The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge
V.Y. Mudimbe
"Africa" itself, he argued, is a category built by the people who conquered it.
Mudimbe shifted the ground with a Foucauldian question: who invented the very category "Africa"? He traced how colonial libraries, missionaries, and anthropology manufactured African "otherness," then argued that ethnophilosophy stayed trapped inside that Western order of knowledge even while claiming to resist it. Both Tempels's admirers and his critics, he suggested, were still speaking the colonizer's language. A meta-critique that reframed the entire quarrel.
Its legacy. It pulled African philosophy into direct conversation with Foucault and postcolonial theory.
- Author
- V.Y. Mudimbe
- First published
- 1988
- Genre
- Philosophy
- Theme
- African Philosophy and Ideas
An Essay on African Philosophical Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme
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