Valentin-Yves Mudimbe

Philosopher, poet and novelist who challenged 'Heart of Darkness' clichés about the African continent

- Andrew Anthony

His father had hopes his son, Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, would become a manager at the mining company where he worked, but the young boy was a conspicuously cerebral child, what he called a "small, gifted dog".

He was born on 8 December 1941 in the Swahili-speaking mining town Jadotville (now Likasi) in the then Belgian Congo, arguably the most brutalised of all colonies in Africa.

He was taken away from his family at the age of 10 by a Benedictine mission, where he trained to become a priest. He studied ancient Christian texts and read Greek and Latin, a colonial grounding in the classics that he later brought to his study of Africa's oedipal relationship with its colonisers, while also challenging the scholarly traditions of which the classics were a key part.

Although Mudimbe, who has died aged 83, described the Benedictines as “the order which will most likely continue to colonise my life until I die,” he lost faith in the Catholic church when as a young monk in Rwanda he witnessed its support for Hutu ascendancy, and decided to reject a religious life. He majored in Romance philology at Lovanium University in Kinshasa, then sociology and applied linguistics in France, before gaining a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Louvain in Belgium. A gifted linguist, he was said to speak 10 languages and read in another eight.