The Dance of Plato and V.Y. Mudimbe, or the Relationship Between Plato’s Epistemology and Mudimbe’s Phenomenology

The dance of Plato and V.Y Mudimbe presents different lenses through which one can read the African condition today. Plato and Mudimbe represent two opposed perspectives that clash and contradict: the perspective of Western social sciences practiced in Africa that present an essentialist view of Africa condemned to permanent decay because essentially irredeemable; and the perspective of Mudimbe that is phenomenological, descriptive of both the crises of African societies and the renewal of those societies made possible by assuming the new condition of hybridism of the African intellectual. By rejecting Plato’s essentialism that invents a stereotypical Africa that does not exist, Mudimbe calls for the right of Africa to write her own history, to invent herself as she makes her presence known in a world made in the image of Western scholarship and colonialism.