In 1988, V.Y. Mudimbe published his classic The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Other of Knowledge. The following year, The Invention won the Herskovits Award (now the ASA Best Book Prize). In the same intellectual tradition as Edward Said’s Orientalism, The Invention seeks to deconstruct Western constructions of the Other.

Mudimbe’s intellectual legacy goes deeper. Mudimbe seeks to reconfigure ‘the geography of a discourse’ where Africa has been constructed, indeed invented, as a site of difference, a negated double of the Western imagination starting from the fifteenth century. What is Africa? And what does it mean to be African? Mudimbe intimates that these categories are produced from a discourse, mediated by power, one that is not only traceable to sociohistorical relations but also one with epistemological roots. He performs an archaeological excavation aimed at “the foundations of discourse about Africa.” Apart from the Foucauldian resonances of The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (1982), the bibliography below provides a glimpse of an African discourse ranging from Afrocentrism and revisionist history to “ethnophilosophy” and new traditions of reinventing Africa in the postcolonial era.

  1. Cheik Anta Diop—The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality (1974)
  2. Pauline Hountondji—African Philosophy: Myth and Reality with Introduction by Abiola Irele (1996)
  3. Wole Soyinka—Of Africa (2012)

Against the claim that Africa does not have nor is capable of civilization (social, intellectual, or technical attainments), Afrocentrists like Senegalese physicist Cheik Anta Diop were committed to the rehabilitation of African traditional cultures and the projection of a positive image of Black people. For Diop, ancient Egypt was a Black civilization so powerful it influenced Greek culture. Whereas Mudimbe hacked at the foundation of the invention of Africa by European inventors, he was aware of the African inventors of African traditions and philosophy. In Of Africa, Wole Soyinka adopts the term fictioning to denote this invention and in a chapter calls the African inventors “Children of Herodotus.”

Before The Invention was African Philosophy. Both Mudimbe and Hountondji aimed at Father Placide Tempel’s Bantu Philosophy (1969), a classic of African philosophy. Tempel mused that the Bantu have a philosophy, a way that they make sense of the world, and in this way, the Belgian missionary priest purported to rebut the “primitive” value that European thinkers like Levy-Bruhl assigned to Africa. But at the roots of Bantu Philosophy, Hountondji finds an anomaly where ethnology is conflated with philosophy to produce “ethnophilosophy.” In it, Hountondji locates a popular philosophy of a collective, ideological unconscious that we must separate from “strict” (scientific and dialectical) philosophy. From its European originators, ethnophilosophy did no more than characterized Africa and turned it over for effective European tutelage, exploitation, and colonization. In the hands its African proponents, ethnophilosophy perpetuated an ideological myth of cultural authenticity and essentialism.

Other thinkers have taken up Mudimbe’s charge to investigate an African gnosis, an active mode of knowing. Here are some of them:

  1. Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí—The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (1997)
  2. Gurav Desai—Subject to Colonialism: African Self-Fashioning and the Colonial Library (2001)
  3. Felwine Sarr—Afrotopia (2019)
  4. Minna Salami—Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone (2020)

Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí applies the invention paradigm to gender, arguing that gender is not a central organizing principle among the Oyo-Yoruba, and that biological body is not always social. Seniority, rather than gender, organized social relations, Oyěwùmí contends. While this point has been critically reviewed (e.g., Bibi Bakare-Yusuf 2004), and may been seen as instituting another invention, the implication of patriarchy in African societies is undeniable. Minna Salami calls for increasing our emotional intelligence as an active mode of disrupting “Europatriarchal Knowledge.”

A key concept in Mudimbe’s scholarship is the “colonial library.” Rather than a physical structure, the colonial library is the set of written, visual, and discursive representations that have jointly invented Africa as a location of difference. The term recurs in The Invention and The Idea of Africa (1994). But it is in Tales of Faith: Religion as Political Performance in Central Africa (1997) that Mudimbe defines the concept as “a body of knowledge generalizing conceptual rules, some historical paradigms and a political project, in which the non-Western ‘something’ unveils itself as lacking the Western norm, and thus offers itself as an object for conversion, transmutation and standardization.” From a vast archive of romance fiction, travelers’ and missionaries’ accounts, anthropological fieldnotes, photographs, paintings, postcards, and ethnological exhibitions was formed an order of knowledge through which Black and non-European peoples were signified as primitive and savages. Mudimbe demonstrated that along with a spatial occupation, colonialism dominated and reorganized the minds of its African subjects through the colonial library. Gurav Desai reframes the colonial library as “essentially open,” a site of contestation. In this way, Desai’s project reimagines the colonial encounter as co-constitutive rather than unidirectional.

Felwine Sarr meditates on what it would mean to think Africa into the future. He proposes Afrotopia, “an active utopia that takes as its task the cultivation of vast and open spaces of bountiful possibles in order to help them flourish.” If the past marks Africa as a site of displacement and alienation, the antithesis of development, technology, and economic viability, Sarr argues that Africa needs a utopia, a tangible, liberated future that African intellectuals, thinkers, and creatives can make possible.

Perhaps a place to begin exploring V.Y. Mudimbe’s intellectual legacy and impact on African Studies is the philosopher’s own intellectual biography. “I am the product of my own time and my space and my conscience, or if you prefer, my consciousness,” he said in an interview titled “V.Y. Mudimbe: A Portrait” (Desai 1990). There, Mudimbe reflected on his personal and intellectual life: growing up in Belgian Congo, learning patience as a Benedictine, meeting Foucault, leaving Congo for the United States, and being an agnostic. Pierre-Phillipe Fraiture and Daniel Orrells’ The Mudimbe Reader (2016) contains selected writings with a rich introduction. D.A. Masolo’s “An Anthropology of African Knowledge: A Discussion of V.Y. Mudimbe” (1991) is powerful reflection and review of Mudimbe’s philosophical thoughts.