‘An incomprehensible miracle’ – Central African clerical intellectualism versus African historic religion: A close reading of Valentin Mudimbe's Tales of Faith

Abstract

This piece seeks to address Mudimbe as one of the great creative cosmopolitan minds of our times. The abundance of autobiographical detail in his oeuvre allows me to situate him in a particular social and intellectual context. I read his oeuvre as a sustained attempt at autobiographical self-definition. I concentrate on Mudimbe's Tales of Faith (1997), and show this book to be an intellectual and spiritual autobiography disguised as a detached history of ideas of Central African intellectuals and their work and aftermath in the twentieth century. I look at Mudimbe from two different perspectives: the historical and anthropological study of Central African religion as an established academic sub-discipline (which he virtually ignores), and African historic religion (which does not play a role either in his personal self-construction). I will be very critical, mainly because the fundamental issues of Africa and of African studies today manifest themselves around Mudimbe as a central and emblematic figure. After identifying and discussing Mudimbe's discursive methods as essentially poetical (under the guise of modern philosophy) I shall try to pinpoint what Tales of Faith is about (i.e. the adventure of clerical intellectualism in Central Africa during the twentieth century), what meta-contents it contains (i.e. homelessness as Mudimbe's central predicament), and what all this means for the practice and the study of African historic religion, the uninvited guest of Tales of Faith and of Mudimbe's work in general. This will allow me to critique Mudimbe's quest for universalism which, in my opinion, seduces him to court the very European hegemonism he of all people has so clearly exposed, and to ignore such a way out of his predicament as the cultivation of an African identity and of African historic religion might have offered him. Finally, I will compare Mudimbe's itinerary with my own; our two paths will turn out to have been amazingly parallel even if they appear to have ended in opposite destinations.

* An earlier version of this paper was read at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, 1st February, 2001, as the opening lecture in a series of four, entitled ‘Reading Mudimbe’, organised by Louis Brenner and Kai Kresse. I am grateful to the organisers for creating a stimulating framework in which I could articulate and refine my thoughts about Mudimbe's work; to the African Studies Centre, Leiden, and to SOAS for financing my trip to London, and to Patricia Saegerman, Louis Brenner, Kai Kresse, Richard Fardon, Graham Furniss, and other participants in the seminar for stimulating comments on an earlier draft.

Notes

* An earlier version of this paper was read at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, 1st February, 2001, as the opening lecture in a series of four, entitled ‘Reading Mudimbe’, organised by Louis Brenner and Kai Kresse. I am grateful to the organisers for creating a stimulating framework in which I could articulate and refine my thoughts about Mudimbe's work; to the African Studies Centre, Leiden, and to SOAS for financing my trip to London, and to Patricia Saegerman, Louis Brenner, Kai Kresse, Richard Fardon, Graham Furniss, and other participants in the seminar for stimulating comments on an earlier draft.

¹ Unfortunately, I have not yet been able to consult his explicitly autobiographical book: Mudimbe 1994b.

² Tales of Faith was originally delivered as a series of lectures, the Louis H. Jordan Lectures in Comparative Religion, at the School of Oriental and African Studies in 1993.

³ I prefer the expression ‘African historic religion’ to alternatives such as ‘African traditional religion’ or ‘African religion’ tout court, in order to denote forms of religious expression which existed on the African continent more or less independently from and often prior to the penetration of such world religions as Islam and Christianity, and which have persisted in changed but recognisable form into the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when many of these forms were drawn into the orbit of professional outsider description. The word ‘traditional’ has been used in so many ideologically charged contexts as to have become meaningless; and Islam and Christianity have ranked among the religious forms of Africa ever since the first millennium of the common era.

⁴ Apart from the use of unintegrated scraps of book reviews, the book's level of copy-editing is remarkably low. The spelling of proper names in Mudimbe's work is often defective; e.g. Blummebach, p. 150, and Blumenback, p. 188, for Blumenbach; cf Blumenbach's contemporary Hereen read Heeren (Mudimbe 1992b: 119); Barret, read Barrett (Barrett 1968) (Mudimbe 1997: 74); Livingston, read Livingstone (ibid. 44) – p.188 has it correctly; Al-Hjj Umar, read Al-Hajj ‘Umar, (ibid. 90 and index – if he has the translitteration jihâd whereas that -i- is usually not explicitly represented in written Arabic, then he should also have the common translitteration Hajj where the same is true for the -a-). It is not only the copy-editing of Tales of Faith which is surprisingly defective. Also the bibliography shows major lacunae. The entire, massive oeuvre of Kagame is cited in the text (Mudimbe 1997: 139–141) without a single entry in the end bibliography. And a Tempels publication of 1959 is quoted without appearing the bibliography (ibid. 155); this must be simply the English translation (via the French) of Bantoe-filosofie; a Sally Falk Moore's 1984 book is mentioned in the text but not listed in the bibliography (cf. Moore 1994). Fortes & Dieterlen (1965), African Systems of Thought, is listed as edited only by Dieterlen, yet on page 161 a reference to ‘Fortes 1965’ appears which can only be this book; a very important quote is derived from a 1978 article by Mveng which does not appear in the bibliography (ibid. 173).

