Studies on African continentalism, conventionally dominated by the ranked heuristic and analytical logic of hierarchy, often designate the (non)effects of the processes and institutions African unity as uninspiring, mediocre or outright failures and hence not progressive. Relatedly, African political actors/engineers generally perceived as lacking confidence, self-defined rationality, ideational anchors and ingenuity, tend to be primarily tagged as peripheral, agency-deprived dominated subjects in the world pecking order. The dominance of the cited stereotypes in epistemic communities has hampered the realisation that processes of African unification, being historically contingent efforts to rehabilitate and uplift the African human condition, are inherently valuable and worthy natural experiments in their own right and as such harbour the potential to enrich academic discourse, expand knowledge frontiers and inform the framing of innovative policies. Against this background this project, with the aid of heterarchy: an essentially non-hierarchical mode of thought that privileges unranked and multiplicities of ranked coordinated relationships or transactions, seeks to research the often-overlooked complex nuances of African continentalism. The project’s endeavour, notionally oriented by a solemn and sympathetic consideration of crude transactions, seeks to probe the (i) ideational structures, (ii) institutional configurations and sequential patterns and (iii) (informal)governance regimes of African continentalism.