The Mudimbe Reader

By V. Y. Mudimbe and Daniel Orrells

A prominent francophone thinker and writer from sub-Saharan Africa, V. Y. Mudimbe is known for his efforts to bridge Western and African modes of knowledge and for his critiques of a range of disciplines, from classics and philosophy to anthropology and comparative literature. The Mudimbe Reader offers for the first time a ground-breaking work of modern intellectual African history from this essential postcolonial thinker, including new translations of essays previously unavailable in English.

Constituting an intellectual history of the humanities in the late twentieth century from an African intellectual’s point of view, The Mudimbe Reader provides an introduction and a comprehensive bibliography that frame four thematic gatherings of Mudimbe’s writings. Part 1 bears witness to Mudimbe’s attempts, as a university professor in the new nation-state of Zaire, to balance the postindependence discourse of authenticity with his training in Western philosophy and philology. Part 2 focuses on Mudimbe’s exploration of racial, ethnic, and religious discourses to reflect upon postcolonialism in Zaire and in the United States. In the third part, Mudimbe interrogates ancient Greek and Latin texts as a strategy to engage the legacy of antiquity for European and African modernity. Finally, the book concludes by focusing on visual culture and Mudimbe’s recurring attempt to elucidate how African "primitiveness" has been constructed, challenged, dismissed, and reinvented from the Renaissance to the present day.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Oct 17, 2016
• ISBN: 9780813939124

Book preview

Introduction

Aussi loin que je puisse aller dans mon passé, la leçon reçue fut simple: un décentrement de l’ancienne mémoire paraît obligé mais l’intégration dans la nouvelle doit être réfléchie et critique.

[As far back as I can remember, there was a simple lesson: a decentering of the ancient memory seemed unavoidable but the integration into the new memory had to be a reflected and critical process.]

—V. Y. Mudimbe, Les Corps glorieux des mots et des êtres

V. Y. Mudimbe often returns to the idea that his native country was from the inception of the Congo Free State (CFS) in 1885 a cartographic aberration. In Cheminiments: Carnets de Berlin, a diary in which he recounts his experiences as a visiting professor at the Freie Universität Berlin, Mudimbe remarks that Congolese frontiers were negotiated at the Berlin Conference (1884–85) without any Congolese input. He suggests that this absence of consultation created the basis for future catastrophes and what he calls in French décollage fatal (fatal takeoff) (CB, 170). The word décollage is fairly common, and beyond its obvious usages it also suggests the idea of rapid development and spectacular progress. Interestingly, the term became one of the buzzwords of Mobutu’s political discourse in the 1970s.¹ There is every reason to believe that Mudimbe, who witnessed from close range Mobutu’s rise to autocratic rule, did not use the term fortuitously. Although Mobutu would invariably declare himself committed to the cause of national unity, he remained throughout his long reign (1965–97) the ironic continuator of the divide and rule regime instated by the Belgians during the colonial period.²

The type of colonialism practiced in the Congo was a typical product of late nineteenth-century venture capitalism. This high risk strategy project ran at a loss until rubber became a major global commodity at the beginning of the 1890s.³ Beyond the humanitarian goals evoked by Leopold and his staff to be granted permission to manage the CFS and spread civilization in Central Africa, this enterprise remained a business. Leopold thus took measures to maximize profits and cut labor costs by instituting notoriously exploitative working conditions that would severely affect the locals, trigger the infamous red rubber scandal, and incite the international outcry that would eventually lead to the termination of the CFS and its takeover by Belgium in 1908.⁴ For Mudimbe, the fatal takeoff of the Congo in its postcolonial era is also to be attributed to the formidable powers assumed by religious orders, rather than by the Church, from the 1880s onward. The early presence of Christian orders to evangelize and educate (alphabetize) locals was also part and parcel of Leopold’s cost-reducing exercise, since it was deemed economical to rely on their inexpensive services. The participation of these orders—the Jesuits, the White Fathers, the Scheutists, the Dominicans, the Benedictines, the Redemptorists, and others—is paradoxical for their premodern (in fact quasifeudal) modus operandi, and the sheer diversity of their sometimes outright conflicting agendas sits awkwardly with the unitary logic of modern colonialism. Mudimbe argues that the failure of contemporary Congo to achieve internal stability and political unity—the aforementioned fatal takeoff—resulted not only from tribal, ethnic, geographical, and socioeconomic factors but also from the spiritual checkerboard created by missionary orders (Idea, 109–11).⁵ What is of particular note here is that these reflections on the difficult genesis of the Congo nation have deep autobiographical resonances.

