do you know if most of sub Saharan Africa was primarily made of fairly isolated hunter gatherer societies prior to European colonization?
It was not. The Khoi-San have apparently always been hunter-gatherers, and their territory, particularly to the south, was larger back then, but in the east (Burundi, Rwanda, Kenya) cattle-herding was pretty standard, and in the kingdom of Congo (which extended south into Angola at the time), most of the landscape was farmed (although not all at once because they would deliberately leave some fields fallow for several years at a time), the people lived in villages which were part of a wide multi-layered net of social connections organized in a structure the Portuguese recognized as feudal, and there were a few population centers that could be called cities (although without huge stone monument construction). Of course, that leaves some of the region you asked about that I can't account for, but even just the limited examples I am able to give still cover probably at least a third or close to half of the region.
Also, the general reason that's given for why black people were able to expand and overrun whoever else was there first was because black people had food production (which includes plant farming and domesticated animal herding), which gave them several competetive or military advantages over hunter-gatherers, including greater population density, more reliable food supply, and iron weapons & tools. So, by the time whites got there, food production was certainly a part of the heritage that had been brought from the Niger-Congo-Bantu homeland when they expanded and migrated to dominate most of the land. So it's safe to say that, if any of them ended up
not doing it in any particular little places I don't know about, it's because they had it before and then switched back only after arriving in particular places where they found out food production wouldn't work very well.
European and American children were taught a narrative that emphasized the progress of the 'white' races, and deemphasized the progress of the nonwhite races. It's a set of true facts, but it's a selected set... Afrocentric history also fails on this point... biased in the opposite direction. It is no more true, possibly less in that some of the folks looking for evidence to support it have used a very low standard of evidence
There's a problem with calling it "Afrocentric". If you just look at the parts the word is built from, it means centered on Africa. That would be fine. I expect French history lessons to be centered on France, Japanese history lessons to be centered on Japan, and so on. That's as it should be. But the kind of stuff that's described in the OP here is not just centered on Africa; it's also lying. Lies are not a matter of where something is centered, and going along with a label for them that deliberately makes it sound as if they were only helps the liar.
But of course, as DrKitten already pointed out, there's a much bigger body of knowledge about the Romans than about the Germanic tribes. But I wouldn't expect an American highschool history curriculum to mention Civilis.
