Achille Mbembe

Achille Mbembe (* July 1957 in Malande at Otélé in the center of Cameroon ) is a Cameroonian political scientist and theorist of post-colonialism.

Life

Mbembe was taught in a boarding school of the Dominicans, before 1978, a study at the University of Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon recorded. During the school and the student, he was responsible for the Jeunesse estudiante chrétienne (JE) among others as the person responsible in the Journal of the movement Au Large. The times during his studies were interrupted not only by strikes against the authoritarian regime of President Ahmadou Ahidjo of Cameroon until 1982 and his successor, Paul Biya, but they were also quite Mbembe Cameroon including the English-speaking West and the Muslim North to get to know. There he participated in literacy campaigns for the rural population, particularly near Maroua, the great commercial center in northern Cameroon, in part. Further journeys led Mbembe, for example, in the Tanzania President Julius Nyerere and introduced him to the local socialism.

Studies and teaching abroad

Mbembe studied from 1982 History at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon- Sorbonne and received his doctorate there in 1989 in History. He finished his training at the Institut d' études politiques de Paris from the Diplôme d' études approfondies (DEA ). In his Paris years membe published often in the left press, for example, in Le Monde diplomatique. Jean -François Bayart became his spiritual mentor during these years and opened the journal Politique africaine for his ideas, for example, for a policy from below.

Then he went in 1986 for three years as an assistant at Columbia University in New York. This was followed by a year working in Washington, DC at the Brookings Institution before he went to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. There he was in 1996 a Fellow of the MacArthur Foundation. At the University of California, Berkeley, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut and Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, he taught at times during his stay in the United States.

Activities in Africa

Mbembe 1996 was called to the Council for the Development of Social Science Research ( CODESRIA ) based in Dakar, Senegal. He left this institution in 2000, disappointed with the inner grave ideological struggles.

After a year sabbatical at Berkeley his most important work was published in 2000 in French and in English 2001 On the Postcolony at the University of California Press. In the same year he started working for the newly established Institute of Social and Economic Research ( WISER ) at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Publications

• 2011: Sortir de la grande nuit. Essai sur l' Afrique décolonisée. Éditions la Découverte, Paris. ISBN 978-2-7071-6940-2. ( e-book )

• 2008: Jean -François Bayart include: L' Afrique de Sarkozy. Éditions Karthala, Paris.

• Sarah Nuttall: Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, with afterwords by Arjun Appadurai and Carol A. Breckenridge. Duke University Press, Durham, USA 2008, ISBN 978-0-822342625.

• 2011: Curt Holtz (ed.): Permanent error: Pieter Hugo. Prestel, Munich / London / New York, ISBN 978-3-7913-4520-8.