V. Y. Mudimbe was born on December 8, 1941, in the Belgian Congo.⁶ Unsurprisingly, the epithet Congolese does not quite capture the complexity of a life spanning across different languages (French, English, Spanish, Swahili, Luba, Sanga, Latin, and ancient Greek), divergent memories, religious affiliations, and bridging the divide between the colonial and the postcolonial eras. He was born in the Swahili-speaking Jadotville (now Likasi), a densely populated mining urban center located to the northwest of Elisabethville (now Lubumbashi) in the mineral-rich Katanga (also known as Shaba). His father was a skilled worker—ajusteur (PF, 94; see also CG, 28)—at the Union Minière du Haut Katanga (UMHK), the giant mining group owned by the then all-powerful Belgian holding company the Société Générale de Belgique. The UMHK brought Katanga into European modernity. Its presence in the midst of Congo generated class consciousness, internal migratory movements, and rural exodus.⁷ Mudimbe’s parents were originally from Kasai, and they played their part in this scramble for Katanga and in the ensuing spiritual remapping of modern Congo. In Parables and Fables, Mudimbe recalls this other ethnic connection and the vacation he took in his father’s village, in 1949, when he was seven years old. He remembers a world of sharp contrasts in which autochthonous traditions coexisted alongside the increasing Westernization of the area (see also Domestication and the Conflict of Memories, Idea, 105–52). His parents embodied this conflict (CG, 39). If they were immensely proud of their Catholic upbringing, they also insisted that he be initiated into the religion of their ancestors: Once there, with other boys . . ., I have to listen to stories which are, to me, simply incomprehensible. They are about the universe, the human condition, life and death (PF, 94).⁸

Mudimbe was, however, to adopt more systematically these Catholic and European heritages that his parents had only partly embraced (CG, 39). He became, as he wryly remarks, a small, gifted dog (CG, 13). Although he was first schooled in a Swahili-speaking environment (TF, 48), he left the family home at the age of ten to join a Benedictine seminary in Kakanda and then later Mwera near Lubumbashi (PF, 94). This Benedictine affiliation, the order which will most likely continue to colonize my life until I die (CG, ii), remains a decisive referential framework. This move to the seminary proved crucial, as it coincided with his further assimilation into, and familiarization with, humanist scholarship. By the age of eighteen he was completely francophonized, submitted to Greco-Roman values and Christian norms (PF, 94). Two routes were open to him: priesthood and a return to secular life. Following a traumatic experience as a monk in an increasingly ethnically torn Rwanda (CG, 75), he opted for the latter and embarked on a university career shortly after the independence of Congo in 1960. First as an undergraduate at the University of Lovanium (Kinshasa), majoring in Romance philology in 1966; then as a sociology and applied linguistics graduate student in France (Besançon and Nanterre); finally in Belgium (University of Louvain), where he was awarded his doctorate in 1970, after completing a philological study on the evolution of the word air in ancient Greek, Latin, and French and submitting a complementary thesis on the Russian Zionist thinker Ber Borochov.⁹

In the 1970s, Mudimbe became a major Congolese and (from 1972) Zairean academic occupying important positions (chairs, directorships, editorships, and deanships) at the National University of Zaire (in Kinshasa and then Lubumbashi), taking on visiting fellowships, and fulfilling important pedagogical missions on behalf of the Zairean government (see his Carnets d’Amérique). The working atmosphere prevailing on the Kinshasa and Lubumbashi campuses was one of intellectual cosmopolitanism and openness.¹⁰ Mudimbe was able to experiment with new ideas and develop, to use Bernard Mouralis’s very apt expression, his libido sciendi.¹¹ The campus was also a place of exchange between local intellectuals, who, like Mudimbe, had been partly trained in Europe, and Western academics often employed in the framework of cooperation and development programs between African and European governments. Significant encounters with Third Worldist left-wing figures such as Benoît Verhaegen, Bogumil Jewsiewicki, Johannes Fabian, and Laurent Monnier certainly reinforced Mudimbe’s ambition to reform knowledge and reflect on the historical and epistemological basis informing past and present African scholarship (CG, 151). What is interesting about these individuals is that their research is also deeply concerned with methodological, and indeed ethical, issues. Anthropologists and historians of Africa, they argued, had to become more vigilant and learn from mistakes committed during the colonial era when the relationships between researchers and local informants were still largely asymmetrical.¹² These scholars advocated bottom-up approaches, developed dialogical and equitable interviewing methods (Verhaegen 1974), and favored the experiences of ordinary people in the past and contemporary social issues pertaining to labor, gender, urbanization,¹³ ethnicity,¹⁴ and classes.

