This panel seeks to bring new methods and findings in early African history into conversation with problems in scholarship on Africa’s Diasporas and Global history more generally. Oriented toward Africanists and non-specialists alike, presenters will briefly (2-3 minutes) offer a piece of evidence attesting to a concept-in-use a rooted in African ontology, epistemology, and practice. Then, in conversation with the audience, the panel will explore its value for Diaspora and global histories. In addition to sharing new work, the panel’s format demonstrates how practitioners define the scope of a field in which scholars of concepts like cosmopolitanism, wealth, mental healing, geology, migration, and kingship engage each other’s work across period and region. This ‘scoping’ indirectly counters a model of narrow engagement with Africanist scholarship in which non-Africanists understandably focus in on findings from the regions, time periods, or communities of Africa that link directly to their story. This panel recognizes that Africanists also bear responsibility for making the wide scope of our field accessible to non-specialists and, thereby, the place of Africa in wider global processes legible. Necessarily, questions of the archives and methods of accessing oral societies’ histories will arise. So, too, will conversations about periodization, regionalization, narrativity, and agency. Ultimately, however, the panel should inspire conversations about how to place African ideas at the center of Diaspora and global histories by taking seriously the scope of Africans’ and Africanists’ ideas.