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.

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).

Bios

Jean-Pierre Bekolo is a trailblazing Cameroonian filmmaker, known for his bold narrative style and refusal to conform to cinematic conventions. Born in Yaoundé, he studied physics at the University of Yaoundé before earning a master’s in communication from INA in France and studying film semiotics with Christian Metz at EHESS in Paris. His unique blend of science, philosophy, and cinema defines a visionary body of work that spans fiction, documentary, and experimental forms. Bekolo gained international acclaim with Quartier Mozart (1992), a satirical take on urban life in Cameroon, followed by Aristotle’s Plot (1995), commissioned by the British Film Institute alongside Godard and Scorsese. In 2005, he broke new ground with Les Saignantes, the first African sci-fi film, now recognized by MoMA as one of 70 science fiction classics. His political satire Le Président (2013) was banned in Cameroon, cementing his reputation as a fearless voice in African cinema. Unclassifiable and uncompromising, Bekolo’s cinema blends imagination and critique to propose decolonized futures—rooted in African realities but unbound by convention. An Afrofuturist pioneer, he uses speculative storytelling and philosophical inquiry to challenge dominant narratives and address postcolonial trauma. His concept of Healing Cinema repositions the filmmaker as a “therapeutic intellectual,” while works like Naked Reality, Foumban is Wakanda, and Une Africaine dans l’espace mix spiritual memory, futuristic aesthetics, and political vision.

Omar Berrada is a writer and curator whose work focuses on the politics of translation and intergenerational transmission. He is the author of the poetry collection Clonal Hum (2020), and the editor or co-editor of several books, including La Septième Porte, a posthumously published history of Moroccan cinema by Ahmed Bouanani (2020). He is currently studying racial dynamics in North Africa while living in New York.

Nadia Yala Kisukidi was born in Brussels, Belgium. Agrégée, she has taught in Switzerland (University of Geneva) and France (University of Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis). She was Vice-President of the Collège International de Philosophie (2014-2016) and a fellow at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination - Columbia University (2022-2023). A member of the editorial committee Les Cahiers d’études africaines (CNRS, EHESS), she was also co-curator of the Yango II Biennale—a process that took place in Kinshasa, DRC from February 2020 to August 2022.

Christian Nyampeta is an artist living in New York from where he organizes programs, exhibitions, screenings, performances, and publications, which are conceived as hosting structures for collective feeling, cooperative thinking, and mutual action. Nyampeta is the convener of Boda Boda Lounge 2022-2024, a trans-African film and video art festival. In New York, Nyampeta convenes the African Film Institute at e-flux in Brooklyn.

Kaneza Schaal is a Rwandan-American artist and arts education advocate who works in theater, film, and opera. She believes that theater is a model for a participatory society and fundamental to a functioning democracy. Her work has been presented at numerous institutions, including The Kennedy Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Los Angeles Opera, Detroit Opera, LA Philharmonic, The Shed, Walker Arts Center, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, REDCAT, The New Victory Theater and New Orleans Center for Contemporary Art. Kaneza Schaal is a Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the Herb Alpert Award in Theatre, United States Artists Fellowship, Soros Arts Migration and Public Space Fellowship, and Ford Foundation Art for Justice Bearing Witness Award. She also directed the 2023 Pulitzer Prize-winning opera Omar. She taught an Atelier course at Princeton University with Elevator Repair Service and has lectured at Yale University, CT; Wesleyan University, CT; New York University, NY; University of the Arts, PA; and Xavier University, LA. In Spring 2020, she taught a course at Harvard University on theater and social practice, and she served as the Denzel Washington Endowed Chair in Theatre at Fordham University in Fall 2021.

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.