The Invention of Africa

Introduction

Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, a Congolese philosopher, novelist and poet teaching in the United States, published the book in 1988 with the subtitle “Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge”. Following Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge, he examines the “colonial library” – travel accounts, missionary writings, anthropology – that constructed Africa as primitive and other. He shows that even African discourses about Africa, from Tempels and Kagame through Négritude to the debate between ethnophilosophy and its critics, remained tied to this order of knowledge. Mudimbe asks how an African gnosis might speak without merely reproducing Western categories. The book shared the Herskovits Award of the African Studies Association in 1989.

Connections

Builds on

• The Order of Things1966 · Michel Foucault
• African Philosophy: Myth and Reality1976 · Paulin Hountondji

Criticizes

• Bantu Philosophy1945 · Placide Tempels