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 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 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’s 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.
At some risk, he declined Mr. 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. 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, Mr. 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 the Marxist literary scholar Fredric Jameson, who died last year. Mr. 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,” Mr. 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, Mr. Mudimbe explored the relationship between Western knowledge and Western domination as it relates to Africa.
“In the accounts of ‘explorers’ on the Continent,” Mr. 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,” Mr. Mudimbe wrote.
Mr. 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 Mr. 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,” Mr. 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.”
Mr. 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.
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,” the 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 Mr. 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?”
Mr. 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 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 “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.
In the 1970s Mr. 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,” the scholar Nadia Yala Kisukidi commented in Le Monde.
At the end of the 1970s, when the offer came from Mr. Mobutu to be “in charge of, I guess, ideology and things like that,” as Mr. 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).
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.
“He said that the tragedy of African thinkers was not to be able to get out of the colonial library,” Mr. 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.”
Susan C. Beachy and Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans, and is now a Domestic Correspondent on the Obituaries desk.
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