OBAFEMI AWOLOWO

UNIVERSITY
NAME
AKINLOYE ADEDOLAPO CLEMENT

DEPARTMENT
POLITICAL SCIENCE

FACULTY
SOCIAL SCIENCES

MATRIC NO
POL/2017/025

COURSE CODE / TITLE

POL 308
POLITICS OF DEVELOPMENT AND
UNDERDEVELOPMENT

LECTURER
DR. AFOLABI

QUESTION
MUDIMBE V.Y “THE INVENTION OF AFRICA"
Introduction
Who is the African? The one described by history books or the one born within an African
culture? It is common place to observe that history books on our library shelves are authored not
by Africans, but by Western writers. Can their account be trusted? At the wake of colonialism,
Europe, inspired by the culture of documentation, went ahead to study African cultures. Many
Westerners that stepped foot on African soil engaged in the study of the behaviour, religion and
tradition of the Blacks who they subjugated and took as slaves. They employed anthropological
and historical methods in documentation of their findings. The challenge for the twentieth
century African is to ascertain the accuracy of what has been presented as the African
experience. How much of our experience as Africans is really documented in these history
books? It is no news that these history books have formed part of our school curriculum in social
studies and history. Have we over the years been telling ourselves and generations who their
ancestors were or “what” the West say they were?
In this essay, we shall try give a summary of the five chapters of V. Y. Mudimbe’s work The
Invention of Africa Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. The book explores the
anthropological and archaeological dimension of African gnosis. What has been, and can be
known of Africa and the various questions it has provoked. We shall commence by exploring the
colonist agenda in engaging in this enterprise that has today turned Africa into a dependent and
unproductive continent. Then we shall take a cursory look at the flaws of the method applied in
studying Africa and arriving at a believed and propagated African Experience. What is the
position of African thinkers of the twentieth century on this issue?
Mudimbe’s book, The invention of Africa, is groundbreaking work. He uses Foucauldian
analysis to reveal Africa as a coherent system of knowledge – an archaeology – assembled from
a colonising structure ensconced in oppositional knowledges that teleologically codified African
normative cultural inferiority and created new social and historical identities for Africans in
ways that projected Western desires. The assemblage of knowledges drew upon the European
imperial project, Western philosophy and its Eurocentric gaze, colonial discourses, functionalist
anthropological taxonomies and Christian missiological praxis, which were underwritten by
discrepant power. Collectively, the knowledges produced a self-serving Africa, an Africa and
Africans whose Cartesian alterity unpardonably deviated from the Western paradigm of history.
In terms of comprehending the historical architecture of Africanness, Mudimbe’s seminal
contribution lies, in part, in the discursive mapping of the normative construction of Africanness
in colonial discourses. His work can be read as a dialectical discourse of identity in which
Mudimbe analyses for us the politics of otherness and its specific relation to the historical
category of African. Of the making of Africanness in colonial discourses, Mudimbe says:
In fact, from a more general historical frame, one can observe three complementary genres of
‘speeches’ contributing to the invention of a primitive Africa: the exotic text on savages,
represented by travelers’ reports; the philosophical interpretations about a hierarchy of
civilizations; and the anthropological search for primitiveness. The complementarity of these
speeches is obvious. It is perceived as a unity in the Western consciousness. The exotic text
dominates in the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century, it complements Enlightenment
classifications of peoples and civilization. In the nineteenth century, an ideology of conquest
appears in explorers’ sagas, anthropologists’ theories, and the implementation of colonial
policy. However, until the beginning of the scramble for Africa, historical distinctions of genres
can only be relative.
In this passage Mudimbe is deconstructing the trajectory of the colonial normative gaze on what,
ultimately, would be thoroughly raced and inferiorised Africans. The gaze went through a
purposeful transformation, eventually congealing in an ideology of otherness which gave
imperial licence to colonisation and subjugation. In the transformed gaze the concept of
‘primitiveness’, as etymologically meaning ‘originary’, was transformed into a discovery of
innately culturally inferior people: a ‘savage’ people normatively in need of rescue and
civilisation. The colonial gaze, which was built on a colonising, dichotomous structure,
represents the first experience of large-scale globalisation on the continent. It was a gaze
culturally driven by a notion of ‘universal civilization’ whose locus was indisputably Europe as
maker of world history.
The colonising structure spoke to an epistemological model then functioning in the West (and in
many ways still is), which renounced all that was African even if the model was external to
Africans. This episteme, which Engelbert Mveng, a theologian, described as epitomising‘
anthropological poverty’, used inferiorisation and fetishisation to unequivocally condemn
everything to do with the being of Africans – their identities, physical appearances, histories,
cultures, ethnicities, spiritualities, creativity and voice. In The wretched of the earth, Fanon
wrote: Colonialism is not simply content to impose its rule upon the present and the future of a
dominated country.
Colonialism is not satisfied merely withholding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s
brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed
people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it.
Echoing Mveng and Fanon, Wynter highlights that colonial difference meant much more than
merely disregarding ‘native’ gnosis. It was an epistemological disregard of the human being, of
the mode of being of black Africans. This disregard created space for an epochal re-description
of Africa as ‘primordial chaos’ and Africans as the ‘acme of the savage’.
Whereas prior to colonisation, what was different between European culture and the cultures
European explorers and travellers perceived as‘exotic’, the colonial project called for a
transformed discourse with unmistakable predatory intentions. African difference would no
longer be neutral difference but thoroughly debased difference using language and classificatory
systems that come with the authority of being part of a dominant discourse. At a cultural level
African difference was rendered as not just difference but ‘discovery’ of peoples exhibiting
absolute, wild and oppositional binary difference that had to be tamed and domesticated. African
difference called for the unequivocal establishment of a violent hierarchy between European
civilisation and African civilisational deficit, as is apparent, for example, in the attempt by
missionaries to empty African religions of all pneumatological meaning through a Manichean
dualism built around ‘African’ as a thoroughly ‘spoiled’ cultural identity.

