Knowledge and Power in Contemporary Africa - Examining Valentin-Yves Mudimbe
There is power in being true to oneself, being authentic: not an external, technical, or military power but an internal, cultural, and spiritual power. This is the power that holds a people together.
(reading time: about 30 minutes)
Valentin-Yves Mudimbe (currently 82 years old) is one of the few living African scholars who has written extensively and philosophically about contemporary African themes. Born on December 8, 1941, in Jadotville, a town now known as Likasi in the Katanga province of Congo, Mudimbe has authored numerous poems and novels, as well as books and articles on African culture and intellectual history, several of which address themes specific to postcolonial Africa.
Among his numerous scholarly works, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge has earned him particular acclaim. In this work, which could be called his magnum opus, Prof. Mudimbe makes the case that what we (as Africans) know about Africa, is in fact a product of Western or European thinking made possible by colonial domination. Mudimbe goes to great lengths to prove this thesis by analyzing all sorts of philosophical, historical, anthropological, sociological, and cultural-artistic works. He is devastating in his harsh critiques of other African Philosophers and their attempts to outline a philosophy that can be called “African”.
For Mudimbe, there is no such thing as an African philosophy. Rather than focusing on a “Philosophy of Africa”, he argues that what we should be concerned about is a gnosis or an epistemology of knowledge – epistemology understood here as the philosophical study of the nature, origin, and limits of human knowledge. The term is derived from the Greek words epistēmē (“knowledge”) and logos (“reason”). In the history of philosophy, epistemology has almost always been concerned not with knowledge per se, but rather with the way knowledge is acquired.
Given his hyper-focus on epistemology, it would make sense to ask which particular epistemological lens Mudimbe himself used in his work. One thing is clear: of all the Western philosophers he quotes and comments on in his book, Mudimbe falls back (almost obsessively) on Michel Foucault (1926-1984). Mudimbe relies heavily on Foucault’s so-called “archeology of knowledge”. He venerates—one might even say that he ‘worships’—Foucault and his hypothesis that knowledge is ultimately dictated by power”. Throughout his dense philosophical work (about 200 pages in all), Mudimbe quotes Foucault an average of 90 times.
In short, only someone aware of Michel Foucault and his contributions to contemporary philosophy as a whole can fully appreciate Mudimbe’s overall message in The Invention of Africa. The Foucauldian epistemological lens is, in fact, the key to understanding much of what masquerades as post-modern philosophy – from cultural Marxism to critical race theory to gender theory to intersectionality to all the “woke” ideologies that are slowly infiltrating our African cultures.
Nevertheless, there is much we could learn from Mudimbe and his focus on the epistemological. We need not throw away his baby with Foucault’s bathwater. What follows is a selection of some pertinent lessons we can draw from his philosophical output, for contemporary Africa.
The crucial role of Epistemology in the philosophical endeavor
Epistemology is an indispensable item in the toolbox of philosophy. In this, Mudimbe is dead right. To say that method is inseparable from content is just another way of saying that there is no metaphysics without epistemology. For far too long, Western philosophy has held the view that pure speculative thought trumps culture or that pure knowledge can be separated from history. Mudimbe reminds us that there is no knowledge of reality without a consideration of the knower of reality, or, to put it in terms relevant to our present purpose, there is no philosophy without culture.
Culture is what conditions every single individual in the universe – be they black or white, African or European, male or female, young or old. There is no human soul without a corresponding concrete body that serves as a lens or a prism through which reality is perceived. The human body in particular, and human community in general, is the physical soil into which metaphysical seeds are planted and nurtured.
In other words, those who have made it their business to accuse Africans of having no purely speculative philosophy of their own are entertaining an illusion. They are assuming that they themselves are positioned on a universal plane devoid of cultural assumptions. What Mudimbe (and Foucault his progenitor) assert is that such a position is untenable It is an illusion and a fallacy to think that we are free from cultural conditioning. This kind of philosophical position is becoming clearer in the contemporary world – and this stance constitutes the heart and soul of postmodern philosophy. There is no “pure caste” of untouchable Europeans who should oversee and therefore rightfully colonize a lower class of African “ethno-philosophers”, supposedly inferior because they cannot attain to the high level of pure abstraction of the Europeans. To some extent, all philosophers are necessarily and unavoidably ethno-philosophers.
