The scent of the father … Hear that as you will. And if, to introduce these texts, I were to trace a path for the reader, I ask myself if it could really be treated as the only one. Despite the occasional peremptory assertion, throughout this book I have merely gathered together questions that seem able to illuminate the complex relations that, stronger today than in the past, tie Africa to the West, and determine not only attitudes of being but also the exercise of thought, practices of knowledge, and ways of living.

These forms of dependence are problems and need to be questioned, because the stakes are high: either continuity and blossoming through adaptation, or the reduction and pure and simple death of singular sociohistorical experiences. The contemporary situation is complex: the Westernization of Africa is now no longer a theoretical project but an activity and movement that presides over the arrangement of life and even of thought, as a function of the complex relations that connect African countries to Euro-America.

No doubt the economic is the most visible dimension. Jacques Bourrinet wrote a review of major documents on African countries’ international trade, for the “dossiers Thémis” series published by the Presses Universitaires de France. He shows that before we can understand texts about the role of foreign trade in development or global perspectives promoting development, it is necessary to take note of both an increasingly marked dependence and a deterioration in the international position of the Third World. This observation is an expression of political despair and also a sign of major calamity for Africa. A glance through the important work of the Commission on International Development, under the direction of L. B. Pearson, makes the constraint measurable. In the countries of the Third World, the “question of will” with which this impressive report opens passes for a diabolical paradox.[i] On the one hand is the growing gap between the economies of the industrialized countries and those of the underdeveloped countries; on the other, the extraordinary increase in aid from rich countries to poor countries – aid which, as Tibor Mende shows in a brave book,[ii] is remarkably compatible with recolonization. The Commission, whose project is to establish “lasting and constructive relations between the developing nations and the developed nations,” offers normative and voluntaristic recommendations that themselves need to be untangled. They clearly describe possible actions, but at the same time they propose fatalistic-sounding prerequisites for collaboration. These constitute veritable “cruxes,” given current relations between North and South and the structural disorder of economic areas in African social formations.

Even the therapeutic prescriptions that are supposed to save Africa are themselves questions. They give an account of the site from which they emerge; and we might ask if they are not better equipped to explain the particular progress of a mode of production and the conditions for its extension than they are to move non-Western societies forward – for their own good – to the point of “equilibrium” that the Euro-American world incarnates today.

The situation is the same in the ideological field. An important problem there is the question of identifying practices that might be more attentive to the African context, speak to its actual conditions, and, when faced with the paradoxes born of development, might occasionally open doors.

Upon finishing a text in which Michel Foucault describes Hegel’s persistence in contemporary philosophy, I felt that I was able to understand not only the violence of the Father’s existence, but also the strangeness of his scent. Here, too, it is a case of dependence, and Foucault’s comments about the Hegelian heritage apply well to my subject: Africa’s dependence vis-à-vis Euro-America. I thus place “the West” where Foucault puts “Hegel”: for Africa, to truly escape from the West presupposes an exact appreciation of the price we have to pay to detach ourselves from it; it presupposes knowing to what extent the West, perhaps insidiously, has drawn close to us; it implies a knowledge, in that which permits us to think against the West, of all that remains Western; and a determination of the extent to which our recourse against it is still possibly one of the tricks it directs against us, while it waits for us, immobile and elsewhere.[iii]

Such an embrace from the West might smother us. So we in Africa must maintain not only a rigorous understanding of the modes in which we are currently integrated into Western myths, but also an explicit questioning that will allow us to be genuinely critical in the face of this “corpus.”

Even today, the West, a certain West, when it thinks of us, continues to wonder “how it is possible to be Black.” Manga Bekombo puts it well:

European scholars have a heavy responsibility – or rather, a great role – in the production             of anti-Black stereotypes; these stereotypes, sometimes with accompanying paintings, are     used as arguments, restored to the empty center of collective representation by literary manipulation. Here exoticism takes its full meaning: it operates like a festival, like         carnival, it is the instinctive explosion that still further valorizes the prestige of reason.[iv]

Confronted with this ideological violence, in my opinion it is not useful for us to expend our energies, as some of our elders have done, in trying to “prove” our humanity or the intelligence we have long been refused – and which is still, with skillful contempt, regularly and learnedly torn to pieces in the name of a reason and a science utterly at the service of political projects.