Anthropology And The Production Of African Cultural Alterity

In juxtaposition to Christianity, anthropology is a field in which African life worlds were
emptied of all meaning in the service of the colonizing structure. The anthropology practised on
sub-Saharan Africans largely aligned itself with a discourse anchored in evolutionary
assumptions that posited a radical difference between the ‘West’ and ‘primitives’. This
difference, as with the overarching colonial discourses, translated into a grand dichotomy
between intellectual, spiritual reasoning and rational(logical), civilised reasoning on the one hand
and irrational (pre-logical),uncivilised reasoning on the other.
To the lesser half of the dichotomy European anthropological discourses assigned not just
Africans or Negroes, but other peoples including ‘American Indians, Australian Black fellows,
Chinese, Melanesians, and Polynesians’. The dichotomy was purposeful. It served the colonial
project by giving legitimacy to the notion of the ‘white man’s burden’; the duty of Europeans to
civilize Africans and uplift them according to their ‘natural’, meaning racial capabilities. In
civilisational reasoning, as Mudimbe notes, the dichotomy was also influential in producing a
colonial library to give authenticity to complementary ‘primitive philosophy’. It is a genre of
philosophy which mimicked Darwinian evolutionary science and the reversal of time in
anachronistic space. It purported to express a world in which Africans were incapable of
articulating discursive verbal statements– the universal grammar of abstract thought – precisely
because their worldview, in essence, was symbolic and ritualistic.
The seminal contribution of Mudimbe’s work in The invention of Africalies in his effort to
deconstruct a deliberately constructed dichotomy, laying bare its cultural imperialistic
provenance, as well as in his effort to construct, however incomplete or contestable, a
methodological framework for assembling an African gnosis through restructured
anthropological methodologies. Mudimbe’s attempt at constructing a universal method for
African knowledge systems – an African ‘order of things’ with its own rationality – is mainly
through a critique of Eurocentric anthropology as one of the main archives that was used to
acquire knowledge about Africans. In welcoming Mudimbe’s contribution, it is also important to
highlight at the outset that there are reductionist pitfalls in any attempt to search for an‘authentic’
African episteme.
A search for authenticity has its place in building a sense of wholeness for a social group. An
ever-present pitfall, however, is that a backward-looking approach might incline us towards
recovering a narrated past through an a historical approach that forces us to reduce the
heterogeneity of African cultures to a common denominator in search of an African
Weltanschauung. If the search for authentic African rationality requires recovering a past, it
would be counter productive precisely because it takes us back to culturally over-determined
Africans. It risks essentialising and homogenising Africanness and thus falling foul of Hall’s
anti-foundational, transformative approach.
An African Weltanschauung requires us to imagine Africanness as disproportionately formed
along the axis of similarity and continuity, at the exclusion of the axis of difference and rupture.
Even allowing for the possibility of a homogeneous African country, the fact remains that no two
African countries can ever be quite the same. Coming to share the same historical, economic and
social histories would remain problematic as African countries were impacted by colonialism in
similar but also radically different ways. We are best served by a remedial approach which takes
into account not just our similarities but also our differences: what Hall calls connectedness
through the ‘doubleness of similarities and differences’.
A difficulty with Mudimbe’s thesis is that it appears to assume the possibility of discovering an
internally uncontested African episteme. The thesis appears to want us to return to an ‘unmarked
authentic origin’: ‘apre-text’, but without the tools for anticipating indeterminacy and conflict. It
is not clear how a Mudimbe an search for an authentic African episteme would respond to the
discovery of conflict within and between African cultures and what deliberative resources
Mudimbe would use to resolve differences without flattening them out. Thus, a methodology for
resolving inter- and intracultural difference is needed. It can be asked whether the search for an
African episteme is not perilously located in the politics of retrieval of an old Africa that is no
longer there, in the sense meant by Hall.
Like all cultures, African cultures are subject to decentring, reflexivity and pluralisation. To
suggest otherwise would be to give validity to the notion of African culture as ‘traditional’ as
opposed to ‘modern’ in the sense portrayed in colonial discourses. Barry Hallen reminds us that,
when African culture has been described as ‘traditional’ in Western anthropological and religious
studies, it has meant not just a culture that is inherited from the past: it has meant a culture that is
incapable of changing in the present so as to be normatively passed on in the same form to the
future. Kwame Gyekye argues that the time has passed when this dichotomy can be used to
produce a typology of an African society or culture. Like other cultures, African cultures have
elements not just of the past and the present but also of other cultures.
My argument, therefore, is that an African episteme should, above all, address the present and be
historically situated. If we wish to address the African present in a continent that is radically
changed from its past, it is no longer possible to retrieve a pure African episteme or to construct
an African episteme at the exclusion of its Western counterpart as the two have become inter
imbricated. Imagining a pure African epistemology or, for that matter, a pure Western
epistemology produces a fallacy. In Seyla Benhabib’s words, we have become an ‘infinite
community of conversation’ and a ‘community of global interdependence’. An African
episteme, ‘even in the process of its reconstitution’ cannot divest itself of the temporal present
with its historical entanglements, ambivalences and cross-cultural hybridity.
Mudimbe and African gnosis
This search for identity clearly marks the intellectuality of Africa and Latin America from the
beginning. It is our intellectual dilemma, the intellectual dilemma of the peripheries between
being as the center or being as ourselves, as Eduardo Devés (2017) observes. In this way, the
uses and disputes around these concepts are crossed by scientific-philosophical reflections and
by ideology. So, the notion of “gnosis” used by Mudimbe assumes a greater relevance and
applicability than the author suggested in his classical book The Invention of Africa: Gnosis,
Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (1988). Just as one can speak of an “African gnosis,
that is, both the scientific and ideological discourse on Africa” (p. 187), we can refer to, for
example, a Latin American gnosis. Probably, the idea of gnosis in Mudimbe has similitudes with
the notion of pensamiento, pensée– recurrently used in Latin American Studies to nominate the
intellectual reflections of the region. Nor doxa, nor croyance.
This African gnosis “is sometimes African by virtue of its authors and promoters, but which
extends to a Western epistemological territory” (p. 186). It is more Western because it is thought
from Western categories (philosophical, anthropological), and in non-African languages. Would
this have to be overcome by an epistemological shift? Mudimbe wonders: “Is it possible to
consider this shift outside of the very epistemological field which makes my question both
