LA BIBLIOTHÈQUE DE MUDIMBE

We’re excited to land the Pan African Space Station at the Prisme Library, a reading space in downtown Lubumbashi, from 21-24 October.

The landing marks an exploration of the intellectual, literary and artistic histories of Lubumbashi in the time of V.Y. Mudimbe and, more specifically, his time at the University of Lubumbashi, where he was based from 1971 to 1980.

This is a period often overlooked by his biographers, yet one during which the philologist published three major novels, several collections of poetry, and emerged as a leading thinker on African modes of self-writing. It is also a period marked by the institutionalisation of the ideology of “authenticité” by Mobutu Sese Seko’s MPR regime—at best, a culturalist misappropriation of the Guinean Socialist Cultural Revolution.

Lubumbashi is both the Congo and persistently not. Situated in Katanga, a territory whose economic, political and cultural histories have repeatedly exceeded the borders of the Congolese state, the city belongs simultaneously to the Congo and to the wider Copperbelt and Southern African worlds; made possible by colonial extraction yet transformed by African mobility; claimed repeatedly by the national state yet continually producing affiliations that cross its borders. Mudimbe’s intellectual problem—how “knowledge” produces Africa, how colonial categories survive their apparent overthrow, how African subjects inherit and contest those categories—began here.

Under the name “La Bibliothèque de Mudimbe”, our project refers both to an actual library—Mudimbe’s personal collection, which he donated to the University of Lubumbashi shortly before his death—and to the conceptual archive associated with what he famously called “The Invention of Africa”. But rather than centering the colonial library, as Mudimbe does in his celebrated work, we draw on his method in order to trace the less visible and perhaps unacknowledged trajectories that preceded his departure to the US in 1980.

So, not only documents and collections, but also the lives lived within them, and the intellectual companions and adversaries who inhabited this period: Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi, Clementine Nzuji, Georges Ngal, Theophile Obenga, Paulin Hountondji, Johannes Fabian, Pius Ngandu Nkashama, Isidore Ndaywel e Nziem, Bogumil Jewsiewicki, and others.

We will engage histories of publishing in Lubumbashi, beginning with V. Y. Mudimbe’s publishing house, Mont Noir, founded in 1971; the emergence of “Bantu Studies” following the first publication in Lubumbashi of Placide Tempels’ “Bantu Philosophy” in 1945; Copperbelt music cultures established on the mining/railway network connecting Johannesburg to Lubumbashi, and spreading across the White Redoubt in Southern Africa all the way to the Swahili Coast; and much more—readings, listenings, annotated screenings, talks, performances.

“La Bibliothèque de Mudimbe” is part of the 9th Lubumbashi Biennale, and produced in collaboration with: Kalenge Yamukena Yantumbi and Prisme Collective; Kalombo II and Mudimbe Club; Feza Kayungu and Centre d’Art Waza; DJ Spilulu; Nico Wasakwel; Jackie Kabedi; Sando Marteau; Mze Lotingo; MLD Slamareine; Ernest Thibadi; Clementine Nzuji; Emmanuel M. Banywesize; Jacques Mukonga; Alexis Takizala Masoso; many more.

Daily program and live streaming via panafricanspacestation.org.za

Tune in!

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