The Myth of “10,000 African Kingdoms”: How Europe Misread Ethnopublic Africa
BY: OMOLAJA MAKINEE
One of the most persistent fallacies in African historiography is the claim that ancient Africa was composed of over 10,000 separate kingdoms, empires, and self-governing entities. This claim is routinely repeated in European academic literature, school curricula, and popular discourse, often presented as evidence of African political fragmentation, tribalism, or premodern disorder.
This interpretation is not merely inaccurate—it is conceptually flawed. It arises from the application of a European political lens to a civilisation that did not organise itself according to European State logic. What Europe identified as “thousands of kingdoms” were, in reality, dispersed ethnopublic formations—tribal stocks and sub-tribes of major ethnic groups migrating, settling, and re-anchoring themselves economically across vast territories.
Africa was never a continent of isolated micro-kingdoms. It was a continent of ethno-governed communities, fluid in movement, unified in culture, and economically motivated in expansion.
1. Migration Was Economic, Not Accidental
Human migration, from the earliest primitive era, has always been driven by economic necessity and opportunity, not tourism, curiosity, or chaos. Africa was no exception.
Ancient African societies migrated:
- To access fertile land.
- To control trade routes.
- To secure water, minerals, or livestock corridors.
- To establish craft, spiritual, or commercial centres.
When populations moved, they did not abandon their ethnic identity. They replicated it.
Thus, what European observers later catalogued as “new kingdoms” were often new settlements of the same ethnic stock, maintaining:
- The same language.
- The same spiritual cosmology.
- The same customary laws.
- The same kinship structures.
Governing authority followed the people—not the territory.
2. The Yoruba Case: A Living Model of Ethnopublic Dispersion
Among African peoples, the Yoruba provide one of the clearest and most well-documented examples of ethnopublic dispersion through economic and spiritual migration. Historically, Yoruba migration followed two primary motivations:
- Economic expansion – establishing trade, crafts, and governance nodes.
- Spiritual dissemination – spreading Ifa divinity and cosmological knowledge.
These migrations were not acts of conquest but acts of civilisational replication.
Yoruba communities spread across West Africa, forming distinct settlements that Europeans later mislabelled as independent “kingdoms,” when in fact they were tribal stocks of a single ethnosystem. Each settlement retained Yoruba language, ritual systems, and social organisation, while adapting to local ecological conditions.
Even today, the Yoruba continue this ancient pattern—appearing across Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas as economic migrants, religious custodians, and community builders. Modern Yoruba diasporas are not a break from history; they are its continuation.
3. Kemet, Kush, and the Yoruba Spiritual Corridor
Contrary to Eurocentric narratives that isolate ancient Egypt (Kemet) from the rest of Africa, indigenous African traditions preserve a different memory—one of interconnected civilisational stocks.
Yoruba oral traditions, Ifa corpus, and spiritual cosmology consistently reference ancient Nile-Valley knowledge systems. The Yoruba, as custodians of Ifa divinity, are historically linked to migrations toward Kemet, interacting with Kushite and other Nilotic tribal stocks in the formation of Pharaonic civilisation.
This was not the formation of a “foreign empire,” but the convergence of African ethnopublic stocks, pooling spiritual, scientific, and administrative knowledge. Kemet was not an anomaly—it was a civilisational hub of African ethnopublic convergence.
4. Why Europe Counted Kingdoms Instead of Peoples
European historiography made a fundamental error: it counted administrative nodes instead of ethnic continuities.
Where Europe saw:
- Multiple thrones.
- Multiple chiefs.
- Multiple settlements.
Africa experienced:
- One people.
- Many locations.
- Shared governance norms.
Europe defined sovereignty territorially. Africa defined sovereignty ethnically and communally.
Thus, when Europeans encountered hundreds of Yoruba, Igbo, Akan, Bantu, or Nilotic settlements, each with local leadership, they assumed political fragmentation. In reality, these were federated cultural extensions, not sovereign rivals.
5. Ethnopublics: The Organic African Govoxical Unit
Africans were never “kingdom-centric.” They were ethno-centric.
An ethnopublic is:
- A people first.
- Territory second.
- Authority derived from collective identity.
- Governance replicated across space.
This explains why African societies could:
- Absorb newcomers.
- Relocate without collapse.
- Maintain cohesion without fixed borders.
What Europe interpreted as weakness was, in fact, adaptive strength.
6. The Future Ethnopublic Africa: Migration Re-Normalised
In the proposed continental ethnopublic framework, this ancient pattern returns—modernised but unchanged in principle. It will be normal to see:
- A single Igbo family migrate to another African region.
- Establish economic outlets benefiting the host society.
- Attract kin and community over decades.
- Form a recognised ethnopublic stock linked to their homeland.
These dispersed stocks will remain governed by their original ethnopublic StateLord, while operating economically and socially within host regions—creating inter-ethnopublic interdependence, not conflict.
This is not fragmentation. This is civilisational circulation.
7. Why the “10,000 Kingdoms” Narrative Must Be Abandoned
The myth of 10,000 African kingdoms serves three harmful purposes:
- It justifies colonial partition by portraying Africa as naturally divided.
- It erases Africa’s ethnopublic logic.
- It misrepresents migration as disorder rather than strategy. The republican lens enforced strict and rigorous border-control in its worldview and established legal frameworks that criminalise migration as a statutory offence.
Africa was not a continent of petty kingdoms. It was a continent of people in motion, governed by shared ancestry, belief, and economic purpose.
Conclusion: Africa Was Never Fragmented—It Was Distributed
What Europe mistook for fragmentation was distribution. What it called tribalism was ethnopublic continuity. What it counted as kingdoms were settlements of the same civilisational ethnic stock. The Yoruba stand today as living evidence of this truth—global, mobile, rooted, and coherent.
As Africa moves toward ethnopublic re-organisation, it is not inventing a new system. It is remembering its own. The future of a United African State will not be built on borders drawn in Berlin—but on peoples who have always known how to move, adapt, and remain one.
Back to: 👇