A Doctor of Philosophy and Letters from the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium) since 1970, Mr. Mudimbe began his career as a professor at the National University of Zaire in Lubumbashi, where he was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters from 1972 to 1974. In the early 1980s, when he had to go into exile for political reasons, prestigious American universities opened their doors to him, such as Haverford College (Pennsylvania), Stanford University, and then Duke University, where he is still a professor.
“The Invention of Africa” published by Présence Africaine.
The book The Invention of Africa (1988), here translated into French by Laurent Vannini, has a strange fate. Its author, Valentin Y. Mudimbe, is recognized as one of the finest analysts of the social sciences, classical and modern humanities, and philology; Mudimbe is also an outstanding novelist. Yet it took a generation to translate his book into the French-speaking language and intellectual traditions that nourished it. Here, Mudimbe explores three epistemological territories: Greek and Latin philology, religious libraries, and colonial ethnography, to take on, with a certain glee, literatures in search of a "vernacular" Africa, a neo-pharaonic modernity inaugurated by a triumphant ancient Egypt, put back on its African feet, which taught the Greeks a lesson in order to establish an intellectual production disconnected from the Western world.
The book continues to be the subject of commentary and criticism. It is probably one of the most cited works of Africanist literature. It is required reading in several disciplines taught at American universities.