Mudimbe was not an anthropologist or a social historian, but from the outset he was interested in the metadiscursive subtext of this debate on new orientations in the human and social sciences. Ultimately, this discussion is profoundly political, and in his first two major collections of essays—L’Autre Face du royaume and L’Odeur du père—he bemoans the fact that sub-Saharan Africa is, fifteen years after decolonization, still the object of knowledge procedures developed in and for the West. Mudimbe favors here an epistemological insurrection (AF, 154). He urges his fellow African intellectuals and educationalists to think differently and to critically reappraise—reprendre—Western legacies, a point developed in this reader in Western Legacy and Negro Consciousness and "Reprendre: Enunciations and Strategies in Contemporary African Arts." Behind this seemingly innocuous critique, Mudimbe lays bare the neocolonialist basis of the new regime and its inability to move away from the logic of dependency that had prevailed before decolonization. Mudimbe was never a political activist in the literal sense, but alongside his more theoretical production he also actively fostered debates on the place of culture and education in the postcolonial African polity. Of particular significance is the voluminous collection of conference proceedings that he edited in 1980, La Dépendance de l’Afrique et les moyens d’y remédier, in which the contributors lamented the lack of democratic procedures in African cultural and educational policies.¹⁵

V. Y. Mudimbe was never persecuted by the Mobutu regime, and yet he felt unable to fulfill his role properly in a continent where the human sciences and philosophy were increasingly held in suspicion (IoA, 185; CG, 203–5). He eventually decided to leave Congo/Zaire in 1980 (CG, 129–30, 161) and take up a professorship in comparative religions at Haverford College (Pennsylvania). In an interview, he shows that this definitive exile—he is now an American citizen—was motivated by a refusal to be politically compromised by the Zairean regime: when Mr. Mobutu decided to have me as a member of his Central Committee in charge of, I guess, Ideology and things like that, with, I think, a cabinet status.¹⁶ The rest of Mudimbe’s biography is better known and more readily available. The publication of The Invention of Africa in 1988 coincided with his rise to global prominence and his recruitment by Fredric Jameson in the Literature Program at Duke University. The moment could not have been more opportune, as the 1970s and 1980s coincided with the emergence of new subfields in American (but also British and Australian) academia: black, gender, and postcolonial studies, a movement that was accompanied by the acknowledgment of a new kind of academics with Third World credentials (Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha, and Gayatri C. Spivak have been the best-known examples). The lessons that Mudimbe learned in France and Belgium in the late 1960s and on the Lubumbashi campus in the 1970s would prove the best preparation for this recognition by the American academia. The use of English, as opposed to French, played a very significant role, for Mudimbe is happy to admit that from his first essays in French to The Invention of Africa his major thesis has remained the same (IoA, xi).

The terms recognition and rise to prominence must perhaps be qualified a little further. Mudimbe has, since The Invention, continued at regular intervals to write works of major significance, the latest one being On African Fault Lines (2013), a study investigating the impact of neoliberal agendas on Africa and its diasporas. Mudimbe’s work is difficult to define. It is located at the same time in African philosophy, (cultural) history, and postcolonial studies. The difficulty with these fields is that they operate separately (in different journals and academic networks) while, at the same time, intersecting with many other areas in the human and social sciences. Postcolonial studies is an interesting case in point. It is perfectly reasonable to say that Mudimbe is a postcolonial scholar, even though he is often not classified as such. The following checklist could be used to locate him within the boundaries of this critical vein. His work is characterized by epistemological vigilance, an attention to the ideological processes informing identity politics and nation building in Africa and elsewhere, a repeated engagement with the objectifying violence of anthropology, and a tendency to challenge established scholarly traditions (such as the classics), and to interrogate African and Western literary and iconographic representations.¹⁷ But he is also a historian and an African philosopher. Of course, other checklists could be called upon to slot him into these disciplines. Such categorizations, ultimately, would have little sense and would not be very intellectually rewarding. It is the aim of The Mudimbe Reader to attend, via these twelve selected texts, to the different disciplinary orientations that have shaped his work from the late 1960s to the present day.

