Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, 83, Dies; African Scholar Challenged the West

“If you say the truth of Africa is in the eye of the beholders,” he said, “you have to ask, Why do so many beholders hold that truth?”

Mr. Mudimbe was unapologetic. “To the question ‘what is Africa?’ or ‘how to define African cultures?’ one today cannot but refer to a body of knowledge in which Africa has been subsumed by Western disciplines such as anthropology, history, theology or whatever other scientific discourse,” he told Callaloo. “And this is the level on which to situate my project.”

Valentin-Yves Mudimbe was born on Dec. 8, 1941, in Likasi, in the Katanga Province of what was then the Belgian Congo, to Gustave Tshiluila, a civil servant, and Victorine Ngalula. At a young age, he said in 1991, he “began living with Benedictine monks as a seminarist” in Kakanda, in pre-independence Congo. He had “no contact with the external world, even with my family, and indeed had no vacations.”

When he was 17 or 18, he recalled, he decided to become a monk, this time among the Benedictine “White Fathers” of Gihindamuyaga, in Rwanda. But in his early 20s, already “completely francophonized,” he abandoned the religious life and entered Lovanium University in Kinshasa, graduating in 1966 with a degree in Romance philology. In 1970, he received a doctorate in philosophy and literature from the Catholic University of Louvain, in Belgium. He then returned to Congo to teach.

In the 1970s, Mr. Mudimbe published, among other writings, three novels, all translated into English: “Entre les Eaux” (1973), published in English as “Between the Waters”; “Le Bel Immonde” (“Before the Birth of the Moon,” 1976); and “L’Écart” (“The Rift,” 1979). The principal characters in these novels “find it impossible to tie themselves to anything solid,” the scholar Nadia Yala Kisukidi commented in Le Monde.