Achille Mbembe b. 1957

Achille Mbembe is a Cameroonian philosopher and political theorist, professor at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research in Johannesburg, and one of the most influential voices in contemporary African and postcolonial thought. On the Postcolony reread the political imagination of postcolonial Africa as a space of intimate co-mingling of rulers and ruled rather than the simple imposition of foreign forms, while Necropolitics extended Foucault's biopolitics into an account of the powers that decide which lives may be exposed to death. Critique of Black Reason offered a global history of how the black body has been produced as a figure of capital and labor.

Joseph-Achille Mbembe was born at Otele in Cameroon in July 1957. He took his bachelor's at the University of Yaoundé and his doctorate in history at the Sorbonne in 1989 with a thesis on the Catholic mission in central Africa, supplemented by a diploma in international relations from Sciences Po. He held appointments at Columbia, the Brookings Institution, the University of Pennsylvania, Yale, and the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, and from 2000 has been research professor at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) in Johannesburg.

His books include Afriques indociles (1988), On the Postcolony (De la postcolonie, 2000), Sortir de la grande nuit (2010), Critique of Black Reason (Critique de la raison nègre, 2013), Necropolitics (Politiques de l'inimitié, 2016), Brutalisme (2020), and the late La communauté terrestre (2023). He received the Holberg Prize in 2024.

Mbembe has redrawn the postcolonial map of Africa around the concept of the postcolony as a regime of improvisation, mutual obscenity, and the everyday exercise of bare power; his account of necropolitics extended Foucault's biopolitics by treating the production of death-worlds — colonies, camps, occupied territories — as the constitutive operation of late-modern sovereignty. His recent work has turned to planetary ecology and the question of an inhabited Earth shared in common.