Preface
p. 11-12
Texte intégral
1This edited volume stems from an international symposium held at the University of Nairobi in 2019, which brought together leading scholars in African Studies, and African Philosophy in particular. The symposium was titled “Thinking Africa with Mudimbe” and focused on the work of the Congolese writer, cultural and literary critic, philologist and philosopher, V.Y. Mudimbe. On that occasion, speakers, organisers and the public gathered at the University of Nairobi (UoN) as part of an institutional and intellectual collaboration between the French Institute for Research in Africa (IFRA-Nairobi) and the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies. This symposium was included in a larger research programme for knowledge dissemination, “Intellectuals from Africa and the diaspora: how African thinking about Africa is being reinvented,” which focused on two prominent thinkers from Eastern and Central Africa: Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and Mudimbe. Its aim was to debate, in Africa, the relevance of their thoughts and revisit the traces and legacy they had left, especially for the decolonisation of knowledge and the grounding of the humanities and social sciences in African epistemologies.
2The Mudimbe symposium in Nairobi was grounded in the idea that, due to its scope and depth, Mudimbe’s work should be seen as inescapable, primarily because of its call for a radical epistemic change. It is a call for decolonising thought, decolonising knowledge production and management, decolonising the ways in which the world has been understood and studied, and decolonising the types of questions we ask about it and how we answer them. Mudimbe tells us how we could change the conditions of possibility of thinking, that is, to refer to a Foucauldian phrasing, of what we can see and what we can say. We first need to assess how much Western thinking shaped and influenced African societies and individuals during colonisation but also after colonisation—looking carefully at the concepts used, the questions asked, the answers brought, the objectives given, and who was considered legitimate to speak and to think, and who was not. Mudimbe speaks of an “epistemic cage” (1988, 77) in which Africans were enclosed and are still enclosed; other authors refer to the “colonial intimacy” that shaped both the colonisers and the colonised, yet within a situation of colonial oppression. Hence a call for decolonisation that concerns the former colonisers as much as the formerly colonised. According to Mudimbe, we can free ourselves from the epistemic cage by thinking against the cage and from outside the cage. For this epistemic agency to be possible, new questions need to be raised, new theoretical foundations imagined, new conceptual frames and instruments invented which should be grounded in an African epistemological locus. But “what is to be done?” in practical ways, asked philosopher Paulin Hountondji in 1989, to accomplish Mudimbe’s programmatic vision? (Apter 1992: 89). This is a question which a younger generation of African intellectuals have embraced, revealing how much Mudimbe’s critical work stimulated transformative and liberating thinking about Africa. In a way, this book is an attempt to answer the question posed by Hountondji and is a testimony to the heuristic value of Mudimbe’s work and the richness of his thought.
3This collection is very much the product of a joint effort between IFRA-Nairobi and staff at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Nairobi, supported by the Institut Français in Paris. Without the enthusiastic engagement of Reginald Oduor, Oriare Nyarwath and Francis Owakah, the Mudimbe symposium would never have happened, and this volume would not have seen the light of the day. We warmly thank them. Salim Abdelmadjid from Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès in France and Kai Kresse from the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Germany are also thanked for facilitating the links between IFRA-Nairobi and the University of Nairobi philosophers.
4All IFRA-Nairobi staff and researchers were involved in this project and we wish to thank them, too. Among them, Maëline Le Lay was in charge of organising a successful roundtable discussion on Mudimbe at the Alliance Française de Nairobi, together with her colleague Pierre Boizette, in order to reach out to a non-academic public. Both had been deeply involved in a sister-event on Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o organised in Goma, DRC, a few months before the Nairobi symposium, discussing his programmatic ideas about the use of African languages for enabling an Afrophone and Africa-grounded epistemic emancipation.
Bibliographie
Apter, Andrew. 1992. “Que Faire? Reconsidering Inventions of Africa.” Critical Inquiry 19, no. 1: 87–104.
https://doi.org/10.1086/448664.
Mudimbe, V.Y. 1988. The Invention of Africa. Philosophy, Gnosis and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press; London: James Currey.
Auteurs
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Marie-Aude Fouéré
Senior lecturer in social and cultural anthropology at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS).
ORCID : 0000-0002-7565-4231
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Karori Mbũgua
Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nairobi.
ORCID : 0000-0002-2966-0550
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Creative Commons - Attribution - Partage dans les Mêmes Conditions 4.0 International - CC BY-SA 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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