possible and thinkable?”In short, a classic problem of intellectual production in the periphery.
Mudimbe notes that
we are dealing with ideology. Modern African thought seems somehow to be basically a
product of the West. What is more, since most African leaders and thinkers have
received a Western education, their thought is at the crossroads of Western
epistemological filiation and African ethnocentrism. Moreover, many concepts and
categories underpinning this ethnocentrism are inventions of the West. When prominent
leaders such as [Léopold] Senghor or [Julius] Nyerere propose to synthetize liberalism
and socialism, idealism, and materialism, they know that they are transplanting Western
intellectual manicheism (p. 185).
Then, Mudimbe suggests that the only way to approach the problem is as a challenge, but at the
same time as a promise. This African gnosis, and the very anthropology that is at its core, must
be understood from its conditions of existence. To this end, Mudimbe proposes a permanent
reassessment of the frontiers of anthropology so that it effectively contributes to a knowledge
about the human being – and to a historicizing approach.
Such a strategy could approximate us carefully and progressively from a greater knowledge of la
chose du texte, the African gnosis itself. It is a rich, complex, and creative strategy, for the
plurality of approaches the author appropriates, recreating them. It is more interesting than the
Hegelian dialectical proposition present in Jean-Paul Sartre’s approach to Négritude in Orphée
Noir(1948) and in Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la Terre(1961), who understood Négritude as
the antithesis, the “anti-racist racism” that would give rise to a superior synthesis. Mudimbe’s
approach is a safe scientific strategy, but one that does not solve the following problem for the
analyst: these political identities, these scientific and ideological discourses that are intended to
be understood and overcome, are still alive, strongly alive. And in certain contexts, they assume
clearly progressive, even revolutionary meanings. This is not the problem of our author, we
cannot wait that Mudimbe solve this problem, his preoccupation is not to solve the question if
the African gnosis is “true” or if is a “falsification”: his mainly question is to show the meanings
of this production.
We can always hope to overcome them by more universal, cosmopolitical and humanistic
approaches. I agree with Mudimbe when he says in the conference “En nombre de la similitude”
[“In the name of the similitude”] that “With competitive orders of difference in the
interdependent political economies, which we still inhabit today, a basic common sense is still
the most decent and reasonable bet, despite its precariousness” (2013, loc 2332); and that
“alterity” and “difference”, as well as the theories they inspire, in some sense have become a
“business”. But in despite of this, the Pan-Africanisms, Latin-Americanisms, Négritudes,
Latinités and Indigenismos go on and on, like words and things, like myths and realities. We
continue to think in binarisms as autochthonous/cosmopolitan, East/West, black/white, because
they still refer to things, very concrete things, like oppressions, dominations, colonialities,
racisms. So, identities produced as a reaction to that (like Négritude) are very concrete too, even
in the following sense: if we believe in something (that a “black essence” exists, for example), it
is as if it existed in fact. But not only in that sense. Let us look at the issue of Négritude today to
exemplify this point.
The Colonist and the Colonized
The Westerners, by the use of propaganda, have always made the world believe that the invasion
of Africa which began in the 1400 was timely in that it achieved its aim of inventing or
discovering this shrouded continent. Colonization, they say, brought a group of people without a
society to become one, and also brought them to the light of civilization. But is this true? Far
from it! The colonialists were capitalists, with the sole aim of acquiring, procuring and exploiting
lands in colonies; domesticating natives and implementing new methods of production. Thus
their program can be seen as targeted at “domination of physical space, reformation of “natives”
minds and integration of local economic histories into the Western perspectives.”
The genesis of all of this is the Western conception of possessing a superior civilization and so a
higher identity in the order of human species. This consciousness gives them the impetus to
invade, oppress, use and subjugate their fellow men by all possible means. According to
Mudimbe, “Because of the colonializing structure, a dichotomizing system has emerged, and
with it a great number of current paradigmatic oppositions have developed: traditional versus
modern; oral versus written and printed; agrarian and customary communities versus urban and
industrialized civilization; subsistence economies versus highly productive economies [Inferior
versus Superior].”
The European sees himself/herself as the Same, and other human species as the Other. The ideal
and universal is encompassed in the Westerner, while the others are partakers in this universality.
With the influence of Social Darwinianism, an order had been created among the human species.
Those at the bottom of the ladder were earlier comers, primitive and uncivilized, and in dear
need of evolution which was to be wrought by the already evolved. By the use of guns and the
Bible, the West overrun Africa and imposed her worldview on a civilization that cannot be
considered as taking off, but as different from that found in the West. The Other was
marginalized as her culture, beliefs and tradition was considered barbaric and ferocious, while
her people termed savages, untutored, unintelligent and irrational. There was thus a chasm
between the Same and the Other which can be considered as the major cause of
underdevelopment and “stagnancy”. Mudimbe, paraphrasing Bairoch and Bigo, says that this
intermediary space “also unveils the empirical evidence of this tension by showing concrete
examples of developmental failures such as demographic imbalance, extraordinarily high birth
rates, progressive disintegration of the classic family structure, illiteracy, severe social and
economic disparities, dictatorial regimes functioning under the cathartic name of democracy, the
breakdown of religious traditions, the constitution of syncretic churches, etc.” Mudimbe
identifies two types of ethnocentricism6 playing out in this suppressive program of the West.
One is based on the belief that nothing good can come from them (the Other), and even whatever
it seems they know is only a participation of the universal which is Western. Thus the birth of
epistemological ethnocentrism. This view has not disappeared from the European’s worldview
today, because they believe that Africa has nothing intellectual to contribute to the international
community. The other is what Mudimbe calls cultural ethnocentrism, connected to the
intellectual and behavioural attitudes. The Same is the ideal man or woman, because the ideal
way of thinking and behaving is as viewed from the lenses of the Western consciousness,
cultural and social principles. Thus the African “is” because the Westerner “is” and ought to be
what the Westerner deems fit for him. He is to be subjugated, downtrodden and used because the
Other is a savage beast. In fact John Lokce the great-great grandfather of the philosopher John
Locke described "Negroes, [as] a people of beastly living, without a God, law, religion"; "other
people whose women are common.... whose inhabitants dwell in caves and dens: for these are
their houses, and the flesh of serpents their meat"; "and people without heads, having their eyes
and mouths in their breast."

