This course examines how Africans have shaped their political and economic worlds from the late 19th century to the present, asserting visions of freedom, justice, and belonging amid European domination, the Cold War and neoliberal globalization. Rather than viewing Africa as merely a site of external intervention, we center the ideas, movements, and everyday practices through which Africans have defined what it means to live, govern, and flourish in a changing world. We trace how colonialism and racial capitalism constrained African possibilities, and how Africans reimagined those limits through anticolonial struggles, self-rule, Pan-African solidarities, and movements for transformation. Drawing on film, literature, music, and visual culture, the course highlights how Africans have negotiated power and knowledge in the modern world.