Congolese-American philosopher, poet, linguist and novelist Valentin-Yves Mudimbe died on April 21 in the US at the age of 83. A chain-smoking polyglot said to have mastered 10 languages, he was best known for his 1988 book, The Invention of Africa, which sought to deconstruct the “colonial library”: the negative, stereotypical writing about Africa by Western anthropologists, missionaries and explorers who were leading advocates of the imperial project.

The study won the prestigious Herskovits prize in the US for the best book published in African Studies. Mudimbe built on Palestinian-American Edward Said’s 1978 Orientalism, which deconstructed the Western cultural imperial project in the Arab world.

Mudimbe was born on December 8 1941 in colonial Belgium’s Union Minière du Haut-Katanga compound, where his father worked as a fitter for the mining giant. At the age of 10, he was taken into a seminary by Benedictine monks, who immersed him in the study of Greek and Latin Classics. He joined the “White Fathers” in Rwanda to become a monk at the age of 17.

The Catholic Church backed Hutu hegemony in the country, and after massacres of Tutsis in 1959, Valentin participated with other monks in burying the dead. This incident so traumatised him that he left the church to study romance philology at Lovanium University in Kinshasa, then sociology and linguistics at the University of Paris, before obtaining his doctorate in philosophy at Belgium’s Catholic University of Louvain.

Mudimbe returned home to teach, becoming dean of the faculty of letters at the National University of Zaire in Lubumbashi, attracting to the leftist campus prominent scholars such as the prophets of the Dakar School of Culture, Cheikh Anta Diop and Théophile Obenga. He published three novels — Between Tides (1973), The Birth of the Moon (1976), and The Rift (1979) — which dealt with the colonial legacy and postcolonial nation-building challenges, as well as five poetry collections.

Asked by the Western-installed Zairean dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, to join the one-party state’s central committee as head of ideology, Mudimbe instead followed his professorial wife, Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi (who teaches at Stanford), to the US on her Fulbright scholarship to Haverford College in Pennsylvania in 1979, eventually landing a job at the same institution.

He finally had the space to publish his critiques of the link between colonial knowledge and power inspired by Martinique’s Frantz Fanon and French intellectuals Michel Foucault and Jean-Paul Sartre. He went on to Duke University, with a stint at Stanford. His 1994 The Idea of Africa continued many of the themes of his 1988 classic, and he spent much of his career proselytising for the principles in both books.

Mudimbe’s language could be turgid and impenetrable. He was also criticised for relying heavily on the very Western epistemologies he condemned. Like many francophone African intellectuals, he bought into the assimilationist French civilising mission in his 20s. His Belgian biographer, Pierre-Philippe Fraiture, described him as “a tortured man torn between two intellectual legacies”.

As Mudimbe noted: “Europeans have invented Africa, but, today, Africans are inventing their own Africa.” He insisted on academic rigour and warned against essentialist and nostalgic traps, as well as discarding the Western canon wholesale. Though pointing the way forward, he did not fulfil his ambition of creating an African humanities epistemology to replace the prejudiced European-imposed one. He thus demolished the Eurocentric colonial library without building a postcolonial pan-African one.

Mudimbe donated his 8,000-volume personal library to his former university in Lubumbashi, which had earlier named its library after him. Congolese scholar-diplomat Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja described his close friend of five decades as “a baobab of African philosophy”.

This article was first published by the Business Day, South Africa, on 19 May 2025