The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge

by V. Y. Mudimbe

Overview

" . . . groundbreaking . . . clear, straightforward, and economical. . . . seminal . . . " —American Anthropologist

"This is a challenging book . . . a remarkable contribution to African intellectual history." —International Journal of African Historical Studies

"Mudimbe's description of the struggles over Africa's self-invention are vivid and rewarding. From Blyden to Sartre, Temples to Senghor, Mudimbe provides a bold and versatile resume of Africa's literary inventors." —Village Voice Literary Supplement

" . . . a landmark achievement in African studies." —Journal of Religion in Africa

In this unique and provocative book, Zairean philosopher and writer V. Y. Mudimbe addresses the multiple scholarly discourses that exist—African and non-African—concerning the meaning of Africa and being African.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780253204684
Publisher:	Indiana University Press
Publication date:	05/22/1988
Series:	African Systems of Thought
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

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The Invention of Africa

Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge

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By V. Y. Mudimbe

Indiana University Press

Copyright © 1988 V. Y. Mudimbe
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-20468-4

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CHAPTER 1

DISCOURSE OF POWER AND KNOWLEDGE OF OTHERNESS

Colonizing Structure and Marginality

Lord have pity on us! ... "The human race?" Phyllis exclaimed, stressing the second word in her astonishment. "That's what it says here," Jinn assured her. "Don't start off by interrupting me."

P. Boulle, Planet of the Apes.

The scramble for Africa, and the most active period of colonization, lasted less than a century. These events, which involved the greater part of the African continent, occurred between the late nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries. Although in African history the colonial experience represents but a brief moment from the perspective of today, this moment is still charged and controversial, since, to say the least, it signified a new historical form and the possibility of radically new types of discourses on African traditions and cultures. One might think that this new historical form has meant, from its origins, the negation of two contradictory myths; namely, the "Hobbesian picture of a pre-European Africa, in which there was no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continued fear, and danger of violent death"; and "the Rousseauian picture of an African golden age of perfect liberty, equality and fraternity" (Hodgkin, 1957:174-75)

Although generalizations are of course dangerous, colonialism and colonization basically mean organization, arrangement. The two words derive from the latin word colere, meaning to cultivate or to design. Indeed the historical colonial experience does not and obviously cannot reflect the peaceful connotations of these words. But it can be admitted that the colonists (those settling a region), as well as the colonialists (those exploiting a territory by dominating a local majority) have all tended to organize and transform non-European areas into fundamentally European constructs.

I would suggest that in looking at this process, it is possible to use three main keys to account for the modulations and methods representative of colonial organization: the procedures of acquiring, distributing, and exploiting lands in colonies; the policies of domesticating natives; and the manner of managing ancient organizations and implementing new modes of production. Thus, three complementary hypotheses and actions emerge: the domination of physical space, the reformation of natives' minds, and the integration of local economic histories into the Western perspective. These complementary projects constitute what might be called the colonizing structure, which completely embraces the physical, human, and spiritual aspects of the colonizing experience (see, e.g., Christopher, 1984: 27–87). This structure clearly also indicates the projected metamorphosis envisioned, at great intellectual cost, by ideological and theoretical texts, which from the last quarter of the nineteenth century to the 1950s have proposed programs for "regenerating" the African space and its inhabitants.

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)

He refers to the second part of the nineteenth century, emphasizing the coexistence of "imperialist" ideology, economic and political processes for extending control over African space, and capitalist institutions which ultimately led to dependence and underdevelopment (see also Mazrui, 1974). In a recent book, D. K. Fieldhouse writes that "only a dogmatist would attempt to state categorically that colonialism was either totally inconsistent with economic development in the dependencies or, alternatively, that it was the best possible medium for stimulating their growth. Colonialism was not sufficiently consistent over time to justify any such sweeping assertions, nor were its objectives sufficiently coherent to achieve any particular result" (1981:103). Thus colonialism has been some kind of historical accident, a "largely unplanned and, as it turned out, transient phase in the evolving relationship between more and less developed parts of the world" (1981:49). This accident, on the whole, according to this view, was not the worst thing that could have happened to the black continent.

Essentially, the argument is not new. It has a history that goes back to the debate of the early decades of this century. In his book, Imperialism: A Study, J. A. Hobson linked the scramble for Africa to capitalism and capitalist search for higher profits from colonial conquests. For J. A. Schumpeter, in 1919, colonialism as well as its cause, imperialism, did not obey logic. It was "non-rational and irrational purely instinctual inclinations toward war and conquest" that guided "objectless tendencies toward forcible expansion, without definite, utilitarian limits" (Schumpeter, 1951:83). Against the Leninist theme of Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), he stated that "a purely capitalist world offers no fertile soil to imperialist impulses ... capitalism is by nature anti-imperialist" (1951:96). And in a voluminous document full of statistics, The Balance Sheets of Imperialism (1936), Grover Clark demonstrated that colonialism was not only economically irrational but also ruinous for the colonial powers.

