I do hope you are familiar with the civilizations of Kush, Aksum, Congo, Ghana/Mali/Songhai, etc.
You could also add the Swahili coast to this list.
You could also add the Swahili coast to this list.
Or was it primarily tribal conquering/uniting?
That's a complicated question that I'm not qualified to answer (Congo maybe?), but I'd point out that even in the ancient near east, trade and contact with foreigners preceded the development of civilization in those regions and European civilization especially owes a lot of its success to contact with outside civilizations. So the fact the most well-known African civilizations had regular trade contacts with Eurasia should not do much to diminish the accomplishments of those civilizations as such.
For example, it's possible that iron smelting began in the Sahel in Africa, and from there spread to the Near East/Mediterranean rather than the other way around which would mean that Africa entered the iron age well before the rest of the world. [1]
In case it’s the latter, then your slant of:
> northern Mediterranean/Nile influenced groups
is weird. Many European cultures were influenced by the Romans, who were influenced by the Greeks, who were influenced by other cultures. The flow of ideas across time and space is what actually gives rise to civilizations.
So what if an African civilization was influenced by another civilization? Does that make it less meaningful?
As for what civilizations Africa had, you can read about Kerma/Napata/Kush/Nubia, Aksum, Kongo, Swahili coast, Ghana/Mali/Songhai, Kanem-Bornu, Egypt, etc. However, I suspect you have your mind made up, hence the dismissive “Or was it primarily tribal conquering/uniting?”
The idea to use European civilisational and technological development as the measure for all other places is also absurd, because you could sample various points in time where e.g. Britain was a place of warring tribes with pointy sticks while China or the Middle East had thriving civilisations. Real life history is not a game of Civ where everyone starts at the same point and races through a bunch of predetermined milestones.
Inoculation, iron metallurgy and myriad practices in agriculture including rice cultivation and terraced irrigation. There are also technologies not adopted that are still pretty cool, including talking drums.