Salikoko S. Mufwene is the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Linguistics, the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is also professor on the Committee of Evolutionary Biology, the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, and the Committee on African Studies, at UChicago. His research area is evolutionary linguistics, focused on the phylogenetic emergence of languages and language speciation, especially the emergence of creoles and other cases of the indigenization of European languages in the colonies, as well as language vitality. He has authored and (co-)edited dozens of books and has published hundreds of articles, book chapters, and book reviews. His latest publications include Migrations humaines et évolution linguistique (Éditions du Collège de France, 2024) and Ecological Perspectives on Language Endangerment and Loss (Springer Nature 2025). He is the founding editor of Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact and fellow of the Linguistic Society of America, of the AmericanPhilosophical Society, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He assumed the Chaire Mondes francophones at the Clollège de France for the 2023–24 academic year.

May the real V. Y. Mudimbe stand up?

Mudimbe was polymorphous and a real intellectual humanist and an enjoyable social being, friendly and altruist, though he may have appeared aloof to those who did not know him, such as when I was a college student at the National University of Zaïre at Lubumbashi in 1970a. My opinion changed after I invited him to speak at a conference at UGA both to Annual Conference on African Linguistics and to philosophers, in separate sessions, in 1990. The privilege of hosting him one evening at my house with some other Congolese helped discover what a warm human being he was and a kind of party “animateur” (in Congolese jargon), full of wit and humor and making his audience laugh in response to his funny narratives.

Soon after he died, I thought it was time I stopped postponing reading especially The Invention of Africa and The Idea of Africa as well as The Mudimbe Reader, edited by Pierre-Philippe Fraiture and Daniel Orrells. I discovered that Mudimbe was a forerunner of the decoloniality intellectual engagement. In the chapter “When was Africa discovered?” (in The Mudimbe Reader), he reminds us that the European explorers were not the first to discover Africa, although they reached parts of Africa that philosophers and historians of the Antiquity, especially, myth makers had imagined. Ancient Greeks, who had traded across and around the Mediterranean knew not only of Egypt and Lybia (not the modern one) but also the Nile River crossing Ethiopia and the Sudan. How Western Europeans painted Africa and Africans since the fifteentth century was at variance with narratives from Herodotus and other ancient Greeks. Western European explorers and, later, colonizers racialized Black Africa in ways that served “la mission civilisatrice” with little appreciation of African civilizations and cultural practices. On the other hand, the Greeks’ narratives were not necessarily factual, some of the details were fed by myths that they built, which became part of the common knowledge of the time. After all, they created their own gods and monsters! In this presentation, I will share my reactions to “V. Y. Mudimbe.” This name is apparently his preferred self-identification since the Mobutu political philosophy of “authenticity” begun in the 1970s.