V.-Y. Mudimbe, a distinguished figure in African philosophy, novelist, poet, essayist and influential scholar across multiple fields – including African studies, cultural studies, literature, linguistics, history and anthropology – passed away on Monday 21 April 2025, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. From the University of Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (then known as Zaire), where he began his academic career, to Stanford and Duke Universities, as well as educational institutions in Europe and Latin America, V.-Y. Mudimbe distinguished himself by deconstructing the discourses that, from Greco-Roman antiquity to the present, have influenced the understanding of the African world and shaped representations of Africa and Africans in global thought as a paradigm of difference. This lifelong work aimed to expose the limitations of these discourses and their inability to speak about or describe their subject without imposing categories rooted in another historical experience – the Western experience, regarded as the standard and the ultimate measure of all other historical experiences.

Beginning in Africa with the publication of L’Autre face du Royaume. Une introduction à la critique des langages en folie (The Other Side of the Kingdom: an introduction to Folie language criticism; 1973) and L’Odeur du père (The Scent of the Father; 1982), this project gained international recognition after 1988’s The Invention of Africa: gnosis, philosophy, and the order of knowledge, crowned with the Herskovits Prize from the African Studies Association of America. This influential work helped reshape African Studies, then facing a crisis, by promoting a more reflective, decolonial and critically engaged approach to knowledge. It was followed by two other major works, forming a trilogy: The Idea of Africa (1994) and On African Fault Lines: meditations on alterity politics (2013).

Beyond revealing the complex connections linking Africa and the West – connections that shape how Africans think, exist, define themselves and assert their difference – these three works share a common goal: to encourage African scholars in the humanities and social sciences to ‘shed the “scent of an abusive father”’, meaning the West, which has universalized its own specific experience. The goal is to ‘speak and produce “differently”’ by developing discourses that justify themselves as ‘singular existences engaged in a history that is also singular’. Mudimbe was not satisfied with mere ‘counter-discourses’, such as apologetic ethnophilosophies or ethnotheologies, because these can remain confined within the structures they seek to oppose. Therefore, he argued for the significance of an archaeology of African discourse as a foundation for building a scientific discourse in which Africans are both the subjects and the objects – that is, a discourse liberated from dependence on the Western episteme, instead shaped through the lens of Africans and rooted in the singularity of their real-world experiences. This captures the essence of his famous quote from L’Odeur du père:

In other words, African scholars must understand how Africa has been integrated into Western myths to avoid producing irrational languages and creating oversimplified myths – those elaborate games of false constructs that ignore the internal dynamics and logic of the historical context they aim to describe.

Moreover, in a strongly transdisciplinary approach that characterizes all his work, The Invention of Africa challenges the claim to scientific truth made by anthropological, missionary and ideological discourses about Africa. These are discourses of power through which the African world was ‘pathologized’, described, codified and classified – in short, constructed as an object of knowledge and colonial power, using categories and conceptual systems rooted in the Western epistemological order. The problem is that from these very discourses, which subjected Africa to Western frameworks, African discourses on alterity and African ideologies of difference have emerged, among the most prominent in postcolonial Africa’s intellectual history, including Negritude, Black personality and African philosophy.

Building on his masterpiece, The Idea of Africa explores how the concept of Africa has been understood throughout history and across different regions, from the Greeks to today. Mudimbe focuses on two main themes: the Greco-Roman portrayal of alterity, explained through ideas such as barbarism and savagery, and the complicated process by which Europe shaped the idea of Africa as a symbol of difference. He demonstrates that, since the fifteenth century, Europe’s quest for truth has been closely linked to a desire for power. These two – truth and power – have become intertwined and have undermined each other, leading to the emergence of three major atrocities: the slave trade, colonialism and Nazism. Mudimbe also critically examines how postcolonial African thinkers have revived Greek texts. Therefore, The Idea of Africa, like The Invention of Africa, responds to three key questions: What is Africa? What happens when people make truth claims about Africa? What does it mean to be an African and a philosopher today? In addressing these questions, both books critique Western and colonial motives.

The final book in the trilogy, On African Fault Lines, concentrates on African experiences and expressions in today’s global world and considers some of the paradoxes we are facing apropos identity and alterity in contemporary global culture. Facing the impoverishment of alterity, the reification of social identities and the instrumentalization of their meaning by an economic system whose power often lies in its ability to attribute a value to an alterity often considered as a mere body that can be integrated into the processes of production, Mudimbe suggests that ‘from yesterday to tomorrow, our predicament remains: how to handle a collaboration between our three competing reasons – the economic, the political and the cultural – and defend the authority of an ethics of human dignity’. In other words, Mudimbe promotes an affirmation of the critical primacy of ethical reason over the economic, the political and the cultural.