Voyage Documents
With this mindset, the field of anthropology was founded to discover the Other. In this quest, we
had the colonist whose task was to capture virgin lands, explore and exploit the resources and
transport them to the imperial state; the anthropologist, commissioned to discover the people;
and the missionary to Christianize them. In fact, contrary to excuses given on religious grounds,
the missionary’s objective had to be, and was, co-extensive with his country’s political and
cultural perspectives of colonization. According to A. J. Christopher:
“missionaries, possibly more than members of other branches of the colonial establishment,
aimed at the radical transformation of indigenous society . . . They therefore sought, whether
consciously or unconsciously, the destruction of pre- colonial societies and their replacement by
new Christian societies in the image of Europe.”
The worst of reports is that from the colonists who wrote in a pungent fashion in order to
continue the task of exploitation, always writing to the government of the nitwit disposition of
the natives. The anthropologists applied scientific method in their studies. Like the missionary,
who contributed immensely to the subjugation of the natives by pacifying them with religion, the
anthropologist lived with the natives in order to understand them especially by learning their
language. As it is believed, language is a store of the people’s culture and philosophy, the
anthropologists did a great disservice to Africa, as their “will to truth” is put to the test.
According to R. Wagner, “we might actually say that the anthropologists invent the culture he
believes himself to be studying, that the relation is more real for being his particular act and
experiences than the things it relates.” For me, the flaws of the anthropologists are not a
conscious attempt to misrepresent the African, but with such ethnocentric worldview, it will be
by share miracle for a European to present the African experience correctly. According to M.
Hollis
“anthropologists and missionaries knew nothing about the "natives" when they started and seem
to have discovered everything they [the natives] know in the end. This is very well; how do they
discover that the natives sometimes perceive what they perceive? Insofar as the anthropologist is
concerned.... "two possible answers are that he observes their behaviour and that he translates
their utterances.”
It is quite disturbing to know that they proudly present the African experience using these
parameters, forgetting that understanding the translation of the words in a language is not
tantamount to understanding the meaning of sentences, idioms, phrases, parables and folks
within which African experiences are integrated. Like Wittgenstein, understanding the meaning
of a language entails entering into the language-game, not merely understanding the meaning of
each word in a sentence. Mudimbe criticizes this method of recording history. It is viewing a
worldview from the lenses of another worldview. The anthropologist and missionaries are aware,
but deny the uniqueness of every human culture, and proper presentation of a people’s
experience requires being part of that experience, which for the European is already impossible
because of the Same and Other dichotomy. For Oruka, “African philosophy [African worldview]
is viewed as totally obscure from its Western counterpart, this contrast being said to lie in the
dissimilarity between the mindset of the two distinct peoples.” Unlike Western epistemology
which is scientific, rational, critical and detached from the community, that of Africans stand in
direct contrast to this in that it is community based. Therefore, recording a history of any African
society requires embedding one’s self into the community which can be achieved only by been
born (being a native) in the community, necessitating a worldview which is uniquely African.
Again, Mudimbe attributes this failure to the position which anthropology placed the African
upon study. The African was considered the object, while the anthropologist was the subject.
This denigrating classification coloured the findings of the Western historian, because it is only
in placing the object of knowledge (this time a human being) as a subject that the enquirer can
gain access to the consciousness of the African, and then present a fair picture of his experience.
Flowing from the subject-object method of enquiry, “the nineteenth century and the first quarter
of the twentieth, discourses were generally characterized by a functional perspective and a self-
righteous intolerance founded on the philosophical implications of the paradigms of conflict and
significance” which accounts for the normality, creative dynamism, and achievements of the
“civilized world” against the abnormality, deviance, and primitiveness of non - literate societies.
Functionality rather than entity or identity guided the Europeans’ search for the African.