⁵ Personal communication, Richard Fardon, Graham Furniss, and Louis Brenner, London, 1st February, 2001.

⁶ An oblique reference to Derrida's oeuvre. The eminently Derridean concept of difference is also one of Mudimbe's central concepts; the entire book can be said about the ‘liberation of difference’ (Mudimbe 1997: 110) in the context of missionary Roman Catholicism in Central Africa during the twentieth century. Yet apart from a passing mention (on pp. 190–1, on the deconstruction of the binary opposition in Derrida's critique of logocentrism, significantly so indirectly that not Derrida, but Rotman on Derrida is quoted by Mudimbe; Rotman 1993: 98), all possible references to Derrida are avoided, probably merely because both are prominent francophone/America-directed writers, and Mudimbe wishes to avoid stating the obvious. Yet it remains remarkable that in his explication (Mudimbe 1997: 21f; based on Dumézil's reading of ancient Roman myth and rites; Dumézil 1980: 108) of why the day should begin at midnight and not at dawn, the notion of ‘an absence which is also a presence’ (as embodied in midnight conceived as the beginning instead of the opposite of the day), the obvious reference to Derrida is omitted. And when Mudimbe wishes to criticise Western absolute dualism, it is his own sometime senior colleague at Paris-Nanterre, Lévi-Strauss (cf. Mudimbe 1991a: ix, and for a discussion on Lévi-Strauss and Sartre pp. xiff), despite the latter's reliance on binary oppositions, who was to be cited as the authority leading out of the impasse, rather than Derrida, whose critique of binary oppositions marks the transition from structuralism to post-structuralism.

⁷ Moore 1994; repeatedly mentioned in Tales of Faith (Mudimbe 1997: e.g. xii, 27f), but not listed in that book's bibliography.

⁸ Benveniste 1973; incidentally, exactly the same passage from the same author features in Derrida's recent major piece on religion, in Derrida & Vattimo 1996.

⁹ Early eighteenth century Christian Kongo prophets, and twentieth-century Christian prophets in Southern Africa, are discussed briefly in Tales of Faith (Mudimbe 1997: 71f).

¹⁰ Cf. Mudimbe 1991a. Especially in his discussion of the Luba genesis myth Mudimbe poses as one who, while not an anthropologist, has rubbed shoulders with anthropologists and moreover lays claim to a relevant lived experience apparently considered by him as the equivalent of anthropological fieldwork as a source of ethnographic authority: ‘One may ask: Whence comes this authority [to speak on aspects of Luba or Songye culture in anthropological terms]? (…) My answer will be simple. It is true that I am not an anthropologist and do not claim to be one. I spent at least ten years of my life studying ancient Greek and Latin for an average of twelve hours each week, with more than that amount of time devoted to French and European cultures, before being eligible for a doctorate in comparative philology (Greek, Latin, and French) at Louvain University. I do not know many anthropologists who could publicly demonstrate a similar experience about their speciality in order to found their authority in African studies. (…) My experience would define itself somewhere between the practice of philosophy with its possible intercultural applications and the sociocultural and intersubjective space which made me possible: my Luba-Lulua mother, my Songye father, the Swahili cultural context of my primary education in Katanga (Shaba), the Sanga milieu of my secondary education from 1952 to 1959 in Kakanda, near Jadotville (Likasi), and, later on, at the Catholic seminary of Mwera, near what was then Elisabethville, and my brief sojourn in a Benedictine monastery in Rwanda’ (Mudimbe 1991a: 124–125).