PART I: THE NATION

The nation, as a concept to approach the early texts by Valentin Mudimbe, provides a very helpful point of departure. Mudimbe’s life as a budding intellectual unfolded against the backdrop of the turbulent birth of the Congolese nation, an atmosphere and a sequence of events aptly captured by his novels, particularly Entre les Eaux, Le Bel Immonde, and Shaba deux. The 1960s were marked by a high level of instability, and Congo throughout its first decade as an independent state¹⁸ experienced a number of crises, such as Lumumba’s and Pierre Mulélé’s assassinations,¹⁹ the Katangese secession, and a number of ethnically driven rebellions²⁰ threatening the very survival of a country that between 1960 and 1971 was renamed three times: République du Congo-Kinshasa (1960–64), République Démocratique du Congo (1964–71), République du Zaïre (1971–97). The first three essays in this reader bear witness to this climate of insecurity and volatility. They were originally published in French and specially translated into English for this volume. These three pieces are intriguing because they exemplify Mudimbe’s early engagement with left-wing thought as a way to challenge neoliberal ideologies and explore the rise of African identity politics. These essays also testify to an ambition to analyze the significance of national life and examine the development of a national consciousness against other entities and notions—the individual, the state, negritude, ethnicity, Pan-Africanism, local, global (and indeed glocal) knowledge production—whose urgency became particularly palpable with the advent of Western modernity in sub-Saharan Africa and, specifically, in Congo.

In Western Legacy and Negro Consciousness, one of his first published articles,²¹ Mudimbe reflects upon the gradual Westernization of sub-Saharan Africa, an issue that has unarguably retained its place in his writings until today. By way of a number of references to the works of Vincent Mulago, N’Sougan Ablegmagnon, and Louis-Vincent Thomas, and their examination of mythical time in Central Africa, Mudimbe implicitly dismisses the stifling communitarian structure of traditional life in Central Africa. This critique is not so much aimed at the past as at the present. This article is a commentary on contemporary black Africa and on the emergence of Africanness in the political discourse. For new African leaders it became imperative to facilitate a rupture from Western practices and reconnect with customs and traditions that had been weakened or rooted out by Europeans. This focus on the Africanness of Africans privileges the worship of the ancestors and a collective identity in which individuals are not ascribed any substantial present- and future-orientated role. Thus Mudimbe’s observations have political implications, and his support of individual freedom is also a meaningful commentary on the colonial administration and postcolonial regimes—in Congo but also in Rwanda and Burundi—and their well-documented tendency to subordinate individual agency to ethnic identity. Of course, the interesting aspect of this question is that colonial rulers were more often than not the advocates and guarantors of some traditional customs and orthodoxy. The practice of anthropology, as will be discussed later in part II, had a profound impact on how Africans came to understand and locate their own cultures. It is not to say that they did not possess the tools to appraise their cultures and compare themselves to their neighbors, but anthropologists gradually imposed styles and vocabularies that would become the norm. African self-knowledge was mediated, and in many cases heavily doctored, by this new breed of scholars. Their narratives—Mudimbe prefers the words invention, tale, and fable—would gradually gain in status and would also be spread more quickly with the acceleration of the alphabetic revolution (MR, 16). Mudimbe is therefore also examining his own country and the move toward the politics of authenticity initiated by General Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, the new Congolese guide, as he was increasingly referred to. The top-down revamp of the Congolese nation engineered by Mobutu would affect sartorial habits but also names: Joseph-Désiré Mobutu became Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga; Mudimbe, for his part, swapped Valentin Yves for Vumbi Yoka. This shift to authenticity remained nonetheless dependent on ideas developed after the French Revolution and then adapted by other budding nations during the long nineteenth century. In his enthusiastic appraisal of Mobutu’s revolution, Kutumbagana Kangafu, one of the regime’s official ideologues, fails to reflect upon these historical contexts of the new leader’s plan to pave the way for Zaireanization. While Kangafu alludes to the contributions of important African thinkers such as Cheikh Anta Diop and Engelbert Mveng, he omits to add that these intellectuals did not operate in a vacuum, as their writings resulted from dialogues and encounters with African and Western thinkers.²² Ultimately, Mudimbe argues in this chapter that intellectual legacies, like myths, are not finite entities but are subjected to dynamic forces that are not reducible to the logic of ethnic purity. What is crucial to add, finally, is that Mudimbe’s exploration of the individual vs. community dichotomy has continued to attract considerable attention within the field of African philosophy.²³

