Though self-imposed, it is nonetheless a humbling task to attempt to encapsulate as towering a figure as V.Y. Mudimbe is, whose work is extremely complex and straddles many academic and creative fields. It is even more humbling to delve into that complexity on the pretense of trying to explain it. There is no disputing that he was and will remain an immense presence in African critical thought, and that his work is in conversation with other kinds of critical thinking in and beyond Africa, as he was translated and is studied in many places and languages. The legacy he has left behind equals or surpasses that of many other great thinkers of our times in terms of its impact. The word that comes to mind as I think of Mudimbe’s work is insaisissable—perhaps “unfathomable” in English. One may think of him as a philosopher that he was, but he was also a linguist, an anthropologist, a poet, a novelist.
Valentin-Yves Mudimbe was born in Likasi, Democratic Republic of the Congo on December 8, 1941, and passed away on April 21, 2025 in North Carolina, a few hours after Pope Francis. That he should die on the same day as the pope is a coincidence that exemplifies his lifelong connection to the Catholic church. Although he proclaimed himself an agnostic, the practice of his faith never left him. He received his early education in a Benedictine monastery, pursued the priesthood and became a monk, but left and earned a PhD at the Catholic University in Louvain.
In public, Mudimbe appeared stern, even intimidating while on a podium, but in one-on-one encounters, he was affable, with a dry sense of humor that nonetheless evinced profound thought about subjects that may appear benign. My own initial encounter with him was serendipitous. It happened in April 1981, at the seventh annual conference of the Afican Literature Association, at the Claremont Colleges in California. I had offered to present three novels of Mudimbe’s that appeared between Reference Mudimbe1973 and 1979—Entre les eaux, Le Bel Immonde, and L’écart—at a roundtable such as was regularly organized to get acquainted with the work of new authors in those early years of the association. No analysis was required: all I had to do was summarize, in fifteen minutes, what I had read. Apart from a poem or two gleaned from an anthology for the occasional needs of an African literature course, I knew nothing of Mudimbe’s work, not to mention the man himself. A few minutes before the session—by what stroke of good luck, I’ll never know—a man comes up to me and says his name is Mudimbe. I invited him to the session, not without some trepidation: I knew that what I was about to say about his novels was not profound, even though they had shaken me to the core of my being by plunging me back into “the events” of Zaïre, the country we shared but which I had left nearly two decades earlier. In another session, I had presented a more polished paper entitled “Violence and Madness in Mudimbe’s Narrative.” The appearance of a writer in the flesh at ALA conferences was a very popular event. That year, Cameroon’s Mongo Beti and George Lamming of Barbados were featured guests. When my turn came at the 1981 conference, I introduced him to the audience of African literature scholars and teachers. He was warmly applauded. All the questions were addressed to him. I did not have to say a word; in any case the audience stopped listening to me, and that was fine with me.
Mudimbe had come to the United States the year before we met, on a Fulbright grant. Two weeks later, Mobutu Sese Seko named him to the Central Committee of MPR, Zaïre’s “party-state.” This was a good reason not to go back. He quickly got acclimated to the American academy, teaching at Pittsburgh, Haverford, and later at both Duke and Stanford, and finally settling at Duke. Mudimbe was not yet known in the United States. He would make a dazzling entry into the ranks of the American intelligentsia with The Invention of Africa, his first book in English, in 1988.
The Rift
Much has been written about Mudimbe’s critique of the colonial library. Most of what has been written involves Mudimbe’s philosophical work and seldom delves into his literary work. It has also been said that Mudimbe became an Africanist in the United States. A cursory reading of the literary work published before his coming to the US tends to show his preoccupation with Africa’s positioning in the world. Of all of Mudimbe’s literary works, L’écart (Reference Mudimbe1979), translated as The Rift (Reference Mudimbe1993), can be said to best exemplify his critique of the colonial library. It is the story of a young graduate student by the name of Ahmed Nara, struggling to conduct doctoral research on one of the most studied ethnic groups, the Kouba of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Nara dies unexpectedly and mysteriously, leaving seven notebooks that an editor publishes posthumously, and describes him as “a brilliant young historian working on a thesis on the Kouba” (1993, 11). The burning question for Nara is, “How can the African intellectual free himself/herself from the weight of the past to better face the future?”
Nara has no intention of writing an ordinary thesis: his is a project to completely overhaul the way historical-ethnological research is conducted in Africa, and more specifically, in this case, on the Kuba people. It’s a major project, radical, even dangerous, in its ambition to invent a new epistemology for this people. To this end, he explains his project to his thesis supervisor, who retorts:
[Thesis director:] What’s the use? The Kouba are well known. They have been studied in depth… .
[Nara:] By a black person?
[Thesis director:] Do you think it would make a difference?
[Nara:] Let the Germans begin by being satisfied with French descriptions of their past. The latter, by English studies… . Only then will I give in … . I think sensitivity is very important, sir, sensitivity (1993, 27).