On the opposite side, at the risk of being labeled dogmatists, Marxist interpreters accept the essentials of Lenin's thesis. The contention of neo-Marxists such as Samir Amin, Paul Baran, André Gunder-Frank, and Immanuel Wallerstein is that if colonialism was inconsistent with economic development, it was at least, since its inception, quite consistent with its own economic interests and objectives.

Accordingly, colonialism should have produced a body of knowledge on the means of exploiting dependencies (Rodney, 1981). It should also have produced a kind of empirical technique for implementing structural distortions by positing four main political propositions: first, priority given to the industrial revolution over the agricultural revolution; second, the simultaneous promotion of all branches of industry with a preferential approach to heavy industry; third, emphasis on tertiary and service activities; fourth, preference for exports to the detriment of the total economic system (Amin, 1973). The outcome of these policies was the process of underdevelopment initiated everywhere colonialism occurred. This process can be summed up in three points: First, the capitalist world system is such that parts of the system always develop at the expense of other parts, either by trade or by the transfer of surpluses. Second, the underdevelopment of dependencies is not only an absence of development, but also an organizational structure created under colonialism by bringing non-Western territory into the capitalist world. Third, despite their economic potential, dependencies lack the structural capacity for autonomy and sustained growth, since their economic fate is largely determined by the developed countries (Amin, 1974; Gunder-Frank, 1969; Wallerstein, 1979). From this last contention, some theorists have quickly hypothesized that if Japan has escaped the predicament of underdevelopment, it is because it is the only non-Western country to have escaped colonialism (Bigo, 1974:32, 60).

It seems impossible to make any statement about colonialism without being a dogmatist, particularly where economic organization and growth are concerned. Different as they are in form and intention, the Marxist and peripheral theories have nevertheless the same focus: overseas territory, totally reorganized and submitted to a Western model (Mommsen, 1983). The first theory considers colonial imperialism as a calculated and inevitable culmination of capitalism. If the latter discounts the planned aspect of colonialism, it still assumes the phenomenon to be a consequence of European industrialization and development, somehow bound to expand overseas. Whatever theory one accepts, the application remains the same, leading inevitably to what I have called the colonizing structure responsible for producing marginal societies, cultures, and human beings (Emmanuel, 1969; Bairoch, 1971). Therefore, for the purpose of clarity further on, let me make clear the dichotomy that this structure creates and which is a sign of what I. Sachs calls "europeocentrism." It is a model which

dominates our thought and given its projection on the world scale by the expansion of capitalism and the colonial phenomenon, it marks contemporary culture imposing itself as a strongly conditioning model for some and forced deculturation for others. (Sachs, 1971:22; quoted by Bigo, 1974:23, n.3)

Because of the colonializing structure, a dichotomizing system has emerged, and with it a great number of current paradigmatic oppositions have developed: traditional versus modern; oral versus written and printed; agrarian and customary communities versus urban and industrialized civilization; subsistence economies versus highly productive economies. In Africa a great deal of attention is generally given to the evolution implied and promised by the passage from the former paradigms to the latter (Mudimbe, 1980). This presupposed jump from one extremity (underdevelopment) to the other (development) is in fact misleading. By emphasizing the formulation of techniques of economic change, the model tends to neglect a structural mode inherited from colonialism. Between the two extremes there is an intermediate, a diffused space in which social and economic events define the extent of marginality (Bigo, 1974:20; Shaw, 1985:33–36). 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). As a second example, one could regard the social disintegration of African societies and the growing urban proletariat as results of a destabilization of customary organizations by an incoherent establishment of new social arrangements and institutions (Turnbull, 1962; Memmi, 1966; Mair, 1975). 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). From that moment on the forms and formulations of the colonial culture and its aims were somehow the means of trivializing the whole traditional mode of life and its spiritual framework. The potential and necessary transformations meant that the mere presence of this new culture was a reason for the rejection of unadapted persons and confused minds.