The Rigors of Economics is a short chapter from Autour de la Nation: Leçons de civisme (1972; Around the nation: lessons in civic education) in which the idea of national community also plays a prevalent role. Congo, the nation alluded to in the title, was renamed in 1971 and became Zaire. The whole book provides a reflection upon the concept of nation in relation to ideology, revolution, and development. Mudimbe examines the factors that could potentially contribute to the creation of a national culture in Mobutu’s Zaire. As demonstrated by the subtitle, his approach is avowedly didactic even though there is, in some chapters, a definite tendency to adopt the allusive and oblique posture that has since characterized his writing style. When the book was published, Mudimbe was associate professor at the National University of Zaire. Autour de la Nation makes specific reference to the circumstances that led to the creation of the Second Republic by the Mobutu regime and to the Manifeste de la Nsele, the party manifesto document used by the Mouvement Populaire de la Révolution (MPR) to legitimize Mobutu’s one-party rule. The young professor speaks to his students, but, more covertly, he addresses the regime and its strongman. Mudimbe’s suggestive style can to a large extent be attributed to the delicate situation in which he found himself as an intellectual and a civil servant in a dictatorship. His examination of the concept of revolution, for example, offers a critique of the MPR’s abusive reappropriation of the adjective revolutionary. The notion of development, the focus of Rigors of Economics, is as contentious and provides Mudimbe with another reason for launching an indirect attack on Mobutu’s neocolonial order and fatal takeoff.

A Meeting with L. G. Damas offers another point of view on the nation. This text was originally published in Carnets d’Amérique (1976), a travel diary in which the author looks back at a period of six weeks spent in the United States in 1974. Invited by the American-African Institute as a research fellow, Mudimbe also acted as the official emissary of the Zairean government and conducted a series of pedagogical visits to major American institutions of higher education such as Columbia and Princeton. In this highly impressionistic account, Mudimbe is able to compare Zaire to the United States and to conclude that the latter, a mere six years after the assassination of Martin Luther King, is grappling with its own decolonization. As the director of the Center for Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at Lubumbashi, he deplored the monolingual bias of American teaching practices and remained acutely aware that intellectual life in his native country would depend on the active promotion of linguistic and ethnic diversity. The nature of this mission in America is also to be understood against the backdrop of Zairean nation building. Mobutu’s Zaire in the early 1970s was still a prosperous country and a cultural point of reference, notably in the field of popular music and dance²⁴ but also in literature and theology. His Zaireanization was regarded as a sort of African third way in which local authenticity would attenuate the worst excesses of capitalism. Mudimbe’s critical gaze translates this attempt to heal the Congolese from cultural alienation and reconcile Africa with a selected set of Western legacies. This conversation with Léon-Gontran Damas at Howard University, one of America’s oldest African American institutions of higher education, captures the many entanglements that such a project would entail.

PART II: ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE POSTCOLONIAL

Part II deepens Mudimbe’s analysis of the politics of knowledge production in and about Africa and puts the spotlight on anthropology. But what is the role to be played by anthropology in postcolonial Africa? If we are to understand the meaning—the point—of anthropology in today’s Africa, we need to understand the history of this discipline. We will have to think about the claim that anthropology is/has been a colonial science. But how should one write a history of anthropology? What would/should such a history look like? Since the 1970s, the history of this subject has garnered much interest, as many historians have emphasized the importance of self-reflexivity in the practice of anthropological theorizing and fieldwork. After postmodernism, anthropology could no longer be seen as privileged discourse with access to the objective truth about the peoples it studies, as Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Finn Sivert Nielson have put it: anthropologists questioned the possibility of a neutral authorial voice.²⁵ Part of the postmodernist critique reflected on the colonial context of anthropological theory and practice. The 1973 volume Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, edited by Talal Asad, brought together several case studies. In 1978 Edward Said’s Orientalism appeared, in which Said interrogated Western science, including anthropology, for essentializing and reifying Eastern cultures as the Oriental Other. In 1983 Johannes Fabian published Time and the Other, arguing that anthropology tended to freeze in time the people it analyzed. In his 1985 essay, Social Anthropology and the Decline of Modernism, Edwin Ardener contended that anthropology was predicated on a series of premises (the active, scientific fieldworker and the passive, unscientific informant; the notion that primitive societies are stable wholes without a complex conceptualization of historical processes) that reflected and colluded with colonialist values and practices.²⁶ Writing a history of anthropology, then, meant coming to terms with anthropology’s relationship with colonialism.

