  With little to no evidence in much of the canonical literature and curricula of academic Philosophy that Western philosophers have focused attention on questions of historical relations between Egyptian and Greco-Roman thinkers, or on African thinkers and traditions of thought, a number of the pioneers of Africana philosophy have turned to independent, often controversial figures and scholarly projects outside of academic, professional Philosophy for their inspiration and for intellectual resources and strategies in taking on the challenges of creating intellectual spaces in academic Philosophy for “matters African.” A major resource and intellectual mentor continue to be works by and the person of Cheikh Anta Diop, the intellectually daring and pioneering Senegalese scholar who, in The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, published in the early 1970s, argued for the reality of the African origin of human civilization. Diop had begun the challenging work of reclaiming African heritages decades earlier by arguing in a dissertation submitted for the Ph.D. at the University of Paris that ancient Egyptian civilization was a black African civilization. His explorations in support of his claims have enormous implications for revisions to histories of the origins of Western Philosophy. Similarly, Martin Bernal’s loudly and heatedly contested multi-volume Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization is by far the most widely read, and intensely debated, work in this vein to which many have turned. However, Bernal’s work, which acknowledges a long line of African and African-descended scholars who are his precursors, Diop included, has raised hardly a ripple in academic Philosophy. The discipline has thus long been overdue for a spirited and disciplined critical reconsideration of the possibilities and realities of informing Greco-Roman and African Egyptian contributions to the histories of emergence and development of philosophical thought that has been canonized as foundational to the genealogy of Western Philosophy. Africana philosophy has been forged as a novel context of provocations for such critical reconsiderations.