A Meditation on Violence Against Women and Nature

Laura K Kerr, laurakkerr.com

He says that woman speaks with nature. That she hears voices from under the earth. That wind blows in her ears and trees whisper to her. That the dead sing through her mouth and the cries of infants are clear to her. But for him this dialogue is over. He says he is not part of this world, that he was set on this world as a stranger. He sets himself apart from woman and nature.

— Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature

Inspiration: A Colloquium

Earlier this month, I had the honor and pleasure of being part of a colloquium at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. Titled, “Violence in/and the Great Lakes: the thought of VY Mudimbe and beyond,” this colloquium was hosted by the Thinking Africa project of the Department of Political and International Studies at Rhodes.

VY Mudimbe was born in Belgian Congo, and is the Newman Ivey White Professor of Literature at Duke University. He is the author of many books and articles of philosophy and cultural critique, as well as novels and poetry, and is an esteemed scholar of African thought, culture, and history. Professor Mudimbe is also a person of great compassion yet realism. As both our guide and inspiration, he brought not only wisdom and experience to the colloquium, but also a commitment to safeguarding the humanity and dignity of life. With Professor Mudimbe as a mediating presence, our collective meditation on violence in the Great Lakes region was both sensitive and critical, which is not easy to do when the topic is violence.

My initial plan for this post was to give a summary of the colloquium. Yet I am still thinking about what was shared, still reflecting on the different perspectives and approaches to the topic of violence. I was also moved by discussions with students and faculty at Rhodes about violence, poverty, and exploitation in South Africa. Thus, to give a summary would feel dishonest, putting artificial limits on something that is not yet done for me, as well as somehow doing violence to a shared experience and others’ voices. This is both the beauty and curse when philosophy is enlisted in the service of problematizing the seeming nature of things: such reflective awareness has a way of suspending action. And yet it is often an impulsive and thoughtless drive that leads to violence.

Instead, I will share some ideas that have resurfaced for me and taken on new forms as a result of my participation in the colloquium. These ideas are rough sketches about relationships between men, women, and nature explored through the lenses of mythology, ecopsychology, and early civilizations. I am hoping to understand violence in ways that might lead to healing the wounds of the Congolese and other peoples exposed to the destructive underbelly of modernity. And I am still searching.

Violence in/and the Great Lakes: The Thought of V.Y. Mudimbe and Beyond

7 to 9 August 2013
ELRC, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa.
This colloquium is organised by the Thinking Africa project of the Department of Political and International Studies, Rhodes University, in collaboration with Grant Farred from Cornell University. The colloquium reflects on the work of VY Mudimbe using these reflections to consider the current situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Participants in the colloquium include VY Mudimbe (Duke, USA), Grant Farred (Cornell, USA), Gervais Désiré Yamb (Ottawa, Canada), Fabien Eboussi Boulaga (Yaoundé,Cameroon) Olga Hel-Bongo (Laval, Québec), Justin K. Bisanswa (Laval, Québec) and Kasereka Kavwahirehi (Ottawa, Canada).

V. Y Mudimbe's forthcoming book On African Fault Lines will be launched on the eve of the colloquium.

The annual Thinking Africa colloquia provide opportunities for lengthy debates on topical issues related to

2013 Colloquium Announcement

Thinking Africa


We are pleased to announce the details of this year’s annual Thinking Africa colloquium. The colloquium, entitled Violence In/And The Great Lakes: The Thought of V.Y. Mudimbe and Beyond will be held from the 7^th to the 9^th of August at Rhodes University in Grahamstown. This year’s colloquium is being organised by Grant Farred from Cornell University and reflects on the work of VY Mudimbe using these reflections to consider the current situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Participants in the colloquium include VY Mudimbe (Duke, USA), Grant Farred (Cornell, USA), Gervais Désiré Yamb (Ottawa, Canada), Fabien Eboussi Boulaga (Yaoundé, Cameroon) Olga Hel-Bongo (Laval, Quebec), Justin K. Bisanswa (Laval, Quebec) and Kasereka Kavwahirehi (Ottawa, Canada).

VY Mudimbe's forthcoming book On African Fault Lines will be launched during the colloquium.

The Re-invention of Africa: Edward Said, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Beyond

ALI A. MAZRUI (2005)

State University of New York at Binghamton

Edward W. Said has been described as one of the founders of postcolonial studies. But the claim that Said is a postcolonial innovator should not be interpreted to mean that hiswork does not examine European colonialism in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere. On the contrary, much of the focus in both Orientalism (1979) and Culture and Imperialism (1993) is on the classical era of European imperialism, and about literary interpretations of the colonized peoples, going back to Joseph Conrad and long before him.

V. Y. Mudimbe is, in certain aspects, a thinker in the same tradition as Edward Said. Both of them illustrate that the best time for interpreting colonialism is in the postcolonial era. After all, one can best evaluate the preceding day after the sun has set. In Hegel’s immortal words, “The owl of Minerva spreads out its wings only with the falling of the dusk” (Philosophy of Right, 1812). Postcolonial studies include such an assessment of the preceding era of colonialism.

Parables and Fables: Exegesis, Textuality, and Politics in Central Africa

This remarkable book confronts the philosophical problems of otherness and identity through readings of the parables and fables of a colonized people, the Luba of Zaire. V. Y. Mudimbe poses two overarching questions: how can one think about and comment upon alterity without essentializing its features? And, is it possible to speak and write about an African tradition or its contemporary practice without taking into account the authority of the colonial library that has invented African identities? Mudimbe brings unusual insight to such a discussions: “Here I am on the margin of margins: Black, African, Catholic, yet agnostic; intellectually Marxist, disposed toward psychoanalysis, yet a specialist in Indo-European philology and philosophy.” He uses his own education by Catholic missionairies in Zaire as a framework for exploring interactions between African and Western systems of thought.

Mudimbe examines the relationship between God and human beings in the philosophy and

The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge

What is the meaning of Africa and of being African? What is and what is not African philosophy? Is philosophy part of Africanism? These are the kind of fundamental questions which this book addresses.

Valentin Y. Mudimbe Africa remains the absolute difference—An interview

Valentin Mudimbe: In order to understand “Invention of Africa”, we can use a number of entries, levels of interpretations which were made by scholars, journalists and anthropologists, in order to define the specificity of Africa. We have levels of comprehension and understanding the history of the West; its everyday life, practices and its ethno-philosophy, and indeed the practice of disciplines such as history, sociology, theology and the philosophical level in its two dimensions. I distinguish the semiological from the hermeneutic form. The first is understood as the totality of skills and knowledge that allows one to describe what one is seeing in social science. The second as the totality of skills and knowledge that allows one to read meanings. That is the first entry; the levels of interpretation of what is going on in a given society, which thus could qualify Africa as abnormal. We can also see that abnormality or difference, by using a model, the mode of production. In France particularly, people like Catherine Coquery Vidrovitch, Claude Meillasoux and Emmanuel Terrey, conceived “the lineage mode of production”, to qualify the specificity of Africa on the basis of the Marxist legacy, and the concept of “