Twentieth‐century African theory translated two destructive diasporas – of peoples by the slave trade, of lands by empire – into a creative third: a pan‐Africanist philosophy of decolonization that recovered Africa's pluralism as a powerfully “diasporic” defiance of imperial taxonomies. Comparing a 1967 lecture given in Cairo by Senegalese poet‐president Léopold Sédar Senghor with a 1955 treatise on the philosophy of revolution by Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser (Jamal cAbd al‐Nasir), and both with Achille Mbembe's 2001 On the Postcolony, this essay shows how Senghor marshals race/culture hybridities, Nasser historical/geographic alignments, and Mbembe temporal entanglements to deconstruct monolithic constructions of “Arab”, “Black”, and “African” being, space, and time – and to pluralize and “world” a continent. It argues that the logics of trans‐territoriality and trans‐temporality that informed Third World solidarity in the 1950s–1970s represent a forgotten legacy of pan‐Africanism to postcolonialism and to global theory generally. Africa's place, in theory, decenters Eurocentrism.