Tribute by Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja
Tribute by Kasongo M. Kapanga
Tribute by Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, PhD, Professor Emeritus, UNC-Chapel Hill Former DRC Ambassador to the United Nations
Submitted by Congolese Studies Association
Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, the esteemed and internationally renowned scholar by his philosophy, novels, and poems, left the earthly world to return to the universe of the wise on April 22, 2025. He was born on December 8, 1941, in Likasi in the Belgian Congo, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). He attended excellent primary and secondary schools of the Catholic Church and joined the Benedictine monastery.
He happened to be in Rwanda at the time when the Hutu Revolution of 1959 took place, and the Benedictine monks found themselves obligated to bury many of the Tutsi who were killed by the majority Hutu. By his own account to me, the trauma of this episode made him leave the monastery for Lovanium University, now the University of Kinshasa. After his university degree in Congo, he went to Europe, where he studied philosophy at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium and earned his Ph.D. degree in philosophy at the University of Paris in France.
He returned home to teach at Lovanium University. In 1973, President Mobutu Sese Seko nationalized the Catholic Lovanium and the Protestant Congo Free University (ULC) in Kisangani to merge them with the State University at Lubumbashi as a single state university named the National University of Zaïre (UNAZA). Only one faculty or school was allowed for the whole UNAZA system, except for the Faculty of Medicine, which had two, one in Kinshasa and the other in Lubumbashi.
Professor Mudimbe became Dean of the Faculty of Letters, whose home was the Lubumbashi Campus of UNAZA. Although I had already heard about him, it is in Lubumbashi that I met Mudimbe in October 1973, when we were both getting accustomed to our Kasapa campus in Lubumbashi. I came out of the ULC in Kisangani, as a lecturer (Chef de travaux) in political science. I wasn’t as famous as he was, but we were not different in age and were each part of young couples with little children. By 1973, I had been promoted to the rank of Interim Deputy Dean for Academic Affairs in the Faculty of Social Sciences, the largest school in the entire UNAZA system in numbers of students and teachers.
We were great friends in both Lubumbashi and North Carolina. While my stay in Lubumbashi was limited to two years and two months, I learned a lot from Valentin and his colleagues in the Faculty of Letters, which comprised History, Literature and Languages. Professor Mudimbe brought some very good professors to his faculty. It published three or four scholarly journals, bringing in a lot of academic fervor to the campus, much more than our social sciences faculty, which had a single journal, despite its large size, with political science, public administration and international relations, plus sociology and anthropology. To enrich the scholarly life of the campus, Professor Mudimbe established a publishing press of his own, known as Éditions du Mont Noir (Black Mountain Publishers), which published different kinds of books.
There are three things for which I am most grateful to Valentin. The first is his publication of my class notes for an introductory course in political science. I don’t remember how he got these notes, which I had written in March 1971 for my first course on political science at ULC in Kisangani. I corrected them in October for my first Lubumbashi class beginning in November 1971. To my surprise, a student came to me in early 1972 with a small book entitled Introduction à la science politique (Editions du Mont Noir, 1972), with my name on the cover. When I asked Valentin why he published my notes without my permission, he simply smiled and then replied that “we have the duty to teach the young. Since I saw a great manual for our students, I couldn’t hesitate to publish it.” As he said, this manual was used in teaching political science at Lubumbashi for the next four or five years. A great service to students.
The second was the publication of a paper I had written for a course on political philosophy in one of my Ph.D. classes in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I submitted my 1970 paper on “Political Obligations” to the Faculty of Letters’s African Philosophy Journal. Back in Madison, Wisconsin to write my dissertation, I received in the mail box volume No 5 (1974) of the journal, with my article on pages 37-47. I am sure that as a member of the editorial board, Valentin was one of the editors deciding on the quality of my article.
