The essays collected here take up a question posed sharply in the opening chapter by Souleymane Bachir Diagne: whether African thought should keep asking who and what Africans are, or turn instead to what they are becoming. Diagne traces the identitarian answer through the founding of Presence africaine, through Cheikh Anta Diop's account of African origins and Nkrumah's consciencism, and through the parallel language of rebirth in North Africa, before arguing that the pressing work now lies in religious and cultural pluralism rather than in return to a foundation.

Later contributions push in other directions. One reads marronage as the ground of a feminism built on flight rather than on recognition. Another treats writing and thinking in Africa as a kind of weaving. A further section examines how African personal status law is handled in Western jurisdictions.

The recurring claim is that meaning should be drawn from what is coming rather than from what has been.