PAN AFRICAN SPACE STATION by Chimurenga

The Pan African Space Station lands at the Prisme Library in Lubumbashi from 21-24 October; to explore the intellectual, literary and artistic histories of the city in the time of V.Y. Mudimbe, specifically his time at the University of Lubumbashi where he was based from 1971 to 1980.

A period overlooked by his biographers, during which he published three major novels, several collections of poetry, and emerged as a leading thinker on African modes of self-writing. It is also a period marked by the institutionalisation of “authenticité” by Mobutu’s MPR regime.

Situated in Katanga, Lubumbashi belongs simultaneously to the Congo and to the wider Copperbelt and Southern African worlds; claimed repeatedly by the national state yet continually producing affiliations that cross its borders. Mudimbe’s intellectual problem—how “knowledge” produces Africa, how colonial categories survive their apparent overthrow, how Africans inherit and contest those categories—began here.

LA BIBLIOTHEQUE DE MUDIMBE refers to an actual library—Mudimbe’s personal collection, which he donated to the University of Lubumbashi shortly before his death—and to the conceptual archive associated with what he called “The Invention of Africa”. We draw on his method to trace less visible trajectories that preceded his departure to the US in 1980. Documents and collections, but also the lives lived within them, and the intellectual companions and adversaries who inhabited this period.

We’ll engage histories of publishing, beginning with V. Y. Mudimbe’s Mont Noir, founded in 1971; Bantu Studies after the publication of Placide Tempels’ “Bantu Philosophy” in 1945; music cultures on the mining/railway network connecting Johannesburg to Lubumbashi and spreading across the White Redoubt in Southern Africa; and more.

Part of the 9th Lubumbashi Biennale, and produced in collaboration with: Yam Yantumbi and Prisme Collective; Kalombo II and Mudimbe Club; Feza Kayungu; DJ Spilulu; Jackie Kabedi; Sando Marteau; Mze Lotingo;  MLD Slamareine; Ernest Thibadi; Clementine Nzuji; Emmanuel M. Banywesize; Jacques Mukonga; Alexis Takizala Masoso and many more.