At some point in middle and later colonial history, with the colonization of historiography itself at its height, and concomitant with the post-nineteenthcentury rise of secular science as the hegemonic basis of late-modern Western epistemology, Africa's presence was rigidly demarcated and reduced. It was in both the topographical and the discursive senses cut off from adjacent and contiguous continents and oceans (the Mediterranean and Red Seas, Arabia, the whole Middle East and Asia, the Indian Ocean, southern Europe, and the Atlantic world). This process ran parallel with the axiomatic goal of Hegel and others to deny African history and deny Africa rationality and agency in world history (Eze, 1997), in order to relationally bolster and enable the colonial-imperial basis of the supposedly civilized and superior West. Further, whole portions of territorially African space, according to the new concept of planetarily discrete continents, were also excised by being redefined as externally oriented or originated. Ethiopia became Arab-derived, as did Egypt, Sudan and the whole of North Africa, now sectioned off as parts of the 'Middle East'; Somalis in this context claimed or were ascribed more Arab origins. The Swahili Coast was reoriented toward its numerous real external Indian Ocean origins and identities (Shirazi, Omani, Hadrami, Arab, and so on) during the post-1830s rise of racialized European-governed plantation chattel slavery, contributing to the erasure of its more prodigious African points of origin and connection. Internal contradictions that were either wholly manufactured or hardened and exploited were a mainstay of colonial practice, in the well-known and broadly applied tactic of 'divide and rule', and also in what Mamdani (2012) has described as the invention of two profoundly asymmetric juridical and administrative spheres that demarcated citizenship, rights and power in the middle and high colonial periods and their aftermath.