Both photos were taken at Duke University. The one on the left is a self-portrait, taken in my tiny cottage just outside East Campus. The second was taken by my dear colleague Damien Marassa—a fellow student of Mudimbe—at the café in Perkins Library.

(V. Y. Mudimbe passed away on April 22, 2025.)

I took a course with V. Y. Mudimbe while I was a doctoral student at Duke University sometime in the early 2010s. It was a course on Existentialism. We read Descartes and Husserl, but much of the semester was spent on a page-by-page study of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and his play No Exit. It was an intense course, once a week for about three hours, in a sun-drenched classroom on East Campus. Mudimbe taught in the Comparative Literature department. I was in the English Department.

He would come to class carrying browned, curled-edge foolscap papers filled with notes. Most days he wore black. His glasses gave him an attentive look, as if he was always listening for something deeper beneath the surface of things. He often stood facing the window while he spoke, sometimes turning back to look at us, sometimes not. He wrote on the board a lot and used a lot of latin words and phrases. His knowledge of the philosophical archive was deep and beautiful.

I can’t say that taking that class changed my life in some grand, dramatic way. My early years of graduate school were entirely exploratory. I pursued many ideas that ended up being only passing interests—most of canonical European philosophy would fall in this category. The class was fascinating, but what stayed with me were my many small encounters with Mudimbe over the years.

Mudimbe was kind to me. Semesters after I took his course, I would often stop by his office, usually on my way to meet the late Fredric Jameson about something course-related. There weren’t that many African professors at Duke when I was there, and certainly not many in his department or the English Department. Having Mudimbe there mattered to me in ways I only partly understood at the time. For me, a young African woman trying to find my way in the academic world without much of a model in my family or social circles, Mudimbe’s presence meant something. I felt a quiet pride knowing there was a world-renowned African philosopher just down the hall. He felt like an older uncle, distant in some ways, but always welcoming, always willing to listen to my confused ideas about a paper I was working on, always full of wisdom and assurance. On several occasions, I came to him to discuss papers I was writing for Achille Mbembe’s classes. He was always ready to talk about anything African, literature, philosophy, history. I remember talking with him about Ogun, about Achebe—all subjects that would later become the foundation for my own work.

We never spoke about personal things. Much of what I know about him comes from my reading, especially Guarav Desai’s 1991 Callaloo interview with Mudimbe. Desai, himself a former student of Mudimbe, draws out a rare kind of intimacy in their conversation, one that revealed sides of Mudimbe I never saw in the classroom. From that conversation, I learned that Mudimbe was born in the Congo (then Zaire) and spent much of his early life in a Benedictine monastery, eventually becoming a monk. That life defined how he moved through the world. In the 1960s, he pursued advanced studies in France and Belgium. In 1980, when Mobutu invited him to join the government with cabinet-level status, he refused and left the country, choosing to devote himself fully to teaching and scholarship.

In that same interview, Mudimbe said he was an extraordinarily patient person, something he traced back to his time in the monastery. He spoke of living sub specie aeternitatis, meaning from the viewpoint of eternity. You could feel that patience in how he taught. Long pauses. Careful thought. No rushing through lectures. Stopping to give detailed response to any question a student asked. He was serious but never stern. If anyone could be both serious and sweet at the same time, it was Mudimbe.

Once, my friend Matt Omelsky, now a Professor at Rochester University, and I organized an event on Amos Tutuola and invited Mudimbe. He graciously attended and gave the opening remarks. I still remember how Mudimbe spoke about Tutuola with the highest regard. It made an impression on me. I was just beginning my research on Tutuola then, and Mudimbe’s framing gave me the permission to be unapologetic about Tutuola’s genius, as opposed to the condescension that often clouded critical views of Tutuola’s work.

Sometimes I would run into him outside, under a tree near the building where he often taught. He would be standing there, smoking. I’m just an intense person by nature—loud, quick to laugh, fast with a greeting. I would call out to him from halfway across the lawn and walk over, already talking before I reached him. Mudimbe was the opposite: quiet and thoughtful, never in a rush. He would turn toward me with a kind look, and usually it was just me pummeling him with questions and him answering calmly, one after another, taking his time.

It is really special that I got to study with the person who wrote The Invention of Africa, a book that remains, to me, one of the greatest hacks of European civilizational discourse. It’s the book where he exposed how both European and many African scholars are trapped in a framework that invents “Africa” as an eternal exception to Europe. I can’t say I fully grasped the magnitude of that realization when I first met him, but now I see what an extraordinary thing it was to learn from someone who had shifted the terms of modern thought.

When people like Mudimbe pass away, it feels like more than the loss of a person. It feels like a whole tradition is slipping away, a way of thinking, of questioning, of caring for ideas that feels increasingly distant from the fast, surface-driven pace of intellectual life today. That’s not to say our generation doesn’t have its own strengths. Maybe our breadth and adaptability are our superpowers. But when someone like Mudimbe dies, it really does feel like an intellectual mode of being has been lost.

I carry a piece of his quiet, beautiful presence with me, the part of him that many people might not have seen, beyond the reputation and the books. I am grateful for the small, luminous brush with his world—that providence brought me.