Efforts to decolonise the curriculum in South Africa must, among ample other factors, familiarise themselves with the Congolese philosopher Valentin-Yves Mudimbe’s concept of the colonial library.
Broadly speaking the colonial library is a part of the imperialistic set-up.
There is no rigid definition of what we mean when we say “library” and it is not limited to a single collection of books.
Wai (2020, p. 4) clarifies, the concept “is a designation for the enormous body of written material and framework of illustrations that have over generations jointly developed and keeps going to invent Africa as an example of variations and alterity”.
How the colonial library grows because of colonial interaction is aptly explored by Mudimbe.
Mudimbe employs the conceptual framework of the colonial library to draw attention to the approaches in which Africa has existed and is being invented within the archive of colonial contemporary life, with far-reaching political, philosophical, substance, epistemic, and fundamental implications for not only the African continent and its inhabitants but also for the international governance supported by the fundamental reasoning of such concepts.
This evocation of a colonial library holds the archival materials and philosophical arrangements underlying colonial modernity, its innovations of authority, and its violent exclusionary substance and social procedures, which operates as the foundation components of the dominant European-focused tropes of colonial distinction.
This library is an abstraction for the enormous body of writings and frameworks of representation which have throughout decades jointly developed and continued to invent Africa as an idealization of distinction.
This demonstrates the colonial drive for dominance and the conditions that allowed it to flourish.
The colonial library is a relatively recent philosophical construction, however, Mudimbe’ s gaze is clearly one which seeks to engage from the locus of enunciation of Africa and its ontological realities.
While Africa’s role as an example of variety and difference predates the contemporary era (a topic that Mudimbe has spent a great deal of time and energy exploring from ancient times to current times) it was during the European development in the sixteenth century, that the primitive was created as an embodiment of Europe’s own cancelled surpass (Crilly, 2019, p. 12).
Accepting the idea of Renaissance, Mudimbe creates a comparable separation of contemporary society to historicise, more successfully, the colonial library and the growth of Africanism, as was pursued by the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Africanist movement.
Some African historians’ use of what Nasong’o (2019, p. 46) terms as romantic gloriana is another illustration of how past scholarly endeavors to oppose the colonial library, wind up operating within the epistemic framework created by the colonial masters.
By this, Nasong’o refers to the commonplace assertion that precolonial Africa, boasted sophisticated civilisations and technological advancements on pace with those of Europe.
Some of the colonial library’s preconceptions are called into question by these statements, like the idea that Africa is inherently “backward” or “uncivilised” but fundamental terms such as “civilisation” and ‘development’ remain untouched.
Nasong’o (2019, p. 47) explains that romantic gloriana “rejects Europe’s asserted realities about Africa which insist that Africa has invented nothing,” while seemingly adopting Europe’s ideas that human civilisation is to be appraised based on sophistication and creativity.
Such parochialism is nothing more than subjective hot air!
Recent works on coloniality may also help shed light on the dilemma the colonial library poses.
By underlining the enduring forms of authority that emerged as a result of colonial control but persisted beyond it in areas such as civilisation, labour, intersubjective relations, and intellectual production, the term coloniality helps us grasp just how ubiquitous colonisation actually was (Masinire, 2020, p. 36).
We do not refer to a bygone era when we discuss coloniality; rather, we discuss a technology of authority that continues today, based on the “expertise of the other”.
As Mudimbe notes, the colonial library had a far-reaching influence, and an approach that places a premium on knowledge production reinforces this by highlighting the significance of knowledge production in the deployment of colonial authority and the challenge for critical scholars to overcome Eurocentric systems of illustration.
In closing, Nigeria’s Fela Kuti’s words echo “Who no know go know”… “teacher don’t teach me nonsense”.
Boleka!
*The author of this article is Dr. Tshepo Mvulane Moloi is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Johannesburg’s Ali Mazrui Centre for Higher Education Studies (AMCHES). The views expressed by Dr. Tshepo Mvulane Moloi are not necessarily those of The Bulrushes
