The trajectory of the book The Invention of Africa (1988), here translated by Laurent Vannini into French, has a strange fate. Its author, Valentin Y. Mudimbe is recognized as one of the finest analysts of the social sciences, classical and modern humanities, and philology; Mudimbe is also an outstanding novelist. Yet it has taken a generation to translate his book into the French language and intellectual traditions that nurtured it. Mudimbe explores here three epistemological territories, Greek and Latin philology, religious libraries, and colonial ethnography, in order to attack with a certain glee the literatures in search of a “vernacular” Africa, of a neo-pharaonic modernity inaugurated by a triumphant ancient Egypt, put back on its African feet, which lectured the Greeks, to establish an intellectual production unhooked from the Western world. The book continues to be the subject of commentary and criticism. It is probably one of the most quoted works in Africanist literature. It is required reading in several disciplines taught in American universities.

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