This book confronts the philosophical problems of otherness and identity through readings of the parables and fables of a colonized people, the Luba of Zaire. V.Y. Mudimbe poses two overarching questions: how can one think about and comment upon alterity without essentializing its features? Is it possible to speak and write about an African tradition or its contemporary practice without taking into account the authority of the colonial library that has invented African identities? Mudimbe brings unusual insight to such a discussion: Here I am on the margin of margins: Black, African, Catholic, yet agnostic; intellectually Marxist, disposed toward psychoanalysis, yet a specialist in Indo-European philology and philosophy. He uses his own education by Catholic missionaries in Zaire as a framework for exploring interactions between African and Western systems of thought.