The Way Forward.

Up until the 1920, the epistemological and socio-political status of the African was what the
Western colonialists said it was. It bore a scar deliberately marked by the Europeans in order for
the beauty of the Western worldview to be clearly seen and appreciated. One can observe three
complementary genres of "speeches" contributing to the invention of a primitive Africa: the
exotic text on savages represented by travellers’ reports; the philosophical interpretations about a
hierarchy of civilizations; and the anthropological search for primitiveness. The complementarity
of these speeches is obvious. It is perceived as a unity in the Western consciousness.16 Many
scholars of Western origin have been sympathetic to the African marginalization and subjugation
that they tried to re-write the African genesis. Giovanni Francesco Romano, Samuel Ajayi
Crowther (Nigerian born), and Placide Frans Tempels, whom Mudimbe used as models of
people who saw themselves as saviour of the African continent, are still considered as possessing
a common consciousness, that of a reductionist. The particulars (Other) must be reduced to the
universal (Same). Eboussi Boulaga was apt in presenting the Christian missionary reductionist
scheme:
“The missionary language of derision is basically a cultural position, the expression of an
ethnocentric outlook. The aspects of refutation and demonstration rationalize the initial
ethnocentric moment and are aimed explicitly towards an intellectual reduction that would
complement the rules of orthodoxy and conformity. Thus we have three moments, rather than
types, of violence in missionary language. Theoretically, they are expressed in the concepts of
derision, refutation -demonstration, and orthodoxy - conformity.”
In the 1930s, the Negritude pressure group emerged as a revolt movement aimed at reclaiming
the African identity from the mess which the Westerners had made of it. Applying their writing
skills, men like Leopold Senghor, Aime Cesaire, Leon Damas, laboriously fought to reorientate
the African mind that has already been bastardized by ideology of Same and Other; the Superior
and Inferior; the Master and Slave. The African must first re-discover himself apart from what
history books written by Western anthropologists say about him. He must see his unique self,
culture and mindset. This is what the Negritude movement set out to do.

