Mutually exclusive, a contradiction in terms.
Don’t knock them just yet: there was some semblance of civilisation in Africa, back in the Middle Ages and early modern era...
God only knows what happened after the fall of Songhai, that they have not been able to establish a functioning society, until European colonisation in the 19th century...
(Most of the nation-building of that time was concentrated in West Africa; many of them were Islamic states. Even so, tribalism remained paramount; Mali and Songhai were the two attempts at making a unified African society.)