The Invention of Africa by V.Y Mudimbe

What if I told you that the Africa of our imagination isn’t a real place? Hi my name is Mumbi, and let’s talk about The Invention of Africa by V. Y Mudimbe (1988).

The premise here is simple, Africa is not a real place. And I know you’ll ask me, well, what else is it? Mudimbe answered this for us by saying that the idea of Africa as we know it today is actually a colonial discursive invention.

To understand this better, we need to have a picture of pre colonial Africa. Ipadeola (2023) writes,
“Before the advent of colonialism, Africa was a vast continent of diverse peoples with multifarious cultures, worldviews, ideals, ideas, historical trajectories, and aspirations”.
This tells us that prior to colonization, there was no Africa in the homogenous sense. People identified themselves according to the communities they came from. Today we call them ‘tribes’, but we know the colonial derogatory history of the word, so instead, we can refer to them as ‘autonomous political polities’ pre colonization (Githuku, 2015), or as Wangari Maathai called them, micro nations.
Regarding use of the word tribe, Wangari Maathai said,
“The word tribe is a political statement. It was deliberately introduced to give a connotation of primitive, backward, uncivilised, disorganised people, people unable to govern themselves, to more or less justify colonisation. When it becomes suggested to you long enough, you begin to interpret yourself the same way that the power that wanted to colonise you wanted you to think, so that you could accept his process of colonisation. But today if you look at it differently and say, these so-called tribes were nations, smaller maybe, less sophisticated maybe, but they were nations. I call those nations, the so-called tribes, I call them micro-nations”.

On the importance of this was that African peoples organized and identified themselves a s peoples/autonomous political polities/micronations, I remember in high school in my literature class we read Half of a Yellow Sun, where Chimamanda wrote
“my point is that the only authentic identity for the African is the tribe…I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible from his white. But I was Igbo before the white man came.”

Now back to The Invention of Africa. When colonizers arrived on the continent, in order to justify colonialism, one thing they needed to do was to justify themselves as superior to the ‘Other’, but when they arrived in Africa they did not find an ‘Other’, they just found ‘others’. So it was necessary for them to create an ‘Other’ identity of Africanness that could be measured against Europe in order to sustain the colonial project, and the result was the invention of a generic identity of Africanness (Ipadeola, 2023).

This tells us something very important, that African as an identity did not emerge the same way as ‘western’. So this is why when we talk about ‘the west ‘or something being ‘western’, nobody asks us to be specific about what we’re talking about because we understand that the west isn’t a monolith, in fact western implies diversity (Ukpokolo, 2023). But when we speak of Africa and something being African, you’re all of a sudden running the risk of essentializing, but that is exactly the invention! It’s so diabolical that it actually makes me want to scream!

As someone interested in postcolonial African scholarship I think reading Mudimbe made me feel exactly how I felt when I first read Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, because I think they are both brilliant at pulling the curtain and exposing things for the façade they are. A radical reading of Mudime would be to deconstruct the African identity that he exposed it for, but for better or worse the postcolonial reading of Mudimbe today is a reclaiming of what Africa means, especially as Panafricans. We don’t discuss Africa as a generic identity of culture, rather as an identity of solidarity, of course remembering that the colonial experience wasn’t uniform everywhere on the continent. For more reading on what a New Africa means or meant to early African nationalists, I’d suggest a reading of Bongani Ngqulunga’s Genealogies of African Nationalism and the Idea of Africa. From a South Africa perspective.

So in conclusion, yes ‘Africa’ is a colonial invention as Mudimbe exposes it, but we still play along with the invention because we are active participants in its un-invention. Even Ngũgĩ said concerning language that we must accept the colonizer’s language in order to reject it, Spivak called that strategic essentialism, so perhaps we need to accept the invented Africa in order to reject and redefine it. And maybe that’s what being a Pan-Africanist means today.

Mumbi, April 2026.

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