Mudimbe presents Senghor’s view on the way out of this “troubled waters”. The path to
liberation which Senghor terms African Socialism is a stage in the complex process beginning
with the Negritude movement and oriented towards complete liberation or universal civilization.
He highlights three major moments in this struggle.

1. The African by the very process of colonization was depersonalized, made inferior and
so lost his identity. The identity known to the African was that given him by his superior, the
Westerner. This sentiment of belonging no longer to oneself but to another goes together with an
awareness of inferiority, which becomes translated in social terms into a caste and class
consciousness. Negritude is the warmth of being, living, and participating in a natural, social,
and spiritual harmony. A move to reclaim himself first, and then define his relation with others.
It is laden with both ideological and political agendas
2. Marxism as practiced by the colonialist was one that alienated the African from his
labour. He was a slave who deserved to be treated like the beast of the field, so that while he
worked, his master fed from the sweat of his brow. But Senghor is proposing another kind of
Marxism here. One “acceptable insofar as they indicate a recognition of the natural rights of
humans, who are and must be free agents and creators of culture”. However, Senghor does not
fail to acknowledge the shortcomings of Marxism.
3. Evolution of the human person to higher level of consciousness is obedience to the
natural law. This Senghor says will “imply at least three major theses: the principle of
development of all human beings, the principle of harmony in development, and God's existence
as a natural necessity. Senghor thinks that some basic African values are well expressed in this
perspective: namely the idea of community, the principle of harmony between evolving humans
and changing nature, and, finally, the vision of a unitary universe.
Mudimbe, agrees with Levi-Strauss, Tempels and Foucault on the method of structuralism as the
sure way to liberation of the African mind and society. Classical Structuralism as Levi Strauss
calls it, is the idea that communication systems are closed, discrete systems that can be studied in
isolation from both socio-historical context and the consciousness of actors. Each
communication system and type thereof, moreover, possesses an underlying synchronic structure
that governs spatio-temporal practices and contents even though it is unknown to the actors
involved. Lévi-Strauss further retained the idea that differences and relations, especially binary
oppositions, play a crucial role in defining structural elements. The components of each culture,
such as music, cooking practices, ideologies, myths and religion, have relations with one another
in an orderly manner, governed by a logical framework. This relation as found in this society is
also found in other societies because there is a homology in the underlying structure of both
societies.