The third kind gesture that Valentin did for me was to advise me not to return to Lubumbashi once I finished work on my dissertation. He had come to Madison with a group of Congolese intellectuals invited to visit the United States. In a discussion between the two of us, he asked me what I was planning to do once I got my Ph.D. I replied that I will return to Lubumbashi, of course. Valentin said to me “You must be crazy. Have-you forgotten all the harassment you went through; the interrogations by the Intelligence service, etc?” This was in July 1974. And I never forgot this questioning. In March or April 1975, I sent a letter to Professor Crawford Young, my mentor at Wisconsin and then completing his second and last year as Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at UNAZA/Lubumbashi, asking him to prolong my leave of absence, for family reasons. His answer was quick and positive, and I didn’t see my homeland until August 1991, following Mobutu’s ending of his one-party dictatorship.
Four years later, in 1979, Valentin himself had to face his unsolicited appointment to the Central Committee of the Mouvement Populaire de la Révolution (Popular Movement of the Revolution, MPR), the second major policymaker of the single party after the Bureau Politique (Political Bureau). Valentin found a clever way to escape Mobutu’s dictatorship. Professeure Elisabeth Boyi, Valentin’s wife then, had earned a Fulbright grant for foreign professors at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. Her husband followed her there and both of their careers blossomed outside the Congo.
While Valentin was already well known for his novels, poems and articles on philosophy and literature, it is in his over 42 years of scholarship in America, where he taught in excellent universities like Duke and Stanford and produced one magnum opus after another like The Invention of Africa (1988), The Idea of Africa (2013) and others that he became a baobab of African philosophy, who rejected the European invention of Africa.
In 1989, the African Studies Association (ASA) of the United States, the largest organization of Africa-area experts in the world, selected Mudimbe’s The Invention of Africa as the winner of the Herskovits Award for the best book published on Africa in the previous year, 1988, to be given to the writer at the annual meeting in Atlanta in 1989. By coincidence, I was the person to hand the prize to Valentin, in my capacity as the outgoing past president of ASA, for the year 1987-88. I made it clear to anyone who might not know it, that one Congolese was handing this great award to another Congolese, in the United States of America. Valentin did a lot for the Congo, Africa, and for humanity.
May the soul of our esteemed philosopher Valentin-Yves Mudimbe rest in eternal peace.
Tribute by Kasongo M. Kapanga, PhD, University of Richmond, Virginia
Submitted by Congolese Studies Association
Professor V. Y. Mudimbe and Pope Francis passed away in the same week, that is, on April 22 and April 28th, respectively. Mudimbe was many things wrapped up into a tiny, frail, but brainy body. He was a novelist, a poet, an essayist, and one of Africa’s best academics.
Professor V. Y. Mudimbe was born in Jadotville (Likasi), in the Katanga Province, in the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga (later Gécamines) workers’ compound of Panda, where his father was employed as a skilled worker (fitter or ajusteur).
Unlike his peers, Mudimbe received a classical education destined only for those who aspired to enter the priesthood or religious life. After completing his studies at minor seminaries, Mudimbe entered the Benedictine monastery of Gihindamuyaga in Butare (now Huye), Rwanda, taking the religious name of Mathieu. At age 21, he left the monastery to further his education first at Université Lovanium in Kinshasa, and then at Louvain University, Belgium, and finally in France (Nanterre). His itinerary shows that he was the product of the colonial project, as could be inferred from biographical accounts, or his autobiography Les Corps glorieux des mots et des êtres (1994: “J’ai été bien domestiqué […] Je suis un animal bien dressé,” p. 16. (I have been well domesticated […] I have been trained). His academic career can be divided into two parts: the Zairian or Congolese era and the Euro-American era.
