Decolonizing Knowledge in Africa: Mudimbe’s Philosophical Deconstruction of the Postcolonial Event

The goal of this essay is to show that decolonisation of knowledge in Mudimbe’s work is a philosophical investigation, which unfolds through the triad of construction-deconstruction-reconstruction. It is, in fact, a unique process, which integrates a dialogue with other ‘Deconstruction’ philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Theodor Adorno, and Fabian Eboussi Boulaga, among others, and relies on three indissociable, inseparable, and interdependent activities, namely colonisation-decolonisation-postcolonisation. More precisely, what is at stake here is a ‘writing in the making’ of the postcolonial event, which takes the form of a thematic and conceptual circularity, punctuated by ‘resumptions’, ‘ruptures’, ‘continuities’, ‘discontinuities’, and ‘appropriations’, and whose telos (finality) is a critical and prospective reinvention of a new philosophical framework for and in Africa.