TAMBA Koundouno

My MA reserach project is provisionally titled “The dialectics of decoloniality: Achille Mbembe and the tragedy of the postcolonial intellectual.” It seeks to trace and make  sense of Mbembe's fall from grace in afrocentrist and radical pan-African circles. Once hailed as the go-to intellectual chronicler and advocate of Africa, the Cameroonian historian-philsopher has in recent years been taken off his pedestal and dismissed as a sellout and traitor. In response, he has lamented the death of objective and dispassionate thinking in and about Africa. In this prevailing, raging debate over what it means to be an African intellectual, my goal is to shed light on the uses and abuses of decolonial/postcolonial orthodoxy.