ADEKEYE ADEBAJO: Born into colonialism, Mudimbe tried to refashion Africa
A chain-smoking polyglot, Valentin-Yves Mudimbe was best known for his ‘The Invention of Africa’
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...
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