In chapter one of his book, Discourse of Power and Knowledge, Mudimbe rightfully points out how at the height of the colonial period, the Western world’s sense of superiority was driven primarily by what he calls their “epistemological ethnocentricism” – identifying in this apt phrase, the relationship between epistemology and ethnology, i.e. the connection between philosophy and culture:
In the name of both scientific power and knowledge, it reveals in a marvelous way what I shall define in the following chapter as an epistemological ethnocentrism; namely, the belief that scientifically there is nothing to be learned from “them” unless it is already “ours” or comes from us.
Mudimbe adds:
Since Africans could produce nothing of value; the technique of Yoruba statuary must have come from Egyptians; Benin art must be a Portuguese creation; the architectural achievement of Zimbabwe was due to Arab technicians; and Hausa and Buganda statecraft were inventions of white invaders (Davidson, 1959; Lugard, 1905; Randall-MacIver, 1906; Sanders, 1969; Mallows, 1984)
Furthermore, in chapter one, Africans’ historical lagging behind in terms of (industrial) development is attributed not so much to contact with the European as such, as to the particular breed of Europeans who made contact with the Africans in question. Quoting Aimé Cesaire, Mudimbe notes:
A. Césaire thinks that the great historical tragedy of Africa has been not so much that it was too late in making contact with the rest of the world, as the manner in which that contact was brought about; that Europe began to propagate at a time when it had fallen into the hands of the most unscrupulous financiers and captains of industry. (Césaire, 1972, 23)
The “breed of Europeans” we are referring to here is the modernist – the offspring of René Descartes – the pure rationalist who has no place for tradition, culture, ethnicity, or anything that cannot be proven through the method of empirical science. Culture, for such Europeans, is an impurity, a blemish on pure speculative thought.
I agree with Césaire that underdevelopment in Africa was, to a large extent, propagated by colonization. Africa was already underdeveloped (from an industrial and scientific point of view) but colonization (driven by cultural arrogance or what Mudimbe calls epistemological ethnocentricism) worsened it. Mudimbe again:
At the economic level, for example, if the relatively low productivity of traditional processes of production (formerly adapted to the then-existing markets and range of trade and exchanges) has been disrupted by a new division of labor which depends upon international markets, then transformation has meant a progressive destruction of traditional realms of agriculture and crafts (Meillassoux, 1975: 115).
And also:
Finally, if at the cultural and religious levels, through schools, churches, press, and audio-visual media, the colonializing enterprise diffused new attitudes which were contradictory and richly complex models in terms of culture, spiritual values, and their transmission, it also broke the culturally unified and religiously integrated schema of most African traditions (Bimwenyi, 1981a).
I believe that (to quote Mudimbe), [the] “strong tension between a modernity that often is an illusion of development, and a tradition that sometimes reflects a poor image of a mythical past”, precipitated the postmodern movement that Foucault stood for and that Mudimbe, following in his footsteps, embraced lock, stock, and barrel. Mudimbe found in Foucault an ally in the fight against the culture-less European colonizer of yesteryears.
On the gradual disappearance of the human subject and the re-emergence of our humane traditions
The second element Africans can learn from Mudimbe’s philosophical corpus is the importance of being protagonists of one’s own story and the need to sustain a culture’s oral story-telling traditions.
Chapter Two of Invention of Africa, titled “Questions of Method”, dives deeper into the impossibility of a metaphysical philosophy that lacks a concrete (cultural) foundation. In the previous point (No. 1 above), we noted how the world that Mudimbe (and before him Michel Foucault) was criticizing was really the modern scientific West. Mudimbe notes how towards the end of the 19th century, the narrative of the superior West was already beginning to crumble:
Some thinkers, such as Lévi-Strauss, thought that studying a diversity of cultures reduced the weight of ideology and allowed anthropologists to fight such falsehoods as those about the natural superiority of some races and traditions over others. From this ethical point of view, some scholars have wondered whether it was possible to think of an anthropological science without ethnocentrism (e.g., Leclerc, 1972-).
Unbeknownst to itself, what was beginning to dawn on the “modern” world was that there was no one human person (or culture for that matter) who could qualify as “the universal subject” or interpreter of history. The shift in European philosophy itself (e.g. from a Newtonian mechanistic worldview to a Hegelian (dialectic) historical worldview) contributed to giving more credence to this new notion. The first paragraph of Chapter Two reminds us:
In the European Classical Age, the center of knowledge was, according to Foucault's archaeology (1973), the principle of order. The means of organizing this knowledge is the discourse, the table, and the exchange. One can observe in this epistemological landscape three major systems:
(a) General grammar, “the study of verbal order in its relation to the simultaneity that it is its task to represent.” It has, as its object, the discourse in which the name dominates: “the task of Classical ‘discourse’ is to ascribe a name to things and in that name, to name their being.”
