Mr. Mudimbe was not excused. “To the question” What is Africa? ” Or “How to define African cultures?” One today can only refer to a set 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 on which to locate 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, in Gustave Tshiliila, a civil servant, and Victorine Ngalula. At a young age, he said in 1991, he “started to live with Benedictine monks as a seminarian” in Kakanda, Congo Pre-independence. He had “no contact with the outside world, even with my family, and did not have a vacation”.
When he was 17 or 18 years old, he recalls, he decided to become a monk, this time among the Benedictine “white fathers” of Gihindamuyaga, Rwanda. But at the beginning of the twenties, already “completely Francophonized”, he abandoned religious life and entered the University of Lovanium in Kinshasa, graduated in 1966 with a diploma in romantic philology. In 1970, he received a doctorate in philosophy and literature from the Catholic University of Louvain, in Belgium. He then returned to the Congo to teach.
In the 1970s, Mr. Mudimbe published, among other writings, three novels, all translated into English: “Between the waters” (1973), published in English as “between waters”; “The beautiful Immond” (“Before the birth of the Moon”, 1976); and “the gap” (“The Rift”, 1979). The main characters of these novels “find impossible to bind to something solid”, the learned Nadia Yala Kisukidi commented in the world.
At the end of the 1970s, when the offer came from Mr. Mobutu to be “in charge, I suppose, ideology and things like that”, as Mr. Mudimbe said to Callaloo, he reflected that “I did not think of myself and I still do not think of myself as a politician”. After being established in the United States, his goal turned to essays and philosophy; Among other books, he wrote “L’Odocieur du Père” (1982), “Parables and fables” (1991) and “Tales of Faith” (1997).
