This presentation engages the work of V.Y. Mudimbe around the question of the colonial library, its structuring role in Africanist discourses, and possible transcendence. A major conceptual tool in Mudimbe’s critical repertoire, the colonial library provides a useful way of thinking about the historicity and discursivity of Africanist disciplines and the challenge of decolonising their epistemic foundations. What exactly is this library and how does it structure knowledge about Africa?  I want to interrogate the possible of thinking Africa beyond the fetishes of the structuring violence of the library and ask whether disciplinary knowledge about Africa is possible outside of the power-knowledge regimes of the library, or whether Africanist knowledge, precisely because of the structuring violence of the library, is always already doomed at its very moment of enunciation? What does this mean for a subject who wants to speak with their own ‘authentic’ voice? Can this subject escape the structuring power of the library and be free from its contaminating violence, or is this subject always already at risk of reproducing in their own speech the pre-established discourses of the library as critics maintain? These are some of the questions that this paper attempts to grapple with.