(b) Natural history, or a theory of nature understood as the characterization, ordering, and naming of the visible. Its project is “to establish a general and complete table of species, genera and classes.”
(c) A theory of wealth, rather than a political economy, analyzing “value in terms of the exchange of objects of need,” or “in terms of the formation and origin of objects whose exchange will later define their value in terms of nature's prolixity” (Foucault, 1973:79-211) (emphasis added)
It could be argued that a shift was slowly but surely taking place from Cosmology to Anthropology. The human person was beginning to take the center stage of history and the (objective) world of nature was receding into the background.
And the African as a protagonist of world history was also beginning to emerge:
[Paulin] Hountondji emphasizes the uniqueness of the European scientific tradition and, at the same time, describes the new subject of thinking, the African Philosopher, as “a human being among human beings, an intellectual among his colleagues and a member of a given social class” (Hountondji, 1977:70).
A glance back at the literature of 1940-1960 shows the originality of the present-day spirit. Then, as G. Balandier wrote in his Afrique Ambiguë, the African was challenging “the weaknesses” of the West, trying “to gain recognition as a subject of history,” and, paradoxically, demanding “the attention of a world that has become more curious about his destiny.” This period was for him a moment of an aggressive “self-expression,” “after having long been an object of exchange or an instrument in the hands of foreigners.” (Mudimbe, 1988).
Unfortunately, after succeeding in telling us that culture is integral to philosophy, Mudimbe, following Foucault’s deconstructionist methods, is here trying to convince us that since there is no universal subject of history, it now follows that no one culture should have a monopoly of interpretation of reality. In other words, no one culture has the authority to lord it over the rest. All we can claim to be is cultural storytellers – not philosophers. There is in other words, no such thing as a universal philosophy or wisdom that applies to all men indiscriminately.
Whereas this might be a great solution to the cultural hegemony of one group against another, the question remains: who then is the interpreter of history? Is there any such thing as World History? Does objective knowledge exist? To answer these valid questions, Mudimbe once again dips into his Foucauldian cauldron and provides us with the following principles:
These are:
- Reversal; in order to “recognize the negative activity of the cutting-out of discourse”;
- Discontinuity; in order to understand discourse as “a discontinuous activity”;
- Specificity, in order to “conceive discourse as a violence that we do to things, or, at all events, as a practice we impose upon them”; and,
- Exteriority; in order to look for “the external conditions of existence” of the discourse (Foucault, 1982:229).
These principles, along with the notions that they bring, contribute to a new understanding of the Western experience, and at the same time clearly indicate its capacity to join knowledge and power.
How reversal, discontinuity, and exteriority can be good news to a continent keen on making progress, maintaining tradition, and fostering interiority strikes one as countercultural if not downright un-African. Here, if I may have the effrontery to criticize an intellectual giant such as Mudimbe, I feel compelled to say that he has gone too far. In my humble opinion, he not only provides an answer that (unfortunately) on one hand serves the interests of the already powerful. He is also admitting on the other hand that the already oppressed African has no choice but to join the power play of his Western oppressor. In short, he is (wittingly or unwittingly) admitting that knowledge as a reality (and philosophy in general) essentially functions as a form of power. Knowledge is ultimately a tool of politics.
Furthermore, to suggest (with Foucault) that violence is the way to gain this power is to negate the evidence of the very evolutionary history he is appealing to. The waves of violence, military takeovers, mutinies, and civil wars in ancient and modern Africa have brought nothing but misery to its peoples. He goes on to quote his “spiritual godfather” Foucault:
In order to clarify the meaning of this violence, let us note that, since Descartes, philosophy in the West has been, in a special way, concerned with the relationship between knowledge and truth: “to be a philosopher was to be concerned with the question, what is the truth? What is knowledge?” (Foucault, 1980:82).
