Mudimbe’s Things and Words dir. by Jean-Pierre Bekolo (review)

The Cameroonian filmmaker Jean-Pierre Bekolo, known for his inventive award-winning films Quartier Mozart (1993) and Les Saignantes (2005), has made an intriguing documentary about the Congolese philosopher and writer Valentin-Yves Mudimbe. The film explores Mudimbe’s ideas and life experiences through an extensive face-to-face interview, and includes the scholar’s presentation of his impressive collection of objects and books. Born in 1941 in the Belgian Congo, V. Y. Mudimbe lived through the tumultuous 1950s in the region of Katanga and in Rwanda, where he studied at a Benedictine seminary. Bekolo’s conversation with one of the most important African intellectuals of the twentieth century captures a sense of the man and his way of life, as well as his engagement with many pressing issues of our day. His thoughts range over the lessons we can learn from Frantz Fanon’s misunderstanding of violence and Patrice Lumumba’s tragic fate to the creation of racial identities in the Great Lakes region.

Viewers familiar with Isaac Julien’s classic documentary Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks (1996) will notice a different treatment of Fanon and his ideas in their historical and political contexts in this film. Similarly, we find a different presentation of a historical figure from the one Raoul Peck offered in his personal and intimate exploration of the historical figure of Lumumba through his childhood memories in Lumumba, la mort du prophête (1990). Bekolo does not include voice-over narration or archival footage, but rather allows history to come alive in the interview itself, which is animated by the amicable rapport the two men share and the probing questions the filmmaker asks. Bekolo’s documentary runs a full four hours, rivaling, in its length, Connie Field’s Have You Heard from Johannesburg? (2010) about the epic struggle for freedom in South Africa.

Mudimbe’s Things and Words provides a valuable opportunity to get to know the intellectual as a man: we see him reading and answering questions while seated at his desk; we join him in the kitchen when he takes a break to smoke a cigarette and have a drink. The conversation is intercut with over-the-shoulder sequences of Mudimbe walking through his house, narrating the life of the objects he lives with. He comments on photographs of his children, former students, and the many people around the world who invited him to give lectures; he describes his cult objects, a collection of textiles, a series of fifteenth–nineteenth-century books from the Vatican. Bekolo follows Mudimbe down the hallway and through the book-lined rooms and even into the basement, which is lined floor-to-ceiling with hundreds of volumes of contemporary fiction. We get a genuine sense of the person and his way of life despite the French formality of the vouvoiement (use of the vous ) between them.

Those who have read his seminal work The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (1988) will not be surprised that Michel Foucault emerges as the single most significant influence on the Congolese philosopher. Mudimbe describes his reading of The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970; original title: Les Mots et les choses, 1966) as a “dazzling” experience. Bekolo asks Mudimbe to explain his views on a range of topics such as the symbolic status of the Congo in the Western imaginary and to comment on his personal experience of the region as well as his intellectual work. Bekolo also asks him whether there is a Mudimbe school of thought, to which Mudimbe replies, if so, it would be a certain style of interrogation of the normative ideas that define political economy as a discourse. Mudimbe characterizes his method of interrogation as agnostic, or without an a priori act of faith. It begins with doubt and is followed by a systematic examination of language...