This chapter explores how the discourse on Being arose in the history of Western thought. In this chapter, I rely heavily on the works of the later Martin Heidegger, taking a historical assessment of the various ways that the question of Being has been neglected and even in some cases substituted with God in the thoughts of the most dominant philosophers. The chapter shows how substance-based metaphysics wields influence over other shades of metaphysical thought in the history of Western philosophy even when it turns out to be guilty of what Heidegger calls onto-theology—the conflation of God with the question of Being. The failure to properly offer a commanding account of Being may have been one of the reasons why metaphysics soon became an enterprise for elimination almost a century ago. Although I muse over why such an approach falters, I conclude the chapter by pointing out how substance-based metaphysics ended up as the basis for understanding and codifying the African reality in ways that distortion and misrepresentation of facts were casualties.