Mudimbe’s Contribution To Dialogic Africanness

Leaving aside the risks that come with any attempt at searching for an authentic African
episteme, it is possible to argue that the broad methodological path that Mudimbe puts at our
disposal, including the accent it places on interrogating Western epistemological ethnocentrism
in ways that heuristically excavate Foucauldian knowledge and power relations, is something we
ought to appropriate to enhance inclusive equality. Mudimbe’s methodology is rooted in the
capacity to see equality in difference. For this reason it fits in well with how we should think
about inclusive equality as equality democratically situated in Young’s‘ heterogeneous public
sphere’. For Mudimbe, the bourgeois anthropology that came out of the visions of the
Enlightenment has the same blind spot as Uncle Theo’s lifeworld: it operated in conditions of
epistemological impossibility which assumed that the language of the observer and his/her
forms of thought represent how the universe is constituted. This assumption precluded eliciting
relational cultural difference. Its methodology could only yield polarities between self and other,
observer and observed, body and mind, reason and emotion. Consequently, it was incapable of
any exploration of the dialectics between these polarities.
The discipline of anthropology entered Africa at the height of European imperial domination.
Wittingly or unwittingly, it served as an instrument of the colonial project. It could not see
‘manyness’ and had an assured theocratic capacity for misrecognising difference. In a
Foucauldian sense, anthropology became a sign which stood for something ‘more’. It served less
as a medium for fostering respectful understanding of the African world and more as a discursive
sign of colonial domination and the nativisation of African peoples. Although Mudimbe does not
explicitly use the language of equality, implicitly he is already fully invested in an ethic of
inclusive equality in which the particularities of African speeches are deepened and amplified.
This is in order to render them audible rather than reified. Mudimbe’s ultimate point is that
African speeches are part of the universal. They utter a conception of the universal in horizontal,
non-hierarchical co-existence with other speeches.
Mudimbe’s critique of the discipline of anthropology and his argument that anthropology
participated in the colonisation of Africa are not, in themselves, novel. The novelty in
Mudimbe’s work lies in his going much further than merely suggesting complicity by
anthropology in the colonial enterprise. His argument rests not so much on anthropology’s
complicity as a conscious tool of the colonial project, but on its cognitive failure. Mudimbe’s
focus is on implicating as well as repairing African epistemological disenfranchisement, or what
Boaventurade Sousa Santos calls ‘cognitive injustice’, to denote the failure to recognise different
ways of knowing by which people that are different regulate their lives and assign meaning to
them.
Anthropology’s hand in colonisation was mainly because its methods, touted as scientific, were
sufficiently monochromatic to assure the epistemicide of an African gnosis through
epistemological determinism. Archie Mafeje puts it differently when he observes that the
intellectual effort of anthropologists was of service to colonialism not because of a naked
conspiracy or collusion, but because the ontology of its thought categories was shared by the
colonising authorities. Anthropology was a bourgeois enterprise in the colonies.
In this sense anthropology was not different from the other prevailing social sciences in the
metropolis, which were also products of a functionalist Enlightenmentand intrinsically allied
with imperialism and its project of investing Africa and Africans with pathological alterity and
lack. Mudimbe makes the point that Western anthropological methods did not require
anthropologists to make sense of the African world. The methods were founded on ‘a series of
binary oppositions which contrasted the virtues of European civilisation with their supposed
absence from Africa’. The methodological grid of analysis and generalisation depended on a
Western historical experience in the same way as that used by missionaries.
An important critique in Mudimbe’s work is his observation that the crystallisation of a
particular historical image of Africa as quintessential civilisational deficit was garnered through
a symbiosis between the colonial project and an anthropologically reified definition of primitive
which justified conquest and subjugation. Anthropological methods were tethered to
evolutionary and functionalist paradigms of culture which served as surrogates of Darwin’s
evolution of species. The methods used to understand African cultures were already tied to
assumptions about the biological and cultural superiority of Europeans. In this paradigm, African
speech, which belonged to a different linguistic system, had first to be translated by Europeans
(not Africans) in order to render it intelligible to themselves. We can surmise therefore that
linguistic inadequacies, on their own, were apt to incline European investigators towards slogans
and dogmatic assertions in place of nuance. The outcome would then be not representation but
the teleological construction of Africans.
What is missing from colonial anthropology, to borrow from Mafeje, is the presence of
‘authentic’ interlocutors. ‘Authentic’ does not imply that anthropologists need to be indigenes
but that in order to represent the peoples they study they need first to develop a capacity and
inclination to decode local vernaculars and encode into anthropology local ontologies and modes
of comprehension. Colonial anthropology and its theocratic disposition did not take local
knowledge as a reference point, but instead relied on Enlightenment ‘universal’ typologies. To
use the language of feminism, it produced a colonial library about Africans which was
manifestly lacking in ‘standpoint epistemology’. Even in its well-intentioned or benevolent
moments, colonial anthropology constituted speech that was not uttered by Africans. Rather, it
was speech uttered for Africans, denying their subjectivities. It was inherently incapable of
mustering a deeper grammar so as to speak more meaningfully about African life worlds.
Instead, it ‘undid’ Africans and saw only one side of them – the side it translated – but not the
other side – the side it did not see or could not translate. The failure to see the other side or
translate African cultures in their plenitude and multiplicities evokes the injunction of Esu-
Elegbara (Esu), one of the Yoruba deities. Esu is a divine linguist who embodies indeterminacy.
When a multidimensional occurrence caused sharp disagreement among two close friends
because each could see only one dimension from where they were standing, it prompted Esu to
deliver a triumphant rebuke in the following parable:
Esu, do not undo me,
Do not falsify the words of my mouth,
Do not misguide the movementsof my feet,
You who translates yesterday’s words into novel utterances,
Do not undo me,I bear you sacrifice.
Mudimbe asks basic questions about how discourses of African gnosis in their multiplicities can
avoid the fate of being undone when expressed in dominant discourses and in non-African
languages. He asks whether African modalities do not become ‘inverted, modified by
anthropological and philosophical categories used by specialists of dominant languages’.
Ultimately, the argument is that anthropology substituted European speech for African speech.
As epistemological redress, Mudimbe calls for a dialectical model for cultural investigation and
classification in which there is relational inflection rather than structural opposition so as to be
capable of registering change within the spaces created by social, economic and political
structures. Mudimbe’s point is that the methods that were used by European anthropologists to
understand African cultures were organised around an ethnocentric anthropology in which
Africans were plotted on an evolutionary path as the ancestors of modern Western civilisation.
They were deprived of voice and power and simply studied as objects by subject anthropologists.
The monochromatic and emasculating nature of the anthropology assured the production of
essential, stereotyped Africans in which sameness and difference were conceived with a
European epistemology trapped in panoptic ethnocentrism that causes a conceptual stricture
blocking the flow of new ideas, yielding only cultural essentialism, and incapable of revealing
non-hierarchical cultural relativism.
As part of extrapolating a theory of inclusive equality from Mudimbe’s work, I argue that in a
Habermasian sense, Mudimbe can be understood as having implicated the absence of
participatory parity in an encounter in which Africans became ‘objects’ as opposed to subjects of
anthropological study. The dialectical model of investigation that Mudimbe advocates requires
the institution of Habermasian communicative ethics in anthropological methods. A
communicative ethics would require anthropological inquiries to be dialogic, predicated upon an
epistemological plurality rather than ethnocentrism, which fails to recognise equality in
speeches. It is well to underline that for each speech to count one would need to be attentive to
conditions of entry and redress any imbalances of power. Communicative ethics need to take into
account that where there is domination there is asymmetry in the effectiveness of speech.
During the colonial era Africans were renamed under the tutelage of Western Enlightenment
which arrogated to itself the status of being the wellspring of universal learning and knowledge
and modernity. Africa could only be intelligible as the ‘primitive world’; as a place of
antiquarian traditions and unprocessed data. Africans were studied by European anthropologists
under parity-impeding conditions of discrepant power in which ‘primitive’ was already a defined
term in European science and philosophy. Parity-facilitating communicative ethics require
dominance and hegemony to be averted by interactions under conditions of equal power. The
essence of communicative ethics as an ethics of justice, and by extension Mudimbe’s critique of
anthropology, is that it is aimed at maximal citizenship through discursive interaction as an
indispensable part of democratic political practice. Its vision is that citizens are citizens precisely
because they deliberate their interests openly, free of domination and oppression and with
reciprocity and mutual tolerance of difference. Needless to say colonial discourses stood for the
opposite: they stood for Africans as objects of raced power rather than citizens

