Mobility and travel have been at the heart of Africa’s sociopolitical and economic evolution for centuries. This mobility has been circular, multi-directional, voluntary, forced, and unpredictably complex, with Africans traversing space and moving between locations within and outside Africa. African mobility is often stereotyped as an existential endeavor, but internal and external mobility was driven by the hunger for, and resulted in the acquisition of, new knowledges. The epistemic dividends of mobility have contributed to the transformation of African communities and polities. Africans’ mobility complicates the notion of home and the anxieties and debates around “leaving” or “returning” home. In this paper, I explore this persistence of mobility, in all its ramifications, in debates about the African renaissance, about African futures, and decoloniality. I argue that, rather than constituting a loss to Africa, the mobility and circulation of youthful African bodies and brains will help determine the future of the continent. I reject the reductive binary of brain drain and brain gain. I propose in its place the concept of brain circulation. I contend that it is more faithful to African youths’ twenty first century itineraries and that it is a more generative framework for understanding catalytic African mobility. I then pivot to the subject of my last book and my ongoing book project: aristocratic mobility, forced and voluntary, and the ways in which it birthed new imaginaries, nostalgias, and modernities. Finally, I explore how these two itineraries, those of aristocratic historical figures and contemporary African migrants, bolster and challenge decolonial theoretical assumptions.