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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“The white man regards the universe as a gigantic machine hurtling through time and space to its final destruction: individuals in it are but tiny organisms with private lives that lead to private deaths: personal power, success and fame are the absolute measures of values, the things to live for. This outlook on life divides the universe into a host of individual little entities which cannot help being in constant conflict thereby hastening the approach of the hour of their final destruction.”
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