¹¹ Cf. de Certeau 1984; de Certeau 1986; de Vries 1992: 441–477; de Certeau 1988. Tales of Faith is dedicated to the memory of de Certeau and Mveng, the theologian and historian of art (cf. Mveng 1965) who will appear below as one of Mudimbe's heroes of the saga of clerical intellectualism in Central Africa.

¹² Cf. note 6 on Derrida above.

¹³ Harding 1993; cf. Mudimbe 1997: 187f. In Mudimbe's discussion of Sandra Harding's work, he has to admit that, given the racial dimensions of the production of science in the contemporary world (the exclusion of certain paradigms and other certain people, and the privileging of others, on the actor's subjective grounds of racialism), the pretended universalism of science is not a reality. But this apparently also comes as a great disappointment to him, which makes Racial Economy of Science ‘one of the most distressing books I have ever read’ (Mudimbe 1997: 197). Little wonder: it explodes the universalist utopia in which he has retreated, as a post-clerical post-African global intellectual – as a Black person he is reminded that even here he represents ‘the paradoxical absolute and relative sign of difference’ (ibid.: 191).

¹⁴ Vansina 1961. In the same year that Vansina's highly seminal book was published, the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute at Lusaka, Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, started a series of Central Bantu Historical Texts (Apthorpe 1961; Cunnison 1968). When in 1966 Vansina's Kingdoms of the Savanna was published, which for many years would remain the bible of precolonial historiography in Central Africa (Vansina 1966), he could base his synthesis on a large amount of oral historical work already conducted in previous decades, mainly by others than himself.

¹⁵ Willame 1976. Mudimbe replies at length to Willame's criticism in L'Odeur du père (Mudimbe 1982), in a concluding chapter entitled ‘Quel meurtre du père’ [Which parricide?], (pp. 197–203).

¹⁶ The Mveng quote is not adequately referenced in the book.

¹⁷ Cf. Bible, Matt. 26: 34: ‘Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, That this night, before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice.’

¹⁸ There follows a long quotation from Foucault, predictably 1971: 35f.

¹⁹ Cf. Platzeck 1971; a famous author of an Ars combinatoria was Leibniz, published in Frankfurt am Main 1666.

²⁰ Cf. Mudimbe (1997: 198): ‘the stories I have chosen to share in these lectures on conversion are, indeed, not only unthinkable outside of a space circumscribed by African elements but also well determined by anthropology and the colonial saga, as well as the practices and missionizing of Islam and Christianity’.

²¹ Cf. Berlinerblau 1999, which also includes rich bibliographical materials on the recent American culture wars.

²² Sklar 1993: 98f. Sklar follows the definition of C.S. Whitaker: ‘Properly invoked (…) Afrocentricity['s] (…) importance derives from fundamental issues of comprehension in the wake of powerful intellectual legacies that tend to discount the capacity of African cultures and societies to act rationally and constructively in the face of historic realities. It suggests, importantly, that these realities, not Africans, are the course of problematic conditions.’ Whitaker 1991: 359.

²³ The lower-case initial of ‘afrocentricity’ here is original.

²⁴ ‘For people familiar with African Christianity, the conversion model [i.e. the approach to Central African Christian intellectual history as propounded in Tales of Faith —WvB] in both its intention and realization would describe the African critique as generally violent and often, alas, excessive, not only in its evaluation of conversion policies but also of the missionary’ (Mudimbe 1997: 56).

²⁵ Appiah 1992; cf. Mudimbe 1997: 63f for a most sympathetic reading; and on Afrocentrism: Appiah 1993: 24–25.

²⁶ Mudimbe 1992b: 118 (in defence of Herodotus, meanwhile cf. Pritchett 1993; Spiegelberg 1927; however, cf. also Moles 1993).

²⁷ NB: in Mudimbe 1997 (e.g. 30, 102, 119, 171, and index), the name is repeatedly spelled as Sheik, as if name were a religious title, not a given name, as it is usually considered to be. Cf. Amadiume 1997: 468–469; van Sertima 1986; Gray 1989; Fauvelle 1996.

²⁸ No doubt, my forthcoming book Global bee flight will represent Mudimbe's worst fears come true on this point.

²⁹ Meanwhile the fact that science is less than universal and e.g. is capable of endorsing racial prejudice and enforcing inequalities along racialist lines, is recognized by Mudimbe in his discussion of Sandra Harding (mentioned elsewhere in my argument); cf. Mudimbe 1997: 184ff.

