V.Y. Mudimbe

Valentin-Yves Mudimbe (born 8 December 1941, Jadotville, Belgian Congo) is a Congolese philosopher, professor, and author of poems, novels, as well as books and articles on African culture and intellectual history.

He was born in the Belgian Congo, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. As a young man, he joined a monastery, but left in 1962 in order to study the forces that shaped African history. He studied in Louvain (PhD, 1970), came back to Congo and flew to the USA in 1979 for political reasons. He has taught at Haverford College and Stanford University, and is now Professor Emeritus in the Program in Literature at Duke University. His work has had a major impact on many disciplines including Philosophy, Sociology, Anthropology, Linguistics, Literature, and History.

He is generally considered to be the Edward Saïd of African studies, notably for his major book The Invention of Africa (1988), a work widely regarded to be as significant to the field of African studies as Saïd's Orientalism (1978) has been to postcolonial studies. A considerable body of work has been devoted to Mudimbe's publications.

Mudimbe focuses most closely on phenomenology, structuralism, mythical narratives, and the practice and use of language. As a professor, he has taught courses on these topics, as well as on ancient Greek cultural geography.

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