Resurrecting Mudimbe

This chapter draws on its author’s relationship with V.Y. Mudimbe and intimate familiarity with his work, as well as the conversations that they have had over the years to initiate a conversation on ways of relating to his work. An introduction of sorts, it contextualises the issues that are central to the volume. It suggests that a major preoccupation of Mudimbe’s intellectual vocation has been finding himself—an allegory for Africa—in an ‘archive’ that invisibilises him or reduces him to an object of colonial ideological gazes, that is, constructs him in the mode of absolute otherness. This preoccupation, which essentially defines Mudimbe’s intellectual vocation and the issues that arise therefrom can, the chapter suggests, be approached from the interrelated conceptual registers of ‘invention,’ ‘gnosis,’ and ‘the colonial library’, which anchor Mudimbe’s stimulating exploration of the invention and idea of Africa as constituted in the archives of colonial modernity and its implications for African gnosis and the present-day conceptions and realities of the continent and its people.