This is a book about history: the ‘historical turn’ in international law on the one hand, and the ‘international turn’ in the history of political thought on the other. Yet the arguments explored here matter not just because they change the way we understand the past, but because our readings of the past are fundamental to all critical perspectives on the present and the future. In this chapter, I focus on Africa, and what thinking about the history of political thought in mid-twentieth-century Africa means for our understanding of political ordering.