Mr. Mudimbe was firm in his perspective. He stated, “When addressing the questions ‘what is Africa?’ or ‘how can we define African cultures?’, one must consider the body of knowledge that has placed Africa within Western fields like anthropology, history, and theology,” as he explained to Callaloo. “This is where my work finds its context.”
Valentin-Yves Mudimbe was born on December 8, 1941, in Likasi, located in Katanga Province, which was then part of the Belgian Congo. He was the son of Gustave Tshiluila, a civil servant, and Victorine Ngalula. He noted in 1991 that at a young age he “began living among Benedictine monks as a seminarist” in Kakanda, during the time before independence. He experienced “no interaction with the outside world, not even with my family, and indeed had no vacations.”
At around 17 or 18, he remembered choosing to become a monk again, this time with the Benedictine “White Fathers” in Gihindamuyaga, Rwanda. However, in his early 20s, fully immersed in Francophone culture, he left the monastic life and enrolled at Lovanium University in Kinshasa, where he graduated in 1966 with a degree in Romance philology. By 1970, he had earned a doctorate in philosophy and literature from the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, after which he returned to Congo to teach.
During the 1970s, Mr. Mudimbe authored several works, including three novels that were translated into English: “Entre les Eaux” (1973), known in English as “Between the Waters”; “Le Bel Immonde” (“Before the Birth of the Moon,” 1976); and “L’Écart” (“The Rift,” 1979). The main characters in these novels often struggle to find any real connection, as noted by scholar Nadia Yala Kisukidi in Le Monde.
At the close of the 1970s, when Mr. Mobutu presented Mr. Mudimbe with a role involving “ideological responsibilities,” as he described to Callaloo, he admitted, “I never viewed myself, and still don’t, as a politician.” After settling in the United States, he shifted his work toward essays and philosophy, writing several notable books including “L’Odeur du Père” (1982), “Parables and Fables” (1991), and “Tales of Faith” (1997).