³⁰ Mudimbe defines ethnotheology ‘as a subfield uncomfortably situated between theology and anthropology, opposed to reductionism and claiming to speak in the name of the vitality of local cultures’, pointing out that it faces a major paradox: as anthropology ethnotheology affirms local cultures, as theology it denies them for the sake of the hegemony of the imported Christian doctrine (Mudimbe 1997: 88f).

³¹ Van Binsbergen, 2000a: 175–180 – the next passages of the present argument are an English rendering of part of my French article, of my Global Bee Flight (forthcoming), and of van Binsbergen 1997.

³² Cf also his contributions in van Binsbergen 1997.

³³ I was a full-time member of the Workgroup on Religion and Magic in the Ancient Near East, Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, Wassenaar, The Netherlands, 1994–95.

³⁴ At least not in Mudimbe 1997, and in the selection of his other publications on which my present argument is based.

³⁵ Cf. Mudimbe 1997: 104 (for Diagne) and 143 (for Kagame).

³⁶ A list of the titles referred to: Fortes 1959; Fortes & Dieterlen 1965; Middleton 1960; Griaule 1966; de Heusch 1958, 1971, 1972.

³⁷ Mudimbe (1991a: x) dates this illness at five years after the submission of his doctoral dissertation at Louvain in 1970, but since Entretrailles was already published in 1973, we have to question either this dating, or the claim of that book having been written within five months before or after Le Bel immonde (published 1976) and L'Autre face du royaume (published 1974).

³⁸ Ekstasis is a Greek word used by Plato in the sense of ‘extension’.

³⁹ van Binsbergen 1981; Fields 1985. Elsewhere Mudimbe takes up the issue of prophetism in Central Africa at greater length, but along essentially the same lines (Mudimbe 1991a: 1–31).

⁴⁰ Amselle 1990. For a similar view on anglophone and lusophone Africa, cf. Vail 1989. Cf. Mudimbe 1997: 152.

⁴¹ Amselle, intervention at a 1995 seminar at Leiden; Schilder & van Binsbergen 1993; van Binsbergen 1997b; van Binsbergen 1992b/1994.

⁴² Elsewhere in the same book Mudimbe is to declare his ‘indebtedness to Willy Bal. Thirty years ago, he taught me how to read a text with a philologist's eye, and later on, at Louvain, he patiently introduced me to the art of reading as a demanding undertaking’ (Mudimbe 1991a: xxii). Cf. Bal 1963.

⁴³ Part of the same quotation was used in a footnote above when Mudimbe's claim to ethnographic authority was presented.

⁴⁴ Berlinerblau 1999; Fauvelle-Aymar et al. 2000; Howe 1999. My review article around the first book is forthcoming in Journal of African History, I have a contribution on the Black Athena debate in the second book, and defended Afrocentrism against the third book in van Binsbergen 2000a.

⁴⁵ The same point is taken up again in detail (ibid.: 159f). What this really says is that European text on African religion will always be alien and alienating.

⁴⁶ ‘At Nanterre (…) I did not hide the fact that I was then a practicing Catholic, although, philosophically, agnostic.’ (Mudimbe 1991a: ix). He can hardly have been an agnostic when he stayed at the Catholic seminary of Mwere near Lubumbashi in the early 1960s, or when he entered a Rwandan Benedictine convent as a novice, but from the latter he soon resigned (Mudimbe 1997: 137); cf. also Mudimbe 1991a: 125, ‘my brief sojourn’.

⁴⁷ This passage based on Duran-Ndaya 1999. I am grateful for the many discussions I had with Mrs Duran-Ndaya on her fascinating ongoing Ph.D. research.

⁴⁸ The unreferenced Bible quotation appears to be slightly corrupt, as befits a Roman Catholic, especially a Roman Catholic proclaimed agnostic who is a post-clerical intellectual now proclaiming to be agnostic. Cf. Matt 22: 41–42: ‘While the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them, 42 Saying, What think ye of Christ? whose son is he? They say unto him, The son of David.’ So the question was not asked from the disciples, but from the Pharisees. Or alternatively Acts 13: 25: ‘And as John fulfilled his course, he said, Whom think ye that I am? I am not he. But, behold, there cometh one after me, whose shoes of his feet I am not worthy to loose’.

⁴⁹ Cf. Matt. 3:3: ‘For this is he that was spoken of by the prophet Esaias, saying, The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Wim van Binsbergen

Philosophical Faculty, Erasmus University Rotterdam, P.O. Box 1738, 3000 DR Rotterdam, Netherlands. Email: [email protected].