>>936054987West Africa was a global academic hub long before Europeans showed up there.
Surely Mansa Musa rings a bell, That guy oversaw one of the empires there in the 12th century. There were several that were thriving, the Malians, the Songhai etc. Places like Gao and Timbuktu were economic and scholastic nexuses. In fact they had writing before most the north Europeans did.
By the time of colonial powers invading though it was just a perfect storm:
- Longstanding empires had just crumbled into disrepair and political fragmentation about a century earlier
- The Morroccan invasion into the teetering Songhai empire was just beginning
- Europeans didn't go inland but stayed coastal, and had a maritime advantage
- They leveraged feuds between factions to establish hegemony (e.g. playing on the Songhai empire's succession wars)
It's honestly very similar to parties like the Umayyad Caliphate invading Europe during *its* dark age about a millennium earlier, following the fall of the Roman empire and the sort of centralized authority that could rebuke another centralized authority.
The modern image of illiterate tribals is made up by people who either don't know anything about the place, or people for who it is very important that *you* don't know anything about the place.
Usually it's the former because people tend to be dumb and they're defensive of their power fantasies that call them exceptional for just sitting there and breathing.