Thirty-three years after its publication in English, the book by the Congolese philosopher and novelist is published for the first time in French by Présence africaine. An essential work to remove Africa from colonial thought.
Thirty-three years after its publication in English, the book of the Congolese philosopher and novelist is published for the first time in French by Présence africaine. An essential work to remove Africa from colonial thinking.
Jeune Afrique 28/12/2021| Mamadou Diouf | Teacher at Columbia University (New York), Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies – Department of History
Thirty-three years after its publication in English, the book by the Congolese philosopher and novelist is published for the first time in French by Présence africaine. An essential work for removing Africa from colonial thinking.
It is an ambitious venture, inaugurated in essays and novels that are performative stagings of scholarly ideas. Published in English in 1988 in the United States, The Invention of Africa. Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge, by Congolese writer and philosopher Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, has just been published in French by Présence africaine. The work has acquired, in academic circles, the quality of an obligatory reference in the territories of African and postcolonial studies. It accompanies in these fields Michel Foucault’s L’Archéologie du savoir and L’Orientalisme. The East created by the West by Edward Said.
Translated at a time when debates on postcolonies and decoloniality are raging in the French public space, the book helps to better understand the way in which representations of Africa are constructed and their effects. For Mudimbe, France has decolonized its African empire without decolonizing its own thinking, and continues to convey these images of a fantasized Africa. The questions at the heart of his reflection reveal the operations of knowledge production on Africa and outline proposals for emancipation.
Deconstructing the social sciences
Mudimbe set out to clear the territory of African studies of the inventions of Africa. In a scholarly manner, he systematically tears apart the multiple images of the black continent conveyed by colonization. To do this, he calls upon the various registers of art, literature, history, religion, philosophy, sociology, geography and anthropology.
The clever articulations of the different disciplines make the extraordinary richness of the epistemological operations carried out at the intersection of the social sciences and the humanities. The author mercilessly tracks down the figures of Africa at the heart and on the margins of the great European texts that install it in the geography of the world. A negrophobic Europe, during the 19th century, then negrophilic, at the beginning of the 20th century, arrogant and condescending at the center of the human; it erases the European who becomes the Man, and Europe, the singular site of his realization.
MUDIMBE MERCILESSLY TRACKS DOWN THE FANTASIZED FIGURES OF AFRICA IN THE HEART AND ON THE MARGINS OF THE GREAT EUROPEAN TEXTS
Mudimbe distinguishes three literatures that contributed to the invention of a primitive Africa (from the 17th to the 19th centuries): the exotic accounts of travelers, philosophical interpretations relating to the hierarchy of civilizations, and the anthropological search for the primitive and primitivity. The reflection is focused, in the first chapter, on « [the] fact that civilization has proceeded for a long time from the European home, has maintained the illusion that European culture was by right a universal culture « . She discovers the consequences of the invention of history, geography and ethnology in the interpretation of non-Western cultural traditions. Mudimbe is interested in the Christian discourse as a discourse immersed in the Western episteme. The impossibility of removing it from its Western epistemological site results in an impossible Africanization.
Current debates
These debates, as much about the Africanization of Islam or the Islamization of Africa as about the Christianization of Africa or the Africanization of Christianity, remain topical. They are still fueled today by the need (or not) to decouple Islam from Arab culture and Christianity from Western culture, in order to validate their universal mission. African Catholics participated in these jousts, contributing decisively to the convocation of the Second Vatican Council. Mudimbe confronts them.
To interrogate the history of African ideologies, he takes a tour of black humanities based on the pioneering work of Edward Wilmot Blyden. He would be, if we give credit to Léopold Sédar Senghor, « the precursor of negritude and African personality […], the ideological father of West African unity […] and his pan-Negro ideology, the most important ancestor of pan-Africanism ». The reflection continues with a rigorous reading of the primitive philosophies of Father Placide Tempels, anthropologists such as Marcel Griaule, Germaine Dieterlen, Mary Douglas, Jacques Jérôme Pierre Maquet, or Kofi Abrefa Busia, Alexis Kagame, Paul Mercier… who analyze the myth as a socio-cultural code
THE SECTION ON « HORIZONS OF KNOWLEDGE » LIFTS THE VEIL ON THE DEFORMITY AND INCOHERENCE OF KNOWLEDGE IN AFRICA, FROM AFRICA
Mudimbe thus summons the productions and commentaries of Africans (generally absent or marginal in the literature), to appreciate « African philosophy » and the facilitators of the deconstruction of the social sciences that highlight the drifts and limitations of African studies. The philosopher thus opens a path for exploring the epistemological foundations of African discourse. In his various operations of deconstruction of Christianity, he raises the haunting question of the compatibility of its epistemological foundations with African cultures. This is why African gnosis finds its most impressive expression in history-anthropology. Like all history, it is indeed the manifestation of the violence of the « Western self ». In counterpoint, history becomes a legend, an invention of the present.
Establishing black humanities
The detour opens into a rich analysis of African theologies and the « narrative for the self » as a critical means of understanding the past and its failures, in order to be able to act differently in the future. « The section on « horizons of knowledge » lifts the veil on the deformity and incoherence of knowledge in Africa from Africa, evidenced by an examination of the constitution, organization, paradoxical richness, and scope of knowledge itself, whose roots go back as far as the Roman and Greek periods and which attest to incompleteness and fundamentally skewed perspectives. »
Mudimbe does not straddle the colonial moment. Nor does he bypass it to expose it. He settles in the heart of the « colonial library » and uses its instruments in a different way to put his knowledge to the test and to urge Africa to get to work and establish black humanities. Does he believe in a return to ancient Egypt – to which Cheikh Anta Diop calls to nourish an African renaissance – or in the construction of archives of world time – which do not open with colonization but with the ancient and Arab world – to renovate a universal polluted by Europe in its imperial expansion?
THE BOOK IS A LESSON OF PEDAGOGY TO ENGAGE WITHOUT COMPLEX AND IN AN ERUDITE WAY THE TIME OF THE WORLD
Music, dance, literature and sports strongly present this multiple Africa whose strength has been the administration of diversity and the refusal of rigid ethnic borders. At a time when Europe is plunging back into multiculturalism – read again some of the speeches of Nicolas Sarkozy (France), Angela Merkel (Germany) and David Cameron (Great Britain) between 2007 and 2011 and the rantings of the left, the last bastion of an assimilating republic, one and indivisible – through a geography of « us » and « the barbarians », Mudimbe’s book is a lesson in pedagogy to engage the time of the world in an uninhibited and scholarly way.
Our time, the time of « métissage » (Léopold Sédar Senghor), of « the rendezvous of giving and receiving » (Aimé Césaire) and of the Tout-monde (Édouard Glissant). To turn one’s back on a history reduced by Europe to political affairs for a history of daily life (Rabindranath Tagore). His invitation: to study « with the passion proper to the Other, to this being who has been until now a simple object of the discourses of the human and social sciences. A feat that, if we are to believe Toni Morrison (preface to The Radiance of the King), was accomplished by Camara Laye with Le Regard du roi.
