African empires is an umbrella term used in "Africana studies" to refer to a number of pre-colonial African kingdoms with multinational structures incorporating various populations and polities into a single entity, usually through conquest.
The term "African empires" is used in the 19th century by David Livingstone and others in reference to the West African Sahelian kingdoms. These were actual empires which thrived on the Atlantic slave trade, and which disappeared after the abolition of slavery in the West and the resulting collapse of demand for slaves in the European colonies.
In 20th-century Pan-Africanism, the term came to be extended to include any super-regional kingdom during the entire pre-colonial history of the entire continent, sometimes only to the exclusion of European colonialism, but to the inclusion of the Islamic caliphates. W.E.B. Du Bois in his 1924 The gift of Black folk: the Negroes in the making of America notably linked Ancient Egypt, the medieval West African kingdoms and the African diaspora. Joan Joseph in 1974 published Black African Empires: A First Book as a history book for schools.
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“Exploitation and oppression is not a matter of race. It is the system, the apparatus of world-wide brigandage called imperialism, which made the Powers behave the way they did. I have no illusions on this score, nor do I believe that any Asian nation or African nation, in the same state of dominance, and with the same system of colonial profit-amassing and plunder, would have behaved otherwise.”
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