With Nietzsche, the question was modified and became: “what is the best way, the surest path to truth?” Accordingly, in his work on The Crisis of the European Sciences, Husserl was dealing, in actuality, with Nietzsche's promulgation. Foucault considers himself to represent a third moment, from which, looking backward, he can ask: “What is the history of this will to truth? What are its effects? How is all this in relation to power?” (1980)
There is a power in being true to oneself – a power in being authentic. True. This is the power I wish Mudimbe had quoted in his defense of true knowledge. It is not an external, technical, or military power but an internal, cultural, and spiritual power. This is the power that holds a people together. Africans already have this power in their oral narratives, multiple languages, and traditional religions. The current crisis of the contemporary West is already showing us the limits of relying on such short-lived external, “technological” power.
Furthermore, the absence of a human subject of history does not preclude the presence of a supernatural subject of history. To realize that no one culture should judge universal history is not to conclude that there is no one person who transcends space and time and who is, at the same time, a human subject. This is precisely what Christians claim of Jesus Christ as the subject of history. If that claim is true (and that is a big “if”), it is simultaneously – we argue – a declaration that there can be a universal subject of history. To say it can be a solution is not to say it is the solution. It is merely to say, at the very least, that we are not limited to the suffocating solutions Foucault is offering us. If anything, such a solution spares us the violence (which we are so tired of in Africa) that Foucault suggests as the only way out of oppression.
To his credit, Mudimbe tangentially touches on such a claim when he notes that most, if not all African philosophers of repute have had some Christian backing in their human and intellectual formation:
Among others, the following can be considered representative of this spirit: W. E. Abraham (Ghana), O. Bimwenyi (Zaire), H. Djait (Tunisia), E Eboussi-Boulaga (Cameroon), A. P E. Elungu (Zaire), P J. Hountondji (Benin), E. Mveng (Cameroon), A. M. Ngindu (Zaire), T Obenga (Congo). T. Okere (Nigeria), J. O. Sodipo (Nigeria), I. Sow (Guinea), M. Towa (Cameroon), and K. Wiredu (Ghana). They are all members of the same generation: the oldest, Mveng, was born in 1930; the youngest, Hountondji, in 1942. They all published their major works between 1960 and 1970. Two external characteristics give to this group a relative homogeneity: the spiritual context of their youth and their formal training. Most of them were born into Christian families, which constitute the second or the third generation of African Christians. Thus, they were or still are profoundly marked by Christian principles and values. A number of them (Bimwenyi, Eboussi-Boulaga, Mveng, Okere, and Ngindu) are Roman Catholic priests, and others (Elungu and Towa, for example) at one time in their lives thought about becoming priests. The second external unifying characteristic is the type of training that these persons received. To illustrate, let us note that they were educated at some of the most respected schools and universities in Europe.
Is it a coincidence that this is the case? Is it a historical accident that Christianity has managed to give, to such a diverse mix of African Philosophers, such homogeneity? Is it a coincidence that those who have made some of the most piercing critiques of Western hegemony have also had encounters with a non-antagonistic version or facet of “Western” philosophy? These are the kind of questions that any serious African Philosopher cannot afford to ignore.
Mudimbe himself had his fair share of Christian influence in his formation. As a young man, he joined a monastery but left it in 1962 to study the forces that shaped African history. He did his graduate work in France, studying applied linguistics at the University of Besançon and earning his doctorate in philosophy, with high honors, at the University of Paris (the Sorbonne) in 1970 – this must be where he came into contact with the deconstructionist philosophies of Foucault and Derrida. Mudimbe then returned to Africa to accept a teaching post at Lovanium University (Congo), where he stayed until 1980. In 1981 he moved to the United States to become a professor at Haverford College, and in 1989 he joined the faculty of Duke University.
To be a Christian is not equivalent to being European or Western. To be Christian is not to belong to any one culture. It is, on the contrary, to enter into a universal stream of consciousness that transcends both space and time – but that is simultaneously rooted in space and time.
The Power of Speech
Africa is not only culturally and linguistically rich. In the course of its long history, Africa has also fostered the “ideology” of ‘otherness’, a doctrine that has come to be referred to as the philosophy of Ubuntu – the philosophy of I am because we are.
In Chapter Three, Mudimbe chooses to approach language, not from the point of view of “Ubuntu-togetherness”, but from the point of view of power – i.e. the perception of missionary work in Africa and the use of language as a necessary tool for dominion.
