Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, a Congolese-American philosopher, cultural historian and novelist who questioned the West’s intellectual tools for appraising Africa, identifying them as part of what he deemed a colonizing apparatus, died on Monday in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 83.
His death, in a private care facility, was announced by the official news agency of the Democratic Republic of Congo. At his death, Mr. Mudimbe was an emeritus professor of literature at Duke University in Durham, N.C.
Mr. Mudimbe’s landmark 1988 book, “The Invention of Africa,” which became a standard text in African studies courses, deconstructs what he called “the colonial library”: the 19th- and 20th-century accounts of Africa by European anthropologists, explorers and missionaries whose aim, in Mr. Mudimbe’s view, was to further colonialism. His ambition was to call into question the basis for European understanding of Africa.
The book was a “classic from its inception,” the philosopher Séverine Kodjo-Grandvaux wrote in Le Monde in a 2021 appraisal after Mr. Mudimbe’s book was translated into French. She compared it to “Orientalism,” Edward Said’s landmark text in post-colonial studies.
Mr. Mudimbe left Congo more than four decades ago. Like other African intellectuals, he found himself unable to develop, within Africa, an outlook that criticized the West’s understanding of the continent and left open the question of what was to replace it.