What If? .... Africa Hadn't Been Colonised

I'm in the middle of a chocka few months at the moment but the internet is nothing if not adept at finding interesting distractions and methods of procrastination. One of today's offerings came when idly trawling the internet for images relating to alternate history and counterfactuals. This image caught my eye and let me to Rachel Strohm's website where she hosted it and explained the story behind it:

One of the questions I’m often asked by friends who haven’t studied African history is what might have happened to the continent if it hadn’t been colonized.  It’s interesting to look at the following map of African politico-tribal units circa 1844 by Swedish artist Nikolaj Cyon in the light of this question:

Make sure you click to embiggen, it's well worth it.

Read the rest of Rachel's article here, including some thought experiments about how this map might have been formed and how it might have developed.