On African Fault Lines is undoubtedly the testament of a thinker deeply rooted in the humanist tradition, attentive to the violent impact of economic and political dynamics on the daily lives of ordinary people, and sensitive to the tragedies of his time. This essay also demonstrates Mudimbe’s exceptional ability to start with a sign of everyday life, such as a friendly conversation at the airport, and delve into a reflection of remarkable depth and power, revealing what seemingly trivial facts signify – a way of de-marginalizing the stories of daily life by turning them into signs of the human condition. While it does not shy away from erudition, this essay is not confined to any elitist culture; it is pervaded by the anxiety of the ordinary man. Finally, On African Fault Lines clarifies the ethical demand that runs through all of Mudimbe’s work – both scientific and fictional – or rather that we are directed towards: the ethics of otherness or coexistence, with respect for the demands of human dignity as its highest and most fundamental value. Referring to the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, Mudimbe reminds us of that which transcends all technicalities: ‘The word “ethical” and the word “just” are the same word, the same question, the same language.’

As a writer, Mudimbe produced innovative literary works that are closely linked to his theoretical contributions. Translated into several languages and meeting with significant success, novels like Entre les eaux, L’Écart and Shaba II have established themselves as classics. Additionally, Mudimbe was the driving force behind several remarkable works praised by critics: The Surreptitious Speech: Présence Africaine and the politics of otherness (1992), Africa and the Disciplines (1993), Nations, Identities, Cultures (1997) and Diaspora and Immigration (1999).

As is often the case with innovative thinkers and theorists who develop concepts to convey their ideas, Mudimbe has introduced notions whose adoption and the ensuing scientific debates demonstrate the richness of his work. Four such concepts stand out: ‘colonial library’, ‘the invention of Africa’, ‘reprendre’ and ‘cultural conversion’. Regarding the first two, it is no longer possible to engage in African studies, African philosophy, anthropology, history or African theology – in short, to practise the human and social sciences – without considering the ‘colonial library’ and its stakes, which involve the pursuit of truth inseparable from a will to power, or pretending to forget that Africa, as the subject of our discourses, as well as African cultures and identities were inventions of imperialist and colonialist Europe and its project of cultural conversion.

The concept of ‘reprendre’, elaborated in the eponymous chapter of The Idea of Africa, deserves particular attention. Three interconnected phases define this concept. According to Mudimbe, in the first phase, ‘reprendre’ is understood ‘in the sense of taking up an interrupted tradition, not out of a desire for purity, which would testify only to the imaginations of dead ancestors, but in a way that reflects the conditions of today’. But ‘reprendre’ also suggests ‘a methodological assessment, the artist’s labour beginning, in effect, with an evaluation of the tools, means, and projects of arts within a social context transformed by colonialism and by later currents, influences, and fashions from abroad’. Finally, ‘reprendre implies a pause, a meditation, a query on the meaning of the two preceding exercises’. Readers of Mudimbe’s essays can recognize in the three processes encompassed by the concept of ‘reprendre’ the methodological rigour of Mudimbe, a philosopher, philologist, semiotician and hermeneut always concerned with clarifying his analytical tools, the standpoint and place from which he speaks, and reflecting on the meaning of what he does.

The moments encompassed by the idea of ‘reprendre’ can help address a common criticism of Mudimbe’s work. Some readers see it as contradictory to try to decolonize African humanities while using thinkers like Michel Foucault or Claude Lévi-Strauss. This recurring critique, which also overlooks his work’s phenomenological and existentialist perspective, seems to ignore the freedom and agency of the postcolonial African subject, represented here by the artist who begins with current conditions and assesses tools, concepts and methods to adapt them to their project. As Ernst Wolff aptly notes about The Invention of Africa, Mudimbe ‘implicitly testifies to the space of manoeuvring of agents despite the historical conditions … Mudimbe’s historical account and his performance evoke the possibility of agency and change.’Footnote ¹ Belonging to a scientific tradition or discipline does not mean renouncing freedom and creativity, which start with digesting what one has learned from tradition. Although historical and cultural influences and conditions are important, they do not determine thought. There is always space for the intentionality of the creator or the agency of the subject, celebrated here with reference to Foucault, at the end of The Invention of Africa.

