re-reading "The African Knights" got me realizing how freaking big Africa is. (The title's misleading, because you can't talk about heavily armored cavalrymen without the archers and musketeers who were the reason that armor existed.)

These are all Hausa, so they're fairly inland and seem really different from what little I know about Ife kingdoms and people. That... doesn't seem like a relatively small part of the map.

Earlier I'd run into the idea that Africa shows up as smaller on maps as convenient to Eurocentrism. Mercator projections enlarge stuff further from the equator, and most of Africa and South America are close to the equator therefore less distorted.

Articles talking about this tend to compare places we think of as big (the USA or PRC) to the continent. If you fit west Texas to the Ivory Coast, Hausaland is might be around Illinois; if you flip China and put the eastern edge at the Ivory