In the early thirteenth century, for example, Ibn Battuta travelled the entire world from his home base in Tangier, Morocco, including multiple hajjes to Mecca, circumnavigations of West Africa, the Red Sea and Arabia, the entire Swahili Coast, the Levant, the Indian Ocean, most of South and Central Asia, and China (Hamdun and King, 1994). He also travelled through Iberian Al-Andalus, shortly before his fabled trip to Timbuktu and the Empire of Mali. There was an inherent and widely generalized fluidity in the construction of social identity and culture in the millennia leading up to the point of colonial disruption and reorganization (Ahmad, 2006; Mudimbe, 1988; Said, 1978), which allowed travellers like Benjamin of Tudela, Ibn Battuta and thousands of others involved in commerce, trade, the production of knowledge, and myriad other interchanges to negotiate their identities and occupy multiple layers and cultural inflections simultaneously. Designations such as 'Moor'/'Moorish', 'Habesha', 'Zanj' (Benjamin, 2008), 'Abyssinian' or 'Sud'/'Sudan' all indicated multivalent, geographically dispersed, and flexible yet regionally associated identities epitomizing what de Moraes Farias (1985) explained were the normative 'mobile classificatory labels' of non-Western epistemologies. However, the rigid fixing of identities around invented boundaries produced by reductive Manichaean binaries, and the intense suppression of its own interrelatedness outwards to the rest of the world, are fundamental to Western thought and appear consistently. This spatio-temporal regime then allows multiple seemingly immaculate conceptions of thought, industry and state to emerge in its likeness, as if without history or created whole, thus confirming its own greatness through discovery/invention/industry/virility/rationality. The suppression of African and all non-Western histories is central to this epistemology, as is the imagined unilineal evolutionary grid underpinning it - creating manifold volatilities that persist in culture and politics today.