“What of the name V.Y Mudimbe?”

Bio: Lindokuhle B. Gama is a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at Rhodes University and a Research Fellow with the African Gender Equality Research Group at the Institute of Global Value Inquiry (2025–2029). Her research is situated at the nexus of African feminist thought, applied ethics, and non-ideal critical theory, with a particular focus on personhood, violence, and gender justice in African contexts. Gama is currently engaged in several international research collaborations and is committed to advancing decolonial and generative approaches to philosophy that foreground the lived experiences of historically marginalized communities.

Abstract: This presentation revisits V.Y. Mudimbe’s The Invention of Africa not to memorialize a thinker, but to engage the enduring—and increasingly prophetic—resonance of his critique. Mudimbe exposed how colonial systems of knowledge invented “Africa” as an object of Western epistemes, reducing African personhood to subhuman status. Yet he complicates the idea of a unidirectional imposition of power. Rather than a simple narrative of domination, Mudimbe offers a textured analysis of appropriation, ambivalence, and epistemic entanglement—insisting that the colonial archive is not merely to be rejected but interrogated from within. This talk explores how Mudimbe’s intervention prefigures critical tensions within African feminism and gender discourse today. Particularly, I examine how the inherited invention of “Africa” continues to shape debates between feminist positions that either reject gender as a colonial imposition (declensionist) or affirm it as central to African social life (acclensionist). Mudimbe’s work calls us to scrutinize the conceptual ground upon which such claims are made, and to remain vigilant against reproducing the very epistemic violences we seek to dismantle. To ask “What of the name V.Y. Mudimbe?” is to contend with a thinker whose relevance is untimely—precisely because he saw further than his moment.