There are thousands of tribes in Africa but nobody to date has been able tabulated exactly how many. Tanzania alone has more that a hundred counted tribes.
And they were killing and enslaving one another long before the Europeans arrive in sub-Saharan Africa. That's what Africa would still look like today. In fact tribal warfare continues even today...recall Rwanda?
> That’s what Africa would still look like today. In fact tribal warfare continues even today...recall Rwanda? <
That’s a fair point. But that conflict was caused by two different tribes - the Hutu and the Tutsi - shoved together in the same artificial country by a foreign power. Would the massacres have occurred if those two tribes were in separate countries?
Who knows? Maybe they’d cross international bombers and continue to pick at each other.
My point is that forcing enemy tribes together like that was a lousy thing to do. Not that the European powers cared. In fact, they saw it as a good way to control the colonies. Play the various tribes off each other.