As we have observed so far from Mudimbe’s reflections, both approaches (language as a channel of togetherness and language as a channel for dominion) can be validated by the epistemology one espouses. If it is true that knowledge is essentially a form of power and a tool of politics, then language (which is a form of knowledge) is one more tool that can be used to dominate the other. But if knowledge and, by extension, language, are first and foremost socio-historic realities, then brotherhood (read Ubuntu) prevails over and above Hegel’s and Marx’s master-slave dialectical relationship.
Mamadou Dia, Alioune Diop, Birago Diop, Jacques Rabemananjara, and Senghor are rather critical of communism, even when, as in the case of Senghor, they are socialists. For them, communism is merely (as Sartre defined it) a traveling companion. They question the overemphasis on the fate of the international proletariat and wish to determine a strategy for promoting the individuality of African culture. As opposed to Marx's rigid interpretation of the relations between values and peoples’ aspirations in society, they look for ways of reinventing a sociohistorical foundation for independent African societies (see Senghor, 1962).
Again, if Christianity is seen as one more culture among others, then the Christian missionary’s language must violently replace the languages of native Africans in order for Christianity to flourish. However, if Christianity transcends all cultures, there should ideally be no competition between it and the cultures it encounters – as was the case between the Christian faith and the Greco-Roman world. If Christianity were a rival culture that was necessarily disruptive and violent, the Greek and Roman languages would be dead by now, but the contrary is the case – they are still alive and well. If anything, they are the two ancient languages that single out the “cultured” from the “uncultured” in liberal arts colleges in particular and in “high society” in general.
If the arguments made thus far in Nos. 1 and 2 above are anything to go by – i.e. if:
- Epistemology is a necessary lens through which we perceive our philosophy &
- Culture is a necessary foundation for thought &
- The “who” of knowledge does not contradict the “what” of knowledge &
- The subjective is not in competition with the objective … then,
In each of the pairs above, the latter entity relates with the former as a genus relates to a species. They are not antagonistic. On the contrary, one encapsulates the other in a non-dialectic, non-violent, non-intrusive way. Why then would it come as a surprise to anyone if we state that Christianity is not in competition with cultural groupings because it relates to them as a genus relates to a species … as a mother relates to its child?
Mudimbe, however, owing to his Foucauldian epistemology, which sees forces in history in a necessarily Hegelian, Marxist, and Sartrian way, supports the proposition that Christianity must also be one culture among many others and must, therefore, continuously clash with other cultures for dominance.
One might consider that missionary speech is always predetermined, pre-regulated, let us say colonized. It depends upon a normative discourse already given, definitely fixed, clearly meant in “a vital connection between Christianity and Western culture as a whole” (Dickson, 1984:33). Missionary orthodox speech, even when imaginative or fanciful, evolved within the framework of what, from now on, I shall call the authority of the truth. This is God's desire for the conversion of the world in terms of cultural and sociopolitical regeneration, economic progress and spiritual salvation. This means, at least, that the missionary does not enter into dialogue with pagans and “savages” but must impose the law of God that he incarnates.
The point I am trying to make in this last section is not to argue for one position over the others. My point is simply to show that there is a middle ground and that as far as language is concerned, Africans should be aware of both the divisive and unitive possibilities of the power of speech. Negative ethnicity (or fear of ‘the other’ as stranger) is not a peculiarly African problem – it is a problem of the human race. The envy among brothers that degenerates into bloody wars is as old as the story of Cain and Abel and as modern as the homo homini lupus of Thomas Hobbes.
In 20th Century Africa, this choice between unity and division, between brotherhood and power politics was observed in the historical decisions and paths of two famous African presidents: Julius Nyerere (1922-1999) and Kwame Nkurumah (1909-1972) – both acclaimed Socialists. Nyerere insisted on the fact that “the people” are the main agents and ultimate beneficiaries of socialist development. He believed in his people, their inherent rights, their education, human equality, and “the good” in humanity – hence his populism. Man was not a mere process for him; man was supreme. He is renowned for his promotion of the Kiswahili language, which helped forge the different tribes of Tanzania into one people. Nkurumah on the other hand, was ready to pit one man against another in the name of the inevitable Hegelian dialectic explanation of history.
The human tongue (which is a concrete expression of his mind) can be used to make enemies or to foster brotherhood, to kill or to heal. Both paths have been taken in human history. The choice of which path to take is ours to make as contemporary Africans.
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The final installment of the series “Dataism and Capitalism” will be published at the end of June.
Main References
Mudimbe, Y. V.: The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge, Indiana University Press, 1988.
Foucault, Michel: The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Harper & Row, 1976.