V. Y. Mudimbe’s The Scent of the Father asks what an African order of knowledge would require.
Whose rules?
Congolese philosopher V. Y. Mudimbe published L’odeur du père in Paris in 1982, six years before The Invention of Africa. Polity released the English translation, The Scent of the Father: Essay on the Limits of Life and Science in Sub-Saharan Africa, in 2023. Its essays ask a hard question about the human and social sciences in Africa: whose rules are they built on, and can Africans write by other ones?
A protest, born in Europe
Mudimbe begins with Négritude. He calls it an extraordinary protest against the reduction of Black people to objects, but notes that it grew out of a European moment: the cultural relativism of European philosophy between 1920 and 1945. Senghor himself credited European anthropologists such as Leo Frobenius and Maurice Delafosse with giving young Black students reasons for pride.
Who may speak?
He then holds up Michel Foucault’s 1970 lecture “The Order of Discourse” as a mirror. Foucault argued that every society controls speech: what may be said, who may say it, and through which institutions, from prohibitions and disciplines to rituals and education. Mudimbe treats Foucault as a symbol of the Western knowledge Africa hopes to be free of, and asks what order governs African discourse.
Even the critics
His sharpest claim is that the founders of African social science share one habit. That includes Alexis Kagamé and John Mbiti, Placide Tempels and his ethnophilosophy, and even the “new African science” of Cheikh Anta Diop and Théophile Obenga. All of them, he argues, view African culture through a critical gaze the West has owned since the 18th century, and in doing so make it something to be looked at, the way a museum turns a ritual object into “art.”
The cost of distance
The question he leaves is the cost of distance. To escape the West, he argues, Africans must first know how close it has come, and how much of the West remains in the very tools used to argue against it.
Change the language
As a way forward, Mudimbe imagines African languages becoming the languages of science. Greek thinkers reworked knowledge received from ancient Egypt in their own language, he writes, and the order they built still marks Africa today through the West. A similar shift, he suggests, could open a new one.
V. Y. Mudimbe, “What Order of African Discourse?”, in The Scent of the Father: Essay on the Limits of Life and Science in Sub-Saharan Africa (Polity, 2023).
V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa (1988); Michel Foucault, “The Order of Discourse” (1970).
Lexicon No. 01: Négritude.