  The metaphilosophical efforts to map out and order a complex discursive field of articulations and practices as Africana philosophy are, indeed, emergent disciplinary ventures of the late twentieth century. However, many of the instances of thoughtful articulation and aesthetic expressiveness that are being identified and explored as instances of philosophizing were neither produced nor guided by norms and agendas of the discipline of academic philosophy as institutionalized for centuries in various countries of Western European and North America. The same is true for the needs, motivations, objectives, and many of the principal intellectual resources that motivated and oriented those instances of articulation and creative expression and the formation of the networks of idea-spaces and discursive communities that nurtured them. For African and African-descended peoples were of little or no philosophical or anthropological significance to those who have been the designators, historians, practitioners, and mediators of the discipline’s institutionalized canons of issues, figures, agendas, conceptual and methodological traditions, problem-sets, texts or text-analogs, organizations, and institutions. The pre-Modern histories of African and African-descended peoples; the centuries-long colonized, enslaved, and otherwise utterly dehumanizing unfreedom of Black peoples throughout the continents of Africa, Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean; the rapacious unjust exploitation of their bodies, lands, resources, and life-opportunities—all of these went mostly without explicit comment in the discipline of Philosophy, not even as a focus of protest, notwithstanding all of the vaunted concern within the discipline for conceptions of freedom, justice, equality, human nature, and human well-being generally. Even as European and European-descended philosophes of the eighteen, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries fashion decidedly new philosophical anthropologies, socio-political philosophies, and philosophies of histories into complex Enlightenments to ground and guide quests to realize the global instantiations of Modernities in which reason-guided freedom and justice would be foundational to the spread of the racialized, capitalist civilizational projects of Eurocentrism (Amin 1989), there was almost total silence about the intended and unintended consequences for peoples African and of African descent—except for claims that colonization and enslavement would bring them much needed “civilizing.”