The significance of postmodernist thought received, however, very varied responses. Introductory texts to the discipline by Robert Layton and Alan Barnard have underlined the importance of postmodern theory, whereas the huge Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology barely alludes to it.²⁷ Many anthropologists, uneasy about the anticolonialist critique of their discipline, felt that anthropology offered an antidote to Orientalist ideology in that it sought to represent and defend non-Western cultures.²⁸ And yet, until the 1970s anthropologists in the West scarcely researched and published on issues around colonialism and Third World exploitation. The poor masses, being apparently too assimilated to Western cultures, seemed unexciting prospects for study, even though French anthropologists such as Michel Leiris and Georges Balandier insisted on the urgent need to examine urbanized populations.²⁹ That anthropologists often focused on a single people meant that they were often not attuned to themes of global political economy. And the notion of development was viewed with great suspicion by anthropologists concerned that non-Western cultures were being eradicated for the sake of a Westernized global order.³⁰

Understanding the history of anthropology has been a fraught and contested process: it has proven very difficult to produce an authoritative, universally accepted narrative of the discipline. This becomes an especially significant issue for African anthropologists seeking to evaluate the intellectual legacy they inherit. Mwenda Ntarangwi, David Mills, and Mustafa Babikar have recently addressed this very concern in their attempt to write a historical account of anthropology in Africa from the colonial into the postcolonial era. Their focus is on the British situation, where the relationship between the Colonial Office and anthropology was . . . both fraught with misunderstanding and fruitful. At times anthropologists were in direct confrontation with colonial administrators . . . while at other times there was no clear divide between anthropological work and colonial administrative work.³¹ Ntarangwi, Mills, and Babikar go on to trace out a history of individual Africans (Jomo Kenyatta, Kwame Nkrumah, Kofi Busia, and Nnamdi Azikiwe) who either conducted postgraduate research in anthropology or published anthropological publications that explicitly criticized British colonial rule. However, Ntarangwi, Mills, and Babikar report that the advent of independence for various African states saw the sharp shrinkage of anthropological work: outside of South Africa there were no single-discipline anthropology departments in Anglophone African universities as the subject became a scapegoat owing to its association with colonial power. At the same time, however, anthropological research methodologies became integrated into the work of scholars of African history, who became interested in oral history and the fruits of fieldwork and participant observation. And yet, the 1970s also saw a proliferation of grand narratives about African political and economic history which relied on Marxist and dependency theory, moving the focus away from anthropological interests in tribalism, customs, and culture. The emergence of development studies did, nevertheless, provide anthropological research with a niche, as governmental and, increasingly, nongovernmental organizations hired researchers to provide data, information, and knowledge.³² Despite the founding of the Pan African Anthropology Association (PAAA) in 1989, African anthropologists in African universities remain isolated from the international community, and the consultancy work that is conducted and funded by NGOs often remains inaccessible to academic staff working at public universities in Africa.³³

Mudimbe’s own work has returned to these issues on numerous occasions. Part II of the reader features three pieces of writing that spotlight Mudimbe’s interest in the history of African anthropology and the human sciences more generally. Interestingly, he never tries to construct a straightforward narrative of the discipline in Africa. Instead his oeuvre evidences several different attempts to make sense of colonial knowledges of Africa and their legacy in the postcolonial era. Mudimbe is especially interested in three periods of African intellectual interventions in Western anthropology and the human sciences. He has written about African engagement with Western social science during the colonial period. He has also examined mid-twentieth-century African negotiations with anthropology. And finally, he has interrogated the possibilities of postcolonial African confrontations with anthropological questions. With respect to each period, Mudimbe has asked whether African intellectuals have been able to uncover and understand African reality—or have their appropriations of Western models of science caused them to create their own inventions of Africa, just as they have claimed of colonial images of the African continent? Part II of the reader presents an example of Mudimbe’s writing on each of these three periods. The first, E. W. Blyden’s Legacy and Questions, originally appeared as a chapter in The Invention of Africa, Mudimbe’s 1988 monograph which provided an overview of the various African and non-African discourses that have invented African identities and cultures. Rather than discover the African reality that might lie on the other side of these discourses, Mudimbe analyzes how anthropological and missionary interpretations created powerful paradigms that in turn influenced Africans who have understood their own culture and thought according to Western models. Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832–1912) provided Mudimbe with a very useful model for explaining his broad historical argument about the Western invention of Africa.

