Mr. Mudimbe did not apologize. “To the question” What is Africa? “Or ‘How to define African cultures?’ Today he cannot fail to refer to a body of knowledge in which Africa has been subsumed by Western disciplines such as anthropology, history, theology or any other scientific discourse, “he told Callaloo. “And this is the level at which to place my project.”
Valentin-Yves Mudimbe was born on December 8, 1941 in Likasi, in the province of Katanga of what was then the Belgian Congo, to give Tshiluila, a civil official and Victorine Ngalula. At an early age, he said in 1991, he “began to live with the Benedictine monks as a seminarian” in Kakanda, in Congo before Industence. I had no “contact with the external world, even with my family, and in fact I had no vacation.”
When he was 17 or 18, he recalled, he decided to become a monk, this time among the “white parents” Benedictine or Gihindamuyaga, in Rwanda. But in his 20 years, “already completed Francophonized,” he left religious life and entered the University of Lovanium in Kinshasa, graduating in 1966 with a title in Romantic Philology. In 1970 he recovered a doctorate in philosophy and literature from the Catholic University of Leuven, in Belgium. Then he returned to Congo to teach.
In the 1970s, Mr. Mudimbe published, among other writings, three novels, all translated into English: “Between Les Eaux” (1973), published in English as “among the waters”; “Le Bel immonde” (“Before the birth of the moon”, 1976); and “L’Cart” (“The Rift”, 1979). The main characters of these novels “find it impossible to tie me to anything solid,” said academic Nadia Yala Kisukidi in Le Monde.
At the end of the 1970s, when the sacrifice came from Mr. Mobutu to be “in charge of, I suppose, ideology and things like that,” as Mr. Mudimbe says to Callalooo, he reflected that “I did not think about myself and still do not think about myself as a politician.” After he has the same in the United States, his approach resorts to rehearsals and philosophy; Among other books, he wrote “L’Neur du Père” (1982), “Parables and Fables” (1991) and “Tales of Faith” (1997).