It should be noted that, for Mudimbe, decolonizing African discourse has never meant a complete break from knowledge produced elsewhere. His view aligns with that of his friend Fabien Eoussi Boulaga, who speaks of ‘dialogue des lieux’ (dialogue of places). This suggests an intercultural approach to philosophy that involves meeting the epistemological demands it entails. Among these, respect for each place’s norms of intelligibility is essential.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote that an author’s life teaches us nothing; nonetheless, it remains true that ‘if we knew how to read it, we would find everything there, since it opens onto the work’.Footnote ² This applies to Mudimbe, whose philosophical essays are dotted with autobiographical elements.

Mudimbe was born in the Belgian Congo on 8 December 1941. After attending a minor seminary (1952–58) under Benedictine monks, he chose to join the order. He was sent to the Benedictine monastery of Gihindamuyaga in Rwanda, where he, like the character of his novel Shaba II: Les carnets de Mère Marie Gertrude (1989), was the sole African in the community. However, following independence, Mudimbe had to leave the Benedictine order, partly due to the church’s involvement in the civil war between Tutsi and Hutu in Rwanda. He then enrolled at Lovanium University. After earning his degree in Romance philology in 1966, he was transferred to the University of Louvain to complete his doctoral thesis. He received his Doctorat en Philosophie et Lettres in 1970.

This period (1966–70) was decisive for the philosophical development of the young Congolese intellectual, who immersed himself in the atmosphere of the failed May ’68 Revolution in Paris Nanterre University, where he taught in the Department of Ethnology and Comparative Sociology, a department in which Lévi-Strauss was revered as a god. For nearly three years, Mudimbe absorbed what Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut have called ‘la pensée 68’.Footnote ³ He used this opportunity to strengthen his classical training in Romance philology by exploring new trends in philosophy and the human and social sciences. After completing his doctoral thesis, he returned to the Congo, specifically to the University of Lubumbashi. He then became part of the intellectual effervescence that swept through the Congo in the 1970s. However, he was forced into exile in the USA in 1980 to preserve the integrity of his conscience and intellectual integrity.

He taught at several universities, including Paris Nanterre, the University of Louvain, Haverford College, Stanford and Duke University. He was a corresponding member of the Royal Academy for Overseas Sciences (Belgium), a member of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, and served for a long time as chair of the International African Institute (SOAS, University of London).

To conclude, I would like to emphasize the importance of ‘la pensée 68’ in shaping V.-Y. Mudimbe’s thought. In Parables and Fables, which, alongside Tales of Faith, is one of his most autobiographical works, he suggests that his ‘intellectual odyssey’ truly began when he joined the academic community at Paris Nanterre in 1968–69. What follows is this key passage:

The intellectual atmosphere of May ’68 left an impression on and inspired the young Congolese thinker. The spirit of ‘la pensée 68’ drives his theoretical work. In fact, the style of his thought is marked by a passion for the ‘outside’, a passion for the margins – both of academic disciplines and society. Foucault and Deleuze explore what Derrida calls ‘the relevance of the limit’. For them, any groundbreaking approach involves dismantling established classifications and blurring the boundaries between disciplines. This results in the transdisciplinarity that Mudimbe advocates in the first chapter of On African Fault Lines, entitled ‘What is a line?’, while exposing the fragility of disciplinary boundaries and condemning the new mythologies of difference – used as a rationale for creating new academic sub-disciplines.

A critical thinker who, like Mudimbe, practises methodical doubt cannot claim to leave behind dogmas to be preserved or protected against heretics. His task has been to open new horizons for thought and build a more human world, free from the mythologies of difference. To continue his work, the critical and self-reflective attitude, transdisciplinarity, the passion for research with the discipline it involves, and generosity are the tools and attitudes he leaves as a legacy. Generosity, because the great scholar with an insatiable libido sciendi had a generous heart, ready to share knowledge without imposing it and to support the humble whom he affectionately called his parishioners. I remember that afternoon when, passing through Ottawa to give the inaugural lecture at a conference, Mudimbe spent two and a half hours introducing me to the intricacies of African studies. He had a pile of books in his bag. How can one not conclude this meditation on the beautiful story of the tireless researcher and generous man by adopting the title of one of his very last, engaging articles: ‘Debitores sumus’.