While other cultures lay bold claim and are energised by pasts and traditions, Africa remains uniquely cut off, by the colonial experience, from such anchorage. The notion of Egyptian antiquity as African may have been considered settled through conclusive scientific evidence offered by Cheikh Anta Diop in the 1970’s. And yet strong responses to this idea - including appeals to government intervention in Egypt - to the recent representation of Cleopatra by Adele James, a biracial actress in the Netflix docudrama, ‘Queen Cleopatra’ (May 2023), foregrounds just how unsettled and contested the matter remains; how the struggle over this past, also claimed by others, spills over and continues to frame and shape the present. But even as it is important to establish links to regenerative pasts, it is also useful to interrogate them. I will explore the ways in which Ayi Kwei Armah has, in Osiris Rising: A Novel of Africa Past, Present & Future (1995) and KMT: In the house of life (2002), revisited ancient Egypt through its own writings, and consistently sought to explicate and contextualise these ideas that are foundational to the African archive, and that influence and inform the African literary imagination.