Blyden was born on the Danish island of St. Thomas. Under the patronage of a white American protestant minister, John Knox, Blyden was encouraged to continue his education in the United States. He was, however, refused entry to three theological seminaries because he was black, and so in 1850 he sailed to Liberia, the colony established by the American Colonization Society. There Blyden became an editor of various newspapers, and by the early 1860s he was professor of Greek and Latin at Liberia College (and became the college’s president in the 1880s). He also served as Liberia’s ambassador to Britain and France; and he became Liberian secretary of state, later the minister of the interior, and was a presidential candidate in the 1885 elections. Mudimbe’s chapter focuses on the writings Blyden produced during his glittering career. Blyden has been widely seen as a founding figure of Pan-Africanism, a political philosophy and movement that contends that the peoples of Africa and African diasporas share common and unified political goals. Pan-Africanists have often advocated a return to real, traditional African values and belief systems: Léopold Sédar Senghor’s négritude movement, and Mobutu Sese Seko’s policy on Authenticité have been cited as examples of Pan-Africanist ideology.

In Mudimbe’s essay, Blyden emerges as a complex character. Mudimbe examines how Blyden underlined the necessity for black intellectual self-determination. Blyden was invested in the ’regeneration’ of Africa. As Mudimbe notes, he frequently insists on the fact that only black people transform the continent. But at the same time, Blyden’s thinking reflected an underlying racist logic, as Mudimbe’s essay teases out. Writing about Blyden’s insistence on the repatriation of African Americans to African shores, Mudimbe directly addresses his reader: "Let me underscore that Blyden had quite a restrictive understanding of what black meant. He did not wish to have in Africa people of mixed blood. Through Blyden’s investment in blackness and the Negro personality, racial identity stands as an absolute precondition for any sociopolitical transformation of Africa," as Mudimbe puts it (MR, 77).

But even if Blyden might be seen as professing an early form of Pan-Africanist philosophy, Mudimbe also uncovers another, very different legacy. Throughout his essay, Mudimbe emphasizes Blyden’s intervention in an epistemological debate. Blyden, as Mudimbe puts it, sought to revise the concept of history altogether. While he might have held the English language in great affection, he was also highly critical of the representations of Africans in the writings of missionaries, travelers, and colonial settlers. In Blyden’s own words: The Negro of the ordinary traveler or missionary—and perhaps, of two-thirds of the Christian world—is a purely fictional being, constructed out of the traditions of slave-traders and slave-holders (MR, 70). Mudimbe sees a relativist view of history and its interpretations in Blyden’s writings and, therefore, the possibility of a general criticism of [the] social sciences. Blyden helped to open a vigorous debate on the limits of anthropology (MR, 79). He comes to look very much like Mudimbe himself in his emphasis on the fictionality of colonialist representations of African lives and cultures. Blyden’s call to reorganize education policy seems to anticipate Mudimbe’s concern with the colonial and postcolonial academic structures that have controlled knowledge about Africa.³⁴

Blyden is an important figure for Mudimbe, then, because he was a writer negotiating the relationship between Western colonialist logic and independent African thought. He relies on Western anthropological ideas about race while also critiquing the truth-values of these discourses. Blyden is so significant for Mudimbe (he devotes an entire chapter in The Invention of Africa to him) precisely because he doesn’t fit into a narrative that periodizes African history into colonial and postcolonial eras. Blyden was highly critical of Western constructions of African cultures and identities, just as he himself made use of Western inventions of race in order to construct his own image of the true African state. Mudimbe’s analysis of Blyden demonstrates the complexity of the relationship between anticolonial/postcolonial African thought and Western colonial intellectual frameworks.

The Invention of Africa is itself an enactment of this complexity in that it represents the work of a Central African thinker, writing in the United States, extending the theoretical constructions of the French intellectual Michel Foucault. In this book, Mudimbe is interested in showing how knowledge about Africa was also the production of power relations between Africans and its observers. The colonialist inventions of Africa constrained Africans within a specific set of representations. A particular type of knowledge or