The significance of the work of V. Y. Mudimbe can be cited from various points of view. First, it makes up part of the growing literature in recent years which critically reviews some of the epistemological claims underlying the history of the construction of the image of otherness in Western scholarship. Mudimbe's The Invention of Africa is a brilliant general survey of how Western construction of primitive and savage images of Africa, particularly in historical and anthropological studies, has influenced alienated discourse and self-identity among Africans themselves. Victim and product of this influence, African intellectual history unveils in itself a consistent rupture from its harshly negated past. In the humanities and social sciences in general, and in philosophy and religion in particular, African intellectuals continue to define their world on the basis of Western epistemological standards. Second, Mudimbe's work is also a brilliant intellectual description of the historical dilemmas which many educated African elites face daily in regard to how best to adapt what Jewsiewicki calls the usable to the construction of their present. Haunted by the feeling of their denigrated past, African elites, Mudimbe argues, are constantly eager to abandon it in order to adopt what is foreign (Western) because they think that it is modern and civilized. Everyday, the battle against the past is fought and the past, frequently called the traditional in the constructed discourse, is suppressed in legal suits, political rhetoric, economic and social planning and policy making. In this respect, Mudimbe implicitly raises significant questions about the contrast and complementarity between past and present as distinct periodizations of their history and identity. We can summarize those questions under the following three main points: - the definitions of tradition and its role in African representational discourse; - the contrast between traditionalism and Westernism-must they be contrasted, and what makes each of them acceptable or unacceptable; - the instruments for judging the acceptability or unacceptability of either traditionalism or Westernism, and who sets and standardizes those instruments. The Invention of Africa does not answer all these questions, but they present, I believe, the intellectual and social dilemmas and contexts with which Mudimbe's work basically deals, also brilliantly portrayed in his novels -the polygamous African husband married to two wives -one African the other white; or the contrast between the Church as a Western institution and Christianity as a set of deinstitutionalized values universally open to all, Africans included. The contemporary African intellectual in the humanities and social sciences is torn between two intellectual directions and has