He writes in one of his notebooks: “I’d like to start from scratch, to rebuild the universe of these peoples from scratch: to decolonize the knowledge established about them, to update new genealogies…” (1993, 26–27). Then, proceeding by derision, Nara consults the book Les anciens Royaumes de la Kavana by J. Dansine, a famous Western historian of the Kuba people, and declares: “Only in African history can one consider the exercise of silence and the art of allusion as testimonies of prudence” (1993, 64). He then amuses himself, by way of illustration, by substituting the words “Spaniards” and “Portuguese” for the words “Lélés” and “Kouba” in an otherwise accurate excerpt from J. Dansine’s book:
This game of substitution, which goes so far as to disguise—albeit barely—the author’s first and last names and the title itself, exposes an open secret: the book in question is, in reality, none other than Jan Vansina’s Les anciens royaumes de la savane, published in Léopoldville (Kinshasa) in Reference Vansina1965 by the Lovanium University Institute of Economic and Social Research Press. The original had been written in English under the title Kingdoms of the Savanna and published a year later by the University of Wisconsin Press. Even a cursory comparison of the two texts shows that, apart from the substitutions made by Nara, they are strictly identical. What we have here, then, is a direct quotation that illustrates rather well Nara’s criticism of Western historiography of Africa and by extension the whole colonial library.
But who is Jan Vansina, whom Nara hides behind the mask of J. Dansine, and why does he occupy such a central place in Nara’s work? He is undoubtedly the foremost historian of precolonial Africa and the foremost authority on the Kouba, to whom he has dedicated at least three books, the latest of which, Being Colonized: The Kuba Experience in Rural Congo, was published in Reference Vansina2010. In 1961, along with two or three others, he founded the African Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin in the USA, which today brings together some seventy Africanists working in a variety of disciplines, and is recognized as among two or three of the best centers of African studies. In the History Department of the same university, Vansina created a core group of African historians who, long after his retirement in Reference Vansina1994, continue to train top-level scholars. These scholars in turn, continue to crisscross Africa, particularly Central Africa, as researchers and teachers, from the Congos to Burundi and Rwanda, from Angola to Zambia. Several of Vansina’s history books are classics in African universities. He played a decisive role in the elaboration of UNESCO’s monumental General History of Africa project, published in seven volumes from 1981 to 1993. And within the powerful African Studies Association, he is the only Africanist to have twice won the coveted Herskovits Award for the best book on Africa in any discipline. When Nara attacks the work of J. Dansine/Jan Vansina, it is the very institution of Western historiography on Africa that he intends to challenge.
But Nara is only a writer in the second degree. As a creation of the first-degree writer, V.Y. Mudimbe, Nara is the result of an initial distancing by his creator; he in turn creates a distance or, better, a rift between himself and his intradiegetic readers, and finally between himself and the extradiegetic readers that we are. It is through this process of mise en abyme that we can question, if needed, Mudimbe’s position on the question to which Nara fails to provide an answer before his sudden death.
And to do so, I’d like to recall a passage from Mudimbe’s Reference Mudimbe1982 collection of essays, L’odeur du père (The Scent of the Father, 2022), which is often quoted because it is striking, partly because Mudimbe engages in much the same exercise of substitution as Nara, when he quotes and paraphrases Michel Foucault’s The Order of Discourse (Reference Foucault1971). In the passage that follows, Mudimbe substitutes “The West” wherever Foucault had written “Hegel” to signify “the violence not only of the Father’s existence, but also the strangeness of his scent” (1982, 12):
Foucault refers to Hegel as one of the fathers, if not the father, of modern Western philosophy, a father whose murder would signify redemption, but whom one does not succeed in killing consciously or because one lacks the power; and if one succeeds in killing that father, one does not do it easily or with impunity. And even in death, the father still leaves his scent, relentless and strange, which the son cannot shake off, if only because it is through this scent that he recognizes himself as a son.
Mudimbe’s project in The Scent of the Father, like Nara’s project in The Rift, consists, at least in part, in recognizing the filiation of a certain African thought with the West, in not pretending that such a filiation does not exist, and in accepting the violence it implies and that it calls forth in return, so as to be able to elaborate another discourse, free and relevant, a discourse that is “the cry and witness of this singular place” that is Africa (Reference Mudimbe1982, 14). But the project also involves recognizing one’s own precariousness, in the sense that the father against whom one exercises this violence always conceals another, an elusive one, who, in a strange mise en abyme, may be none other than oneself.
Indeed, while it is relatively easy for Foucault to identify Hegel as the father of modern Western philosophy, Mudimbe only manages to designate the father of a certain African thought with the problematic term “Western,” although Nara may have taken aim at the singular but powerful J. Dansine. In the essays on seemingly disparate subjects (literature, humanities, religion, history, educational science, etc.) that make up The Scent of the Father, this “abusive father” wears many masks. The “West” is sometimes represented by its most conspicuous instruments of coercion, such as christianity, capitalism, and in short, colonialism, and sometimes by those qualities that we think of as only benevolent or innocent, such as colonial schooling and writing. But it is most often represented, and most insidiously, by the very African intellectuals who advocate breaking with the West while simultaneously embracing it: “our elders who, in fact, are our fathers” (Reference Mudimbe1982, 36), such as the figureheads of the négritude movement. But by extension, the West is also “us.” But Mudimbe allows this “us” to be read in the margins of his texts and approaches, with the exception of his admission that “to a certain extent, [his essays] express [his] own contradictions as an African academic” (Reference Mudimbe1982, 14).
But the African academic is not only a son in Mudimbe’s sense of the term: he is also a master thinker and, as such, a father in his own right, just as his elders were to him. And since he must deal with the same issues as his elders, the question is not only whether he follows, but also whether he possesses the means to follow a different path from that followed by his elders. The quest for this new path underpins all Mudimbe’s work in The Scent of the Father, as well as in other works, both theoretical and literary, including The Rift.
