“Blackness Emerges From the Waters” is part of a larger syllabus exploring Black thought and Aesthetics from Precolonial Africa to the Americas. This unit explores the ontology of Black as a color and its various social and symbolic meanings in Pre-colonial African contexts. We will explore how Black is understood as the embodiment and antithesis of certain African aesthetic ideals. We will explore Black color symbolism concerning skin color, art, material culture, and the natural world, as well as how this relates to conceptions of beauty, ugliness, fertility, birth, death, prestige, accumulation, endlessness, and danger in Yoruba, Mende, Kongo, and Igbo aesthetics and cosmologies.