I think that we have other things to do, and urgently: to freely assume the responsibility of a thought concerned with our destiny and environment, with the goal of readapting our psyche in the wake of the violence it has suffered – this psyche which we have not always had the courage to remake because, rightly or wrongly, the project seemed titanic. Our problem, our fundamental problem, can be found in this project. Today and tomorrow, it will determine the relevance of the attitudes we develop to confront economic, political, and ideological endemics that come to us from elsewhere, or that we create ourselves.

Racialization? No. I begin from the fact that my consciousness and effort come from a place, a given space and moment; and I do not see how or why my speech, however it takes flight, cannot be first of all the cry and testimony of this singular place. Therefore, we must promote this important norm: that we stop and look at ourselves. Or more precisely, that we return constantly to who we are, with a particular eagerness and attention for our archeological setting – the setting that makes our speeches possible, while also explaining them. Particularism, you will say … Perhaps. But I would note, following Aimé Césaire: “There are two ways to lose oneself: walled segregation in the particular or dilution into the ‘universal’. My conception of the universal is of a universal enriched by all that is particular, a universal enriched by every particular: the deepening and coexistence of all the particulars.”[v]

The texts gathered here are occasional pieces in the proper sense of the term. These different and even apparently contradictory texts are more expressions of a questioning that pays attention to life and its vital environment than they are systematic research that follows scholarly norms. To a certain extent they express my own contradictions as an African academic. One thing unites them: the impulse of my earlier essay, L’Autre face du royaume [The Other Side of the Kingdom]. Each of the texts gathered here – in different ways, certainly – turns on questions I began to explore in this first essay: namely, how the human and social sciences, like ideologies, do not speak “a same” that is inoffensive and faithfully reproduced in its various expressions, on the model of logical systems. Like the ideologies that mark us today, in their application these sciences seem instead to be cut to fit certain modes of dependence. It is some of the notable traits of these types of dependence that The Scent of the Father addresses.

I could adapt here what Jean-Bertrand Pontalis says to introduce the texts that make up his Après Freud [After Freud]:[vi] it may be that this ensemble of traits is purely accidental, or has no meaning other than to signify myself. It may also be – and this volume took shape around this supposition – that it is precisely in their partial character and in the reprise of the same themes, in their insertion into a personal formation, that these “chronicles” suggest something of interest to the very nature and the situation of Africanism.

If these “chronicles,” with their limits, can help us to understand the equivocations of the scientific and even ethical grids that are transplanted and imposed on us in Africa, and if they can provoke even one reflection on the possible levels at which these grids can be corrected to make life and research in Africa align better with their environment, they will have achieved their objective.

Excerpt from “Preface” in The Scent of the Father, xiv-xviii, Polity Press, 2023, Translated by Jonathan Adjemian.

[i] Partners in Development: Report of the Commission on International Development, New York: Praeger, 1969.

[ii] [Translator’s note: This book is not identified by Mudimbe, but is likely De l’aide à la recolonisation: les leçons d’un échec, Paris: Seuil, 1972 (translated as From Aid to Recolonization: Lessons of a Failure, New York: Pantheon, 1973)].

[iii] [Translator’s note: This passage is slightly adapted from Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan-Smith, New York: Vintage, 2010, p. 235.]

[iv] “Littératures et profils nègres” [Black Literature and Profiles], Recherche, Pédagogie et Culture 6 (33), 1978, p. 31. [Translator’s note: Except where an English-language translation is cited, all translations of French-language sources are my own.]

[v] Aimé Césaire, “Letter to Maurice Thorez,” trans. Chike Jeffers, Social Text 28 (2), 2010, p. 152.

[vi] Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, Après Freud [After Freud], Paris: Gallimard, 1968.