The Mudimbe Reader

V. Y. Mudimbe, Pierre-Philippe Fraiture,Daniel Orrells

• Editore: University of Virginia Press
• Anno: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780813939124
• Argomento: Littérature
• Categoria: Critique littéraire africaine

A prominent francophone thinker and writer from sub-Saharan Africa, V. Y. Mudimbe is known for his efforts to bridge Western and African modes of knowledge and for his critiques of a range of disciplines, from classics and philosophy to anthropology and comparative literature. The Mudimbe Reader offers for the first time a ground-breaking work of modern intellectual African history from this essential postcolonial thinker, including new translations of essays previously unavailable in English.

Constituting an intellectual history of the humanities in the late twentieth century from an African intellectual's point of view, The Mudimbe Reader provides an introduction and a comprehensive bibliography that frame four thematic gatherings of Mudimbe's writings. Part 1 bears witness to Mudimbe's attempts, as a university professor in the new nation-state of Zaire, to balance the postindependence discourse of authenticity with his training in Western philosophy and philology. Part 2 focuses on Mudimbe's exploration of racial, ethnic, and religious discourses to reflect upon postcolonialism in Zaire and in the United States. In the third part, Mudimbe interrogates ancient Greek and Latin texts as a strategy to engage the legacy of antiquity for European and African modernity. Finally, the book concludes by focusing on visual culture and Mudimbe's recurring attempt to elucidate how African "primitiveness" has been constructed, challenged, dismissed, and reinvented from the Renaissance to the present day.

PART I

THE NATION

These three texts are traversed by one prominent philosophical issue, What is truth?, and by one related epistemological question, What is true knowledge? More precisely, knowledge production, and particularly the factors presiding over the production of knowledge about Africa in and out of Africa, is the major line of inquiry to be identified in these three essays. This epistemological investigation is used as a conduit to explore Africa’s gradual Westernization. Colonial officials and missionaries approached African traditions and customs dualistically, and instrumentalization would often dominate their appraisal of indigenous practices. According to this logic, the integration of Africa into a Western order had to depend upon a strictly selective process that would separate the “wheat from the chaff.” In “Western Legacy and Negro Consciousness,” Mudimbe reverses the perspective and adopts the same strategy regarding the West and its intellectual input. The question is just as instrumental, as he proceeds to single out Western legacies that could contribute to the decolonization of Africa. In this selection, he is particularly scathing about historians and their claim to produce true accounts. Mudimbe posits that African history is, more often than not, “history by analogy,”¹ that is, a discipline in which the primacy of European historical experiences dominates African historicity. Mudimbe also regrets the ideological bias of historians such as Endre Sík, whose “provincial”² reason relies upon a methodology in which Africa is denied its singularity. Thus, by way of history, Mudimbe intimates that the human sciences produce fables and invariably fail to generate universal truths. This idea will be developed in his subsequent books and will constitute the premise of The Invention of Africa.

“The Rigors of Economics” conducts an analogous criticism. Development and decolonization went hand in hand. Newly instituted countries such as Congo-Zaire linked genuine autonomy from the former empire to the creation of strong and independent economic structures, the nationalization of the mining sector by Mobutu being the most concrete sign of this process whereby the UMHK (Union Minière du Haut Katanga, a Belgian mining company) became the Gécamines, on paper a national enterprise which, in reality, became the main instrument of Mobutu’s kleptocratic system.³ Interestingly, Autour de “la Nation,” the collection of essays in which “The Rigors of Economics” first appeared, was published in the Objectifs 80 series, an appellation reflecting the regime’s ambition to put an end to underdevelopment by the 1980s and engender a much-needed economic décollage (takeoff). In his review of Jacques Austruy’s Le Scandale du développement (1965), Mudimbe is able to demonstrate that the regime’s objectives may not succeed as quickly as anticipated. His main point is epistemological, and he argues, by way of Austruy’s careful demonstration, that development is a Western construct in which a dualistic relationship between developers and “developees” is maintained. The main target of his politically committed critique is the econometric reason underpinning development. Despite the rationality of its methodology, econometrics remains a very blunt instrument often used to comply with capitalist (and later neoliberal) agendas defined elsewhere in the rich West by agents of the IMF, “structural adjustment programs,” and the World Bank, who often fail to abide by their pledge to respect a “nation’s right to economic self-determination” (OAF, 79). Here too ideology is shown to have contaminated science.

Political commitment can also be identified in the other two essays. In “Western Legacy and Negro Consciousness,” there is a sense that the Congolese is a “yet-to-be,” that is, has the ability to act as a free agent and shape the future. Indeed, this article is infused with Sartrean phraseology and perspectives on the emancipation of the Third World. In the late 1960s Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon were widely read, as Mudimbe showed in a survey that he conducted among Congolese intellectuals.⁴ The focus on authentic Bantu culture is used as a springboard to advocate Sartrean authenticity and overcome, in the name of individual freedom, the ontological stasis inherent in Mobutu’s promotion of a return to authentic (communal) African values.

“A Meeting with L. G. Damas,” on the other hand, serves to challenge persistent myths regarding the centrality of the Senghor-Césaire-Damas trinity during the initial stages of negritude. Damas highlights the role of other individuals such as Birago Diop and René Maran. The chiaroscuro portrayal of Damas aptly conveys his disillusionment with some contemporary black intellectuals and their misrepresentation of the ideals underlying negritude. In “Western Legacy,” Mudimbe refuses to regard negritude as a purely Franco-African phenomenon. Negritude is shown to be the product of a combination of cultural factors and influences from America and, more surprisingly, from Germany. Indeed, he ascribes the emergence of negritude to what Claude Digeon termed “the German Crisis of French thought.” By that, he signifies that a body of German ideas about the nation and the community was gradually integrated at the turn of the century by French thinkers and philosophers and black intellectuals residing in Paris after the First World War.⁵ Thus the development of negritude reflects very specific intellectual circumstances and was from the time of its inception conditioned by global debates on race and ethnic identities. Mudimbe announces his ambition to continue the fight of its precursors and to adapt it to the present situation (i.e., to Africa in the 1970s). The pessimistic tone of Carnets d’Amérique, and its recurrent focus on issues of cultural and racial alienation, are reminiscent of the analyses conducted by Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth.

Let us look more closely at these three essays.

“Western Legacy and Negro Consciousness” resonates with earlier attempts on the part of individuals such as Joseph Ki-Zerbo⁶ and Cheikh Anta Diop (1955), and more generally with the generations of artists and intellectuals who pioneered Présence Africaine, to decolonize black, or “negro,” culture, historiography, and politics. This early article already displays Mudimbean characteristics. There is a tendency to be suggestive rather than explicatory and to interrogate vast corpora not so much to break down their constitutive elements as to affirm the complexity of the object of study under examination. What is Africa now? is the main issue addressed in this essay. This question, argues Mudimbe, cannot be easily answered, as it is itself subsumed by another more fundamental but equally loaded question: What are civilizations? Mudimbe surmises that if their reality cannot be denied, they are often pliable constructs evoked to serve ideological aims. His reference to Hendrik Brugmans’s Les Origines de la civilisation européenne is indicative of this tendency. Brugmans’s attempt to define the nature of European civilization does not produce any clear-cut outcome. Like the other historians cited in this article, he merely argues, as Mudimbe points out, that civilizations are recognizable on the basis of “the existence of certain unifying traits beyond the many divergences” (MR, 13), in this instance, the different “heritages” (or legacies) underpinning Europe and the West. This statement is hardly conclusive and demonstrates the degree to which available historical data can be used to celebrate or mitigate the significance of civilizations. Brugmans’s position is in this respect very interesting, as he was, at the same time, a respected scholar and a political activist within the “European Movement,” a lobbying association created after the Second World War to promote European integration.

The year in which Mudimbe’s article was published (1968) coincides with a time of high convergence between French intellectual life—from the human sciences to philosophy—and Marxism. Mudimbe’s account is saturated with Marxist references. There is no doubt that he is here sympathetic to the new scientific rigor brought about by the reappraisal of Marx by thinkers such as Louis Althusser and that he welcomes the adoption of historical materialism by a new generation of historians of Africa.⁷ He is nonetheless also aware that the “economic interpretation” informing Marxist analyses of class struggles and historical changes is not devoid of “ideological opportunism.” Via the works of Endre Sík and Jean-Jacques Goblot, Mudimbe nuances the contribution of Marxist thought to African history.

Endre Sík (1891–1978), the Hungarian historian, was a pioneer of Marxist African studies, a domain that he attempted to systematize as early as the late 1920s when he was a political refugee in the USSR.⁸ Interestingly, his History of Black Africa (1966) was completed in Moscow in the late 1930s and early 1940s and not published until twenty years later, with no apparent revision.⁹ This delay may account for some of the naive and stereotypical views expressed by Sík on precolonial Africa. “The majority of African peoples,” he argues, lived a “barbaric life” and in “complete isolation” from the rest of the world until their “encounter with Europeans.” The tone is also very dogmatic, and Sík struggles to define imperialism, which he, after Lenin, lumps together a little too hastily with “world capitalism” to denounce “the monstrous historic crimes” committed by this system.¹⁰ It is not that he is wrong but, in the midst of the cold war and Soviet imperialist expansion in the Third World, one would have expected a greater degree of scientific scrutiny. Mudimbe’s own criticism of Sík’s work focuses on the historian’s inability to read Africa in its own terms: Sík submits Africa to thought procedures and relations predetermined by historical materialism. Ultimately, Mudimbe is of the view that Sík’s scientific method marks the return of a new type of ethnocentrism or suprarationalism, since it “transposes the universal to the particular, only to expel the particular from the universal” (MR, 15).

Jean-Jacques Goblot’s analysis of the concept of civilization offers, according to Mudimbe, a more nuanced perspective on the encounters between Africa and the West. Mudimbe refers here to a series of articles published by Goblot in 1967 in the Marxist journal La Pensée.¹¹ Goblot (1931–2009) wishes to depart from the “theoretical sclerosis” that has “hindered the fecundity of historical materialism for too long.” (1967: 133:5; trans. eds.) He is cautiously critical of Stalinism and Stalin’s own schématisme and tendency (in Dialectical and Historical Materialism)¹² to accord a universal value to a formulaic and “suprahistorical” theory of historical development in which non-European modes of production are usually dismissed as aberrant (5–10). Mudimbe is eager to embrace this idea and endorse the points made by Goblot on the necessity of adopting a less tyrannical model so as to approach civilizations not as monoliths but “in terms of imprints or legacies.” This important focus enables Mudimbe to move away from a monopolistic conception of civilizations and to argue that sub-Saharan Africa, albeit on the receiving end of the “epistemological” and “alphabetic” revolutions mentioned here, should not be regarded as a historically passive entity. By way of Goblot, Mudimbe is arguing for the promotion of less partisan and chauvinistic practices on the part of historians. Civilizations are not set entities but result from complex exchanges and mutations in which cultural and technological monopolies become blurred when scrutinized more closely. The genesis of negritude, as mentioned earlier, reveals, beyond the expected Franco-African dialogues, that Francophone African intellectuals during the interwar period also experienced “the German crisis of French thought.”

In his examination of the factors that facilitated the introduction of the European alphabet as a result of modern colonialism, Mudimbe is keen to dismiss the traditional opposition between preliterate and literate civilizations. Instead, he focuses on the longue durée and the fact that this alphabetical revolution, which started thousands of years ago in Europe, in Africa, and in Asia, constitutes in fact “a fortunate short-circuit of history” resulting from “transfers, displacements, and ruptures” in which the determining role of Europe, albeit crucial for contemporary Africa, needs to be somewhat relativized. Ultimately, Mudimbe attempts, like Lévi-Strauss in Race and History,¹³ to attenuate the ethnic weight of human progress. In his conclusion, Mudimbe is eager to reiterate the significance of “Western legacies” in the shaping of contemporary “negro consciousness.” Indeed he is keen to explore the possible impact of Marxist thought on postindependence African politics. This conclusion is clearly aimed at new African leaders—Mobutu, of course, but also Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Ivory Coast and Ahmed Sékou Touré of Guinea-Conakry—and their tendency to celebrate essential African communal values and favor “the [African] legacy via sentimental choices” (MR, 23). Their dismissal of the individual at the expense of a timeless “already whole being” is in his view very dangerous, as it contributes to the consolidation of autocratic rule and, even more crucially, restricts the possibility of African development in the foreseeable future. Just as Mudimbe expresses concern about the dogmatism of certain Marxist thinkers, so he quietly voices his worries about the rigidity of some of Africa’s new leaders.

“The Rigors of Economics” is built upon analogous premises. This piece is the second part of a chapter published in Autour de “la Nation” entitled “Western Legacy and Negro Consciousness,” the first part being a verbatim reproduction of the original article that has just been discussed here. Although its focus is very different, this review of Jacques Austruy’s Le Scandale du développement (1965) provides another reflection upon the power of Euro-American academic ethnocentrism and economists’ “egocentric deformation.” Austruy (1930–2010) contends that scientific procedures are evoked to implement ideology-driven programs. The idea that development, as conceived in the West, may not be the most “rational” course of action was defended by Austruy throughout his career, not only in the academic journal Revue Tiers Monde but also in monographs such as L’Islam face au développement économique.¹⁴ As a politically committed intellectual, Mudimbe refutes the falsely universal arguments put forward by experts in econometrics and instead highlights the latter’s tendency to unleash epistemological violence.¹⁵

Austruy’s book is unusual in that it contains commentaries on Austruy’s own findings written by Ga...