Valentin-Yves Mudimbe is a Congolese philosopher, novelist, poet,
essayist, and academic, widely considered to be one of the most
important African thinkers of his generation. The ideas and arguments he
has developed in his writings since the 1970s, including The Invention
of Africa, have been hugely influential across many disciplines and
established his reputation as one of the essential postcolonial thinkers
of our time.
In The Scent of the Father, Mudimbe set himself the task of shedding
light on the complex links that bind Africa to the West and determine
the exercise of thought and knowledge practices, particularly in
relation to the social sciences. For Africa to escape the West, says
Mudimbe, it must become aware of what remains Western in the very
concepts and forms of thought that allow it to think against the West,
and be alert to the possibility that the recourse against the West might
be just another ruse that the West uses for its own ends. Africa must
elucidate the modalities of the integration of Africans into the myths
of the West, while at the same time aiming at the readaptation of the
African psyche in the wake of the violence it has suffered.
This seminal work by a leading African thinker will be of great interest
to anyone concerned with the legacies of colonialism and the debates on
decolonization and decoloniality in the social and human sciences.