Mudimbe's Order of Things: Screening, Conversation, and Gathering

The African Film Institute is pleased to invite you to an extended program featuring the film Les choses et les mots de Mudimbe [Mudimbe’s Order of Things] by Jean Pierre Bekolo, alongside a conversation between Omar Berrada, Nadia Yala Kisukidi, and Kaneza Schaal, beginning at 2pm on Saturday, June 21, 2025. The film will be screened in parts, interspersed with refreshments and discussion, and followed by a reception. This program is convened by Berrada, Kisukidi, and Christian Nyampeta as part of the African Film Institute's film series at e-flux Screening Room. 

Les choses et les mots de Mudimbe (2015) is a four-hour cinematic encounter between filmmaker-philosopher Jean Pierre Bekolo and V.Y. Mudimbe. Born in 1941 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (then the Belgian Congo), V.Y. Mudimbe lived through the tumultuous 1950s in the region of Katanga and in Rwanda, where he, like a number of his contemporaries, trained at a Benedictine seminary. Mudimbe returned to the DRC and completed his undergraduate studies at Lovanium University, now the University of Kinshasa, before going on to study philosophy at the postgraduate level at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium and then earning his Ph.D. from the University of Paris in France. He returned home once again to teach at the National University of Zaïre, but ultimately settled in the United States, where he lived for four decades before his passing in April 2025.

From his first poetry book, Déchirures (1971), to seminal works such as The Invention of Africa (1988) and The Idea of Africa (1994), and most recently the Encyclopedia of African Religions and Philosophy (2021)—co-edited with Kasereka Kavwahirehi and featuring contributions by miriam cooke, Pénélope-Natasha Mavoungou Pemba, Tabitha Kanogo, Mercy Amba Oduyoye, Aduke Grace Adebayo, Sylvia Wynter, and others—Mudimbe advanced a singular intellectual project spanning poetry, literature, philosophy, anthropology, theology, postcolonial and decolonial studies, and cultural criticism. His work is profound, vast, and expansive, and poses enduring conceptual, epistemic, methodological, and ethical challenges to modern disciplines grappling with Africa’s place in the world.

Through a 243-minute interview, Les choses et les mots de Mudimbe offers intimate insights into this remarkable figure’s way of life—studying Mudimbe’s influences, his books, his objects, and his surroundings—and his engagement with many of today’s pressing issues. Bekolo’s film draws fresh lessons from Frantz Fanon’s readings of violence and from Patrice Lumumba’s tragic fate, and features Mudimbe reflecting on the enduring violence wrought in part by the creation of racial identities in the Great Lakes region.

Mudimbe observes that “we prefer our thinker-prophets dead because their role while alive is to create disorder and new epistemological openings.” Yet the conversations sparked by Les choses et les mots de Mudimbe “leave little doubt that Mudimbe is a compelling thinker-prophet and still very much alive” in the hearts and minds of his students and readers.

The screening invites open conversation and collective learning, honoring not only Mudimbe’s legacy but also the vibrant, ancestral, spoken, and written Black and African knowledges that contribute to healing the innumerable injustices experienced in the world today.

Schedule
2:00 - Part 1 of Les choses et les mots de Mudimbe
4:30 - Intermission
5:00 - Part 2 of Les choses et les mots de Mudimbe
7:15 - Conversation between Omar Berrada, Nadia Yala Kisukidi, Kaneza Schaal
8:15 - Reception

About V.Y. Mudimbe
V.Y. Mudimbe (1941–2025) was a poet, novelist, philosopher, anthropologist, and philologist. Among his publications are three collections of poetry, four novels, and works in applied linguistics, philosophy, and social sciences. He is known worldwide for two path-breaking and greatly influential books: The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge (1988), which received the Herskovits Award from the African Studies Association (1989), and The Idea of Africa (1994). Concerned with the processes of transformation in systems of knowledge and cultural conversion that led to the Western invention of Africa, these works interrogate Western representations of the continent; analyze the authority of anthropologists, missionaries, and ideologists; and attempt to answer the question of what it means to be an African and a philosopher today—that is, in a postcolonial African context. V.Y. Mudimbe’s other publications include L’Odeur du père (1982), Parables and Fables (1991), Les corps glorieux des mots et des êtres: Esquisse d’un jardin africain à la bénédictine (1994), Tales of Faith (1997), Cheminements: Carnets de Berlin (2006), and On African Fault Lines: Meditations on Alterity Politics (2013). He was also the editor of The Surreptitious Speech (1992); Nations, Identities, Cultures (1997); and Diaspora and Immigration (1999). He served as General Secretary of SAPINA (the Society for African Philosophy in North America) and co-edited, with Robert Bates and Jean O’Barr, Africa and the Disciplines (1993). V.Y. Mudimbe was a Membre Honoraire Correspondant de l’Académie Royale des Sciences d’Outre Mer, Belgium, and a member of the Société américaine de philosophie de langue française, the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, and the World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning. He also served as Chairman of the Board of African Philosophy in North America and as Chairman of the International African Institute (SOAS, University of London).

For inquiries addressed to the African Film Institute, please write to africanfilminstitute@e-flux.com.

For general and press inquiries, contact program@e-flux.com.

Accessibility
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the Screening Room and this bathroom.