Coda

Abstract

Let me bring this book to a close by drawing attention to the predicament of Africanist social science. The aim of Africanism, V. Y. Mudimbe tells us, has been attaining “truth” about Africa and expressing it in “scientifically” credible discourses. However, the production of these truths has been faced with two major problematiques: (1) problems concerning the very condition of knowledge and (2) important questions concerning the status of truth discourse itself (1994: 38-41). Michel Foucault has, after first distinguishing among types of truths,¹ raised important questions about the very status of truth discourse itself: “Either this true discourse finds its foundation and model in the empirical truth whose genesis in nature and in history it retraces, so that one has an analysis of the positivist type (the truth of the object determines the truth of the discourse that describes its formation); or the true discourse anticipates the truth whose nature and history it defines; it sketches out in advance and foments it from a distance, so that one has a discourse of the eschatological type (the truth of the philosophical discourse constitutes the truth in formation)” (Foucault 1970: 348).