Over 100 days, BBC Radio 4 set out to present, in a series of short programmes broadcast from 18 January to 22 October 2010, ‘a history of the world in 100 objects’. What was noteworthy about this enterprise was the use of the indefinite article – ‘a’ history – as it would nowadays indeed be a little presumptuous to embark onthehistory of the world, a bold project which has nonetheless tempted historians in the not too distant past. Interestingly, all the objects selected to testify to this notional ‘history of the world’ come from the British Museum, a...

V. Y. Mudimbe famously referred to Jean-Paul Sartre as ‘an African philosopher’ (IoA, 83) and a ‘philosophe nègre’ (CB, 69). This unilateral africanisation of the Paris-born phenomenologist compels the reader to pause and think about the many fault lines but also intellectual and imaginary overlaps between Africa and Europe. Where does the former start and where does the latter stop? There are of course objective geographical facts and undeniable ethnic markers to corroborate the idea that Africa and Europe are distinct entities with neatly defined boundaries. Mudimbe has, however, shown that human exchanges have the ability to upset the patient...

This chapter will explore Mudimbe’s literary and scholarly activities in the early 1970s in Congo-Zaire and pay particular attention to the hitherto little-studied collection of essays,Autour de la ‘Nation’(1972),² in which the author reflects on the newly introduced ideology of Zairianisation, a process whereby the former name of the country was changed to Zaire in the wake of the Mobutu-led politics of authenticity.³ In the maturation of the author, and in the process that eventually led to his international recognition and prominence, this period is of the utmost significance. In many ways, the corpus that resulted from this...

Anger, hope, Utopia, and radicalism are the four axes of V. Y. Mudimbe’s work in the 1970s. There is in this corpus a marked tendency to exaggerate the West’s supposed oneness and to convey the impression that the world, to use an expression first coined by Chinweizu² and the American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins,³ is made up of the ‘West and the Rest’. This dualistic dimension is all the more surprising given that Mudimbe advocates at the end of bothL’Autre FaceandL’Odeuran epistemological ‘insurrection’ that would reject the very dualistic basis upon which colonialismandneo-colonialism are predicated....

In 1980, V. Y. Mudimbe, who from the late 1960s onwards had also been known as Valentin Mudimbé, moved permanently to the US. The disappearance of the acute accent from his surname is the mark of a very concrete transformation as he was obliged, as will be examined in this chapter, to switch language and develop new strategies to adapt to the sociological and institutional demands of American academia. The consecration in this context came in 1988 with the publication ofThe Invention of Africa. This monograph captured the critical mood of the 1980s and resonated with other projects such...

Tradition is a contentious notion. What does it really mean? Where is the much-vaunted tradition: in the past, in the present, in the future? Its corpses are silent and demand the intervention of patient pathologists who will retrospectively reveal the time and the etiology of their deaths. The morgue is a text but, ultimately, it defies strict generalisations as the singularity of each corpse cannot be subsumed by one unifying narrative. It could be said that V. Y. Mudimbe, Achille Mbembe, and Patrice Nganang are part of a Central African tradition of writing. Interestingly, each author has devoted a significant...

‘Reading Mudimbe’, argues Kai Kresse, ‘means engaging in an intellectual space where African studies just cannot happen in splendid isolation from other disciplines, in disjunction from the European history of the study of humanities’.¹ Indeed, V. Y. Mudimbe conjures up the image of afabulouslyinquisitive reader sifting and collating data across disciplines. The adverb ‘fabulously’ is used here to reiterate the author’s belief that essays and exegeses are also fables, that is,attemptsto translate what can, at best, only be transformed. His presence at the intersection of several ‘libraries’ bears witness to his ambition to read Africa as...