Mudimbe did not apologise. “The question, 'What is Africa?' or 'How to define African culture?' Today we have no choice but to refer to the knowledge that Africa is enveloped in Western disciplines such as anthropology, history, theology and other scientific discourses,” he told Callaloo. “And this is at the level that positions my project.”
Valentin Yves Mudimbe was born on December 8, 1941 in Likasi, Katanga Province, where at the time the Congo of Belgium, and civil servants Gustave Zillira and Victorin Ngarla. In his youth, he said in 1991 that he “began living as a seminarist with the Benedictine monk Ks” in Kakanda in pre-independence Congo. He “not even my family had contact with the outside world, and there was no actual vacation.”
When he was 17 or 18, he was reminded of becoming a monk among the “white fathers” of the Benedictine Society of Gihindamuyaga in Rwanda. However, in his early twenties, he had already “fully Frenchized” and abandoned his religious life, enrolled at Robanium University in Kinshasa, and graduated in 1966 with a degree in linguistics of romance. In 1970 he received his doctorate in philosophy and literature from the Leuvain Catholic University in Belgium. He then returned to Congo to teach.
In the 1970s, Mudimbe published three novels, all of his other works, in which three novels were translated into English. “Le Belle Imonde” (“Before the Birth of the Moon”, 1976); and “l'écart” (“The Rift”, 1979). The protagonists of these novels “I think it's impossible to associate yourself with something solid,” commented scholar Nadia Yara Kiskidi in Le Monde.
When Mobutz was offered to “take ideology and things like that,” in the late 1970s, when Mudimbe told Karalu, he thought, “I don't think of myself, and I still don't consider myself a politician.” After he established himself in the United States, his focus changed to essays and philosophy. In other books, he wrote “L'Odeur du Père” (1982), “Paraables and Fables” (1991), and “Tales of Faith” (1997).
