 Issues of epistemic imperialism bear on Africana philosophy because hegemonic institutions have historically recognized, and to a considerable degree still recognize, philosophic interventions as achieving scholarly respectability by appeal to standards calibrated to colonial and apartheid imperatives. One very short version of this story is that the most influential university systems in the contemporary world—including in Africa and the Caribbean—started as the creations and tools of European colonial powers or settler colonial authorities. (This is only one version of the story because it is not, of course, a story simply about university systems. It is also a story about, among other things, publishing houses, dictionaries, the word “philosophy,” and the baggage that European elite cultures attached to all of these things. Outlaw and Gordon also tell this story well.) Consequently, and not surprisingly, it was only in the years after colonized peoples won formal independence and apartheid regimes formally embraced democracy that these institutions began in any thoroughgoing way to credit research programs and curricular initiatives not animated by assumptions about African backwardness, savagery, or barbarism.