Recreating Knowledge About Africa in the Shadow of the Colonial Library

Debates on the politics of knowledge production on Africa are not new but are being revitalised by recent decolonial scholarship and student activism. This paper sets out to revisit earlier discussions on this topic to see what can be learnt from them. In particular, I use VY Mudimbe’s discussion of the colonial library to contribute to contemporary debates about how best we can decolonise knowledge production about Africa. The chapter begins with an overview of the concept of the colonial library. I then turn to Mudimbe’s discussion of the legacy of Edward Blyden to argue that it is possible to produce knowledge on Africa which counters the colonial library even while such knowledge may not fully escape the constraints of that library. Building on this idea, I engage with Gaurav Desai, Philip Zachernuk and Siba Grovogui’s discussions of the intellectual contributions of various colonial-era African thinkers to complicate how we think about the colonial library. Their writing shows us the complex, but productive position from which African intellectuals must necessarily work. It does not make sense, I will argue, to think that those trying to resist the colonial library can and should reject ‘Western’ knowledge and embrace some kind of purely African alternative. Rather, we should recognise and work with the ambiguous and difficult position that the colonial library creates for knowledge production on Africa. To illustrate the approach I seek to defend, the final section of the paper discusses recent writing by Souleymane Bachir Diagne, showing how he manages to both recognise and push beyond the constraints of the colonial library in creative and productive ways. Overall, the main goal of this chapter is to highlight the thinking of some important and thoughtful scholars (and particularly that of Mudimbe) whose insights are of value to current debates on decolonising knowledge production.