Un Homme de Lettres. The rise of Mudimbe in the Congolese academia coincided with his joining the teaching staff at the Lovanium University in Kinshasa and then Campus de Lubumbashi when President Mobutu merged all the institutions of higher learning under one umbrella called UNAZA (Université Nationale du Zaïre). At the Lubumbashi Campus, as Dean, Mudimbe headed an impressive Faculty de Philosophie et Lettres with professors (Pius Ngandu-Nkashama, Clémentine Nzuji-Faïk, Georges Ngal, Paulin Hountondji, Isidore Ndaywell) who would carry the torch of excellence to other world’s respected academic institutions. He also hosted conferences with prestigious speakers such as Cheik Anta Diop, Théophile Obenga, and worked with scores of illustrious Africans and well-known non-African academics such as Johannes Fabian and Bogumil Jewsiewicki. These scholars’ engagements at the University of Lubumbashi during the 1970s highlighted the institution’s prominence as a center for critical thought and its contribution to the broader intellectual movements in postcolonial Africa that Mudimbe would ultimately radiate in his post-Lubumbashi academic career. It is also during this period that most of his literary works were published, such as Entre les eaux or Between Tides, which put him in a prominent position on the African literary scene. He also emerged as a leading figure in African Philosophy and a sharp analyst of the colonial undertaking, which allowed him to reflect on the relationship between power and knowledge as performed in the framework of European colonization of Africa.
V. Y. Mudimbe has been the best-known and the most studied Congolese writer and remains a towering figure in Congolese literature. Even though he went into exile almost half a century ago, and his academic activities pulled him away from fictional writing, he remains at the forefront. One of his closest collaborators, Professor Pascal Nyunda ya Rubango (University of Creighton), describes him as follows, “not a single label could adequately describe this writer, essayist, and multifaceted professor whom many see as the manifestation of an ‘encyclopedic’ genius.” [Aucune étiquette figée ne saurait adéquatement décrire cet écrivain, essayiste et enseignant polyvalent que d’aucuns considèrent comme manifestation d’un génie « encyclopédique » …] (“Deux écrivains” 249).
Haverford, Stanford, and Duke: Mudimbe’s Academic Homes.
Mudimbe taught in three American universities: Haverford in Pennsylvania, Stanford University in California, and Duke University in North Carolina. The Euro-American phase of his career is primarily dominated by his influential academic publications (essays), which, situated at the intersection of several theoretical reflections, are in dialogue with modern European philosophers, where Michel Foucault was in a prominent position. The Invention of Africa (1988, crowned with the 1989 Herskovitz Prize) and The Idea of Africa (1994) were two seminal essays marking his extraordinary academic career in the United States. In The Invention of Africa, Mudimbe analyzed the colonial act and its consequences in the postcolonial era. Critics have legitimately seen this work as an attempt to bridge Western systems of knowledge and colonized societies’ gnostic systems to resolve the conflictual relationships that presided over the forced encounter. The sequel, The Idea of Africa (1994), underlines moments and genealogical elements that led him to what he had become. Mudimbe is a universal thinker and someone whose influence has spread beyond his native DRC to reach global academic circles.
Nevertheless, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is mourning one of its prized sons who ironically shed light on the very problems that are assailing the stability of the nation.
Mudimbe was a prolific writer whose comprehensive work straddles many disciplines. His writing becomes a sustained interrogation of the epistemological impetus, not for its own sake, but by gauging its long-term effects on the new Congolese subjectivity with its multi-layered elements accumulated through individual and collective experience. He wrote four novels, namely Between Tides (Entre les eaux, 1973), The Birth of the Moon (Le Bel Immonde, 1976), The Rift (L’Écart, 1973), and Shaba Deux: Les Carnets de la Mère Marie-Gertrude (1985). His poetry collections include Les fuseaux (1973), Déchirures (1971), Entretailles (1973), Fulgurances (1973) and Les Fragments d’un espoir (1976). His fictional works dramatize Congolese characters confronting issues such as the postcolonial malaise, incompetence of post-independence leaders, and identitarian interrogations in decolonized spaces.
Mudimbe wrote several essays that analyze social issues relevant to the Congolese and African postcolonial situations. The Mobutu regime under which he lived fostered an anti-colonial populist ideology to which every Congolese was inescapably urged to adhere. The tenets did not originate organically from commonly lived experiences, but were rather imposed from above. Mudimbe’s inquisitive and reflective mind allowed him to avoid the traps set by political pressure from the regime. Instructed to teach civism as a channel for Mobutist ideas, Mudimbe’s Autour de “La Nation” astutely questions its objectives and practices.
