V.Y. Mudimbe has left us, and yet his work’s life has hardly begun. At a recent memorial service in San Francisco, I addressed his grandchildren (aged 8 and 12), to suggest that we (a collective, admittedly vague and futuristic “we”) would need the time it will take for them to get to college in order to prepare the type of broad courses that could more fully account for their grandfather’s contributions to what we call “theory” at large. While Mudimbe is a giant in African studies, he has proven less visible in conversations on, say, decolonizing the curriculum—and indeed in the “decolonial” movement itself.Footnote ¹ This is curious, given the centrality of the concept of the “colonial library” (Reference Mudimbe1988, 181, for example) that, as Mudimbe describes it, opened up, through the centuries, a seemingly unending set of texts for intertextuality, cross-referencing, and constituting a discursive field for the continual construction of an idea of Africa. Mudimbe specifically discusses the gains made in decolonizing knowledge in the African context (Reference Mudimbe1988, 167–86) through deconstruction, rupture, reversal, and by reassessing the influence of Christianity. For Mudimbe, French and African Marxists heralded a credibly and provisionally universal version of history (Reference Mudimbe1988, 177). At the same time, Mudimbe was aware of his own mind’s capture by European thought. As a thinker, before all else, his energies were focused on the personal conundrum of how to think outside, beyond, or beside his own submission to Greco-Roman values and Christian normative concepts. When he suggested “the replacement of European languages by African languages,” though, the idea had a somewhat different implication than Ngugi’s: Mudimbe was deeply interested in a nonhierarchical admixture that would result from this linguistic movement and from which, he surmised, a whole new “mixed and rich world [would] come to light” (Reference Mudimbe and Adjamenian1982, 30).Footnote ² But, alongside this type of hybrid newness, it was imperative to establish a “corpus of African traditional texts” (Reference Mudimbe1988, 181).

In other terms, Mudimbe recognized the significance of understanding what it meant “to be an African and a philosopher today” (Reference Mudimbe1988, xi). And, daringly, Mudimbe declared that Foucault, was “an excellent actualization of the Western knowledge of which we would like to rid ourselves” (Reference Mudimbe and Adjamenian1982, 25)! In interrogating key European thinkers with deep influence in the social sciences, such as Lévy-Strauss and Foucault, it is to Mudimbe’s credit that he posed “philosophical questions of method” (1988, 23; my emphasis).

Mudimbe’s insights from his rich body of works that spans different genres speak directly to fields and subfields where questions of knowledge, pedagogy, and decolonialism are of critical importance. The very term gnosis, preferred by Mudimbe to describe his area of concern, critique, and innovation, rather than the “episteme” or even “philosophy” (although he does use these terms), underscores the need to radically rethink “knowing”—essentially a violent act or one that is based on violence and erasure as far as thought about Africa and the colonizing process more broadly go. Mudimbe considers the concepts and categories in psychoanalysis and ethnopsychology and shifts Althusser’s elaboration of Marxian insights on revolution from the realm of political economy to newness in science and the African practice of these sciences. He writes:

Getting to the heart of the matter, Mudimbe writes: “Do the juridical and moral sciences in [African] societies truly and functionally respond to the demands posed by the intersection of our past social formations, the contemporary context of modernity, and the effects of their complex articulation on individual behavior?” (Reference Mudimbe and Adjamenian1982, 29). Scaling up Ngugi’s radical move to writing in an African language (Gikuyu in Ngugui’s case), Mudimbe theorizes a resulting hybrid gnosis as a consequence of Africans’ exploration of the world through African languages even while using categories that took root in European contexts and languages. This knowledge would be transformed, altered, renewed, and made other in African culture and through African life. And then, in a stunning resurrection of Foucault, drawing from his conversation and deep knowledge of the discourse and milieu of Sartre, Lacan, Althusser, Barthes, and Foucault himself, Mudimbe envisages Derridean rewriting, now unrecognizable, as it would recast the totality of African civilization, life, and future through different means. He thus would ask—before this transformed grid of knowledge systems arrived at through different methods and framed only on a collapsed colonial library that is replaced by the forms generated by African intellectual labor—even as an act to be rid of Foucault, in Foucault’s very terms: “what is the status of this discourse, what is its order? What sovereignty governs and orients it, and in what direction?” (Reference Mudimbe and Adjamenian1982, 30).

Mudimbe is by far the scholar who best navigates the bodies of European work on Africa and the construction of Africa as it is “given” to the world of ideas and histories, those of Africans included. His understanding of the place of Father Placide Tempels (the Belgian missionary who aspired to Philosophy) and the relationship of the latter’s work to that of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (the French philosopher with anthropological leanings) opens up an archeological space for understanding the conflicted history of categories and terms used in African philosophy and in scholarly discourse more broadly. Mudimbe traces out this current of thought as it is seen in the writings of the pioneering French anthropologist, Marcel Griaule, whose work on the Dogon developed alongside a fervent desire to show an African philosophy that was on a par with Europe’s approach to knowledge and existence (Reference Mudimbe1988, 136–45). Mudimbe also reconstructs, for any willing student, the flow of thought and the resistances and differences between Tempels, his contemporaries, and Alexis Kagame, the Rwandan philosopher that another recently departed African scholar, F. Abiola Irele, was in the process of studying in greater depth. Mudimbe articulates most clearly that the search for “authenticity” in African identity in the postcolonial era demands “a critical philosophy” (Reference Mudimbe1988, 153). He deftly unpacks some of the most salient disagreements and debates among African philosophers of the twentieth century on questions of difference and, in particular, he highlights the entanglement among culture, world view, oral history, and philosophy as a discipline.

The colonial library imposed a framework that placed limits on knowledge by—among other blockages—making unthinkable the infinite truths, experiences, and concepts that lay outside it. In a more literal way, Mudimbe himself drew heavily from that library—from those European texts—but in privileging African metaphysics or reaching for African categories and rationales, he was involved in reconstructing them (and theorizing their reconstruction) in the process, operating a restructuring not unlike the one he envisaged through the use of African languages.Footnote ³ Stated simply, Mudimbe’s work has uncovered the way colonialism (and Christianity) generated the colonial library (the vast missionary, ethnographic, governmental, Western historical texts) which specifically obscured “la chose du texte” (literally, the thing of the text) (Reference Mudimbe1988, 183) that inheres in African experience, knowledges, structures of thinking, and feeling. These latter are embedded in African histories that constitute the field of gnosis. Semiology and hermeneutics, suggested Mudimbe—being, respectively, devoted to signs and constituted by elaborate methods for reading and interpreting those signs—could show the way to building an interconnected African studies (Reference Mudimbe1988, 183). But there is no place for any idealization of “native” institutions, because Mudimbe was too aware of the many instances of their control by indigenous political power, even if a legacy of colonialism. Nor does Mudimbe let us forget that “history” for Africa and the postcolonial world is always to be considered with suspicion, for in it inheres a particular notion of the primitive, lurking in the negative of such expressions as “traditional and modern,” for example. In his life’s work, V.Y. Mudimbe was devoted to felling the colonial library to give us the contours of a new gnosis. It is high time we browse through Mudimbe’s library—here, literally the tomes of poetry, prose, and theory he left us—to find pathways for then reading more carefully, attentively, and sustainedly from it so we may help build out purposefully from there to further the project of a decolonized library. One which, unlike the colonial library described by Mudimbe, transgresses space and time to overcome the latter’s limiting function upon the structures and possibilities of our thought. We might then, in Mudimbe’s terms, neutralize “the odor of the father.”