  The variety of reasons for and means of coping in such circumstances, and the variety of conceptions of life to be lived and of freedom to be achieved in the various New World locales, were approached differently by activist thinkers of African descent, conditioned by adaptive continuations—more or less—of some Old World African cultural agendas and practices. The efforts gave rise to developments of different traditions of thought guiding the formation and pursuit of what would become, over time, a variety of agendas, foci, objectives, and strategies of intellectual and practical engagement. It is these variegated, historically conditioned, socially grounded, imperatives-driven thought and praxis complexes, immersed in and growing out of concerns and struggles for survival, endurance, and human dignity in freedom, that are being recovered and studied as the earliest instances of philosophizing by diasporic persons of African descent and form the bases of the unfolding of several subfields of Africana philosophy.