  It became apparent to many—though by no means to all—of the contemporary pioneers of Africana philosophy within academic philosophy that this image of the ideal philosopher was not appropriate for respectfully identifying or characterizing many of the philosophically thoughtful and expressive persons African and of African descent, those, especially, who lived several centuries ago. Certainly, throughout the centuries of radically disruptive and dehumanizing encounters between peoples African and of African descent and peoples of Europe and of the Euro-Americas, and others, the philosophizing efforts of Black people have, indeed, been “born of struggle,” as the philosopher Leonard Harris has so aptly noted. The experiences, thus the philosophizing, of many of these persons—and of generations of millions who were their contemporaries, millions more who came before them, and millions more who came after them—were conditioned profoundly by racialized and gendered exploitative settler-colonialism in their homelands; for others by racialized and gendered capture, relocation, enslavement, and oppression in The New World thousands of miles from their or their ancestors’ homelands; and in all such cases by racialized and gendered imperialist encroachments on the very core of their being by which they were forced to become and to be colonized “natives” and slaves, ontologically as well as socio-economically. Survival and endurance of such conditions by those who managed to do so required coordinated efforts of recovery and retention, or the recreation, of the integrity of personhood and peoplehood, even of basic humaneness, thus required thoughtful ontological and political work of the most fundamental significance. So, too, crucial intellectual efforts of the kinds designated moral, ethical, epistemological, social, religious, theological, and aesthetic.