself to the priesthood. At 20, he became a Benedictine monk, calling himself “
Brother Mathieu
”. But very quickly, he will give up religious life in order to pursue university studies in philology and philosophy, first at the University of Kinshasa, then in Belgium and France.
With his doctorate in semantics in hand, Mudimbe returned to the country in 1970 and for ten years held important positions at the University of Zaire. But anxious to live as a philosopher, he resents the drying up of intellectual life in Mobutu's Zaire. What is more, as a teacher very popular with students, he was under pressure to join the political office of the one party and put his fame at the service of the famous
Zairian
"
authenticity
" set up as the dominant ideology of the regime. Rebel to all identity ideologies that he likes to call “
mystifications
”, Mudimbe left Zaire on the sly in 1979 for the United States, where he has since had a great academic career, before retiring recently.
Mudimbe taught at Stanford and Duke Universities, and it was in the United States that he wrote his particularly influential essay books on the drifts and the renewal of African thought. If the rooting of the Congolese intellectual in the American university tradition went rather well, the thing was not won in advance, as explained Bernard Mouralis, professor of French-speaking literatures in Paris and author of a important essay on Mudimbe's career and work (1): "
He left Zaire, the current DRC, under difficult conditions.
Can one be a philosopher under the Mobutu regime?
I do not think so.
He held a very important position academically, but refused certain compromises with power and left Zaire with his wife and children.
He courageously rebuilt his life in the United States.
He has relearned a language, in this case English.
He learned about the American university system, which is very different from the French-speaking system.
Gradually, he became a very great scholar and made himself known through his books and articles.
"
Poet and novelist
However, it must be remembered that even before he took the path of exile, Mudimbe was known beyond the borders of his country, but mainly as a poet and novelist. The man entered literature by publishing in 1971 his first collection of poems entitled
Déchirures
. Some critics have seen in this title the trace of the in-between which characterizes the intellectual journey of Valentin Mudimbe. Throughout his youth, he was torn between the religious education he received at the school of the Benedictine fathers and the traditional African society from which he had never really been cut off. As a boy, he had even participated in the traditional initiation ceremony of the Luba-Sonkye tribe, from which he came.
Mudimbe's poetry, composed of
Déchirures
and two other poetic collections
entitled Entretailles
or Fulgurance d'une lézarde
and
Les Fuseaux sometimes
, which appeared in 1973 and 1974 respectively, can also be seen as both an extension and a going beyond the movement of negritude.
A poetic movement, negritude was also a tool for rediscovery and cultural affirmation in colonial times.
In the 1970s, it was no longer a grid capable of accounting for the new balance of power in the Africa of independence.
Especially in Central Africa where independence was synonymous with upheavals and immeasurable tragedies, as we have seen in the Belgian Congo with the killing of Lumumba and the secession of Katanga.
"
Mudimbe's poems are marked by a primordial existential experience which is that of tearing, of suffering
," explains Bernard Mouralis.
Because living in Zaire with Mudimbe's intellectual baggage in the 1960s and 1970s was very frustrating. What is more, the conditions under which independence took place had tragic repercussions for the populations. There were many deaths, massacred populations… In his poems, Mudimbe questions the meaning of these catastrophes and the human price of political upheavals.
"
Mudimbe's fictional work, made up of four titles of unequal qualities, is also nourished by this experience of collective tearing, coupled with the individual tearing of the author confronted with the defeat of thought in his country delivered to a bloody dictatorship.
This is notably the subject of Mudimbe's first novel,
Entre les eaux
, published by Présence Africaine in 1973. This novel stages the drama of a conscience torn through the fortunes and misfortunes of the main character, Pierre Landu.
The protagonist's odyssey is reminiscent of the intellectual journey of the author himself, tossed between monastic life and the promises of revolutionary Marxism.
"
Thinking against the West is still Western
"
After a second novel,
Le bel immonde,
which plunges the reader into Mobutu's dark Congo where corruption, prevarication and cowardice reign, Mudimbe gives with his third novel,
L'Écart
, one of his works of fiction the most successful. Fiction here joins the drift of intellectual life in Africa that the writer scrutinizes since his first books. Here, through the story of its main character, Nara, engaged in anthropological research aimed at "
decolonizing established knowledge
», The novelist stages the drama of the colonized intellectual, incapable of establishing himself as a subject facing the West, both domineering and master of the tools of its protest. He painfully realizes like others before him that, as Mudimbe wrote in one of his essays, “
thinking against the West […] is still Western and […] our recourse against it is still perhaps. to be a ruse that he opposes us and at the end of which he awaits us, motionless and elsewhere.
"
The tragedy of the dominated man is the real subject of Mudimbe's work, of which the latter brilliantly recounted the modalities and the aftermath through his strictly literary works, just as in his theoretical essays which we will discuss more precisely next week. in the second part of this chronicle devoted to one of the most outstanding African authors and perhaps the most universal by the historical depth of his vision.
(1)
V.-Y.
Mudimbe or discourse, separation and writing
(Paris, Présence Africaine, 1988, 144 pages)
Read Mudimbe in French:
► Poésies
: Déchirure (1971),
Entretailles, preceded by Fulgurance d'une lézarde
(1973),
Sometimes Les Fuseaux
(1974).
► Novels
:
Entre les eaux
(1973),
Le bel immonde
(1976),
L'Ecart
(1979),
Shaba deux.
The Notebooks of Mother Marie-Gertrude
(1989).
► Essays
:
Reflections on Daily Life
(1972),
The Other Face of the Kingdom, an introduction to the critique of language in madness
(1973),
The Scent of the Father
(1982),
The Invention of Africa.
Gnosis, philosophy and order knowledge
(1988 and 2021 for the French version).
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