Marginality designates the intermediate space between the so-called African tradition and the projected modernity of colonialism. It is apparently an urbanized space in which, as S. Amin noted, "vestiges of the past, especially the survival of structures that are still living realities (tribal ties, for example), often continue to hide the new structures (ties based on class, or on groups defined by their position in the capitalist system)" (1974:377). This space reveals not so much that new imperatives could achieve a jump into modernity, as the fact that despair gives this intermediate space its precarious pertinence and, simultaneously, its dangerous importance. As P. Bigo put it recently:

The young nations rightly fear seeing their original world swallowed up in the whirlpools of industrial society and disappear forever, somewhat like animal species we try with difficulty and often in vain to protect against the invasion of technical man. (Bigo, 1974:23)

There is no doubt that direct or indirect colonialism always provokes in the countries that experience it cultural constraint, a contamination the more profound as it is hidden. Lifestyles and modes of thinking of the dominant nations tend to impose themselves on the dominated nations. Morever, they are accepted, even sought after. Models spring up, alienating factors for the people who adopt them. (Bigo, 1974:24)

At any rate, this intermediary space could be viewed as the major signifier of underdevelopment. It reveals 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. It also unveils the empirical evidence of this tension by showing concrete examples of developmental failures such as demographic imbalance, extraordinarily high birth rates, progressive disintegration of the classic family structure, illiteracy, severe social and economic disparities, dictatorial regimes functioning under the cathartic name of democracy, the breakdown of religious traditions, the constitution of syncretic churches, etc. (Bairoch, 1971; Bigo, 1974).

In general, troubled by such confusion, social scientists prefer to plead for a reassessment of programs of modernization. No doubt many theories are still to be proposed and plans to be made. Yet one may already understand that this marginal space has been a great problem since the beginning of the colonializing experience; rather than being a step in the imagined "evolutionary process," it has been the locus of paradoxes that called into question the modalities and implications of modernization in Africa.

Discursive Formations and Otherness

It is certain that the learned Anteile, without being a misanthrope, was not interested at all in human beings. He would often declare that he did not expect much from them anymore ...

P. Boulle, Planet of the Apes.

The colonializing structure, even in its most extreme manifestations — such as the crisis of South Africa (see, e.g., Seidman, 1985) — might not be the only explanation for Africa's present-day marginality. Perhaps this marginality could, more essentially, be understood from the perspective of wider hypotheses about the classification of beings and societies. It would be too easy to state that this condition, at least theoretically, has been a consequence of anthropological discourses. Since Turgot (who in the 1750s first classified languages and cultures according to "whether the peoples [are] hunters, shepherds, or husbandmen" [1913–1923, 1:172] and ultimately defined an ascending path from savagery to commercial societies), non-Western marginality has been a sign both of a possible absolute beginning and of a primitive foundation of conventional history. Rather than retracing an already too well-known evolutionary hallucination (Duchet, 1971; Hodgen, 1971), let us take a different angle by examining both the issues derived from a fifteenth-century painting and the allocation of an "African object" to nineteenth-century anthropology.

Commenting upon Las Meninas of Velasquez, M. Foucault writes: "the painter is standing a little back from his canvas. He is glancing at his model; perhaps he is considering whether to add some finishing touch, though it is also possible that the first stroke has not yet been made ..." (1973:3). The painter is at one side of the canvas working or meditating on how to depict his models. Once the painting is finished, it becomes both a given and a reflection of what made it possible. And Foucault thinks that the order of Las Meninas seems to be an example of "a representation [which] undertakes to represent itself ... in all its elements, with its images, the eyes to which it is offered, the faces it makes visible, the gestures that call it into being." Yet in the amazing complexity of this painting there is remarkable absence: "the person it resembles and the person in whose eyes it is only a resemblance" (Foucault, 1973:16).

Now let us consider Hans Burgkmair's painting Exotic Tribe. Is the painter sitting back contemplating his exotic models? How many? It is not even certain that a model is present in the room where Burgkmair is thinking about ways of subsuming particular versions of human beings. The year is 1508. Dürer is still alive. Burgkmair is by then a respected master of the new school of Augsburg he has founded. He would like to please the Fuggers and Welsers and has agreed to illustrate Bartolomäus Springer's book on his travels overseas (Kunst, 1967). He has carefully read Springer's diary, has probably studied some clumsy pencil or pen-and-ink sketches, and has decided to draw six pictures of "primitives."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Invention of Africa by V. Y. Mudimbe. Copyright © 1988 V. Y. Mudimbe. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents

Contents

INTRODUCTION, ix,
I. Discourse of Power and Knowledge of Otherness, 1,
II. Questions of Method, 24,
III. The Power of Speech, 44,
IV. E. W. Blyden's Legacy and Questions, 98,
V. The Patience of Philosophy, 135,
Conclusion: The Geography of a Discourse, 187,
APPENDIX. ETHIOPIAN SOURCES OF KNOWLEDGE, 201,
BIBLIOGRAPHY, 205,
INDEX, 233,