Criticisms Against Mudimbe’s Position

Archie is of the opinion that Mudimbe, though writing to correct the harm done by Europe’s
colonization of Africa, is not free from the Eurocentric experience. First, Mudimbe’s reference to
discussions on colonialism and its inconsistency with economic development emphasizes his
point of Africa not having an economic system. Second, to what could Mudimbe point, as may
well account for the stagnancy of Africa if not colonization when he says “that if colonialism
was inconsistent with economic development, it was at least, since its inception, quite consistent
with its own economic interests and objectives.” I am of the opinion that Pre-colonial African
society had been flourishing and was gradually arriving at its own civilization when it
experienced the still-birth from the hands of Europe. No two civilizations can look alike, due to
the uniqueness of the people and the epoch. Thus, I agree with Archie in calling Mudimbe “an
African, sympathetic to the West.” Again, Mudimbe enumerates the academic achievements of
those who renown African scholars who are bringing in a new and correct gnosis to the “African
genesis.” Although this is a good starting point for any research in terms of being intellectually
sound and committed, yet he states that their knowledge and method is based on European
constructs. So we are not still free from the strong arm of the West. Is it the case that we are
falling back to what the sympathetic Western anthropologists and historians did? Is it not
possible to get it right?
Since the idea of Negritude is endorsed by ethno-philosophy, it has come under attack by many
African philosophers. For Frantz Fanon, if by negritude, we get transformed, then, the African
has lost rather than discovered himself. He says: “The transformation of one’s present condition
signifies at the same time the transformation of one’s essence, of what is particular to the self, of
what is original and unique about it ...it is to enter into a negative relationship with the self.”
Hountondji’s view is that Negritude will not bring us to conquer the world, but conquer
ourselves, and this is not wisdom. Philosophy should be a reflection on science considered as a
significant component of modern culture and equated the philosophical enterprise with the
development of science. Thus, Hountondji seems to endorse a pragmatic outlook to African
philosophy.

Conclusion
Mudimbe, in this great work, shows how the West created a dichotomy between themselves and
the African by subjugating and oppressing the Other in order to assert the Same. This was partly
accomplished by the documentation of who the African is. They succeeded in telling us “what
the African is”, and not “who the African is.” This is as a result of the functional approach to the
anthropological study of the African experience. An approach that does not see the African
experience and mindset as unique, peculiar and particular to them, just as those of the West are.
The work is true to its topic “Invention of Africa.” With the rise of the Negritude movement,
Africans took to reclaiming themselves, by rewriting the knowledge claims of the West. Yet due
to the incursion of Western ideas into the consciousness of the African mind, it seems the
African has been successfully made a partaker in the experience of the Same, such that his
uniqueness is diluted, in the event that retracing his historical past and thus his identity becomes
a herculean task.
For me, Mudimbe does not seem to present a utopian method of solving the problem, rather, he
says we can move on, rather than try to reconstruct the past. It is his [the African] right to exploit
any part of this heritage. What this means is that: the Western tradition of science, as well as the
trauma of slave trade and colonization, is part of Africa's present-day heritage. When we
Africans look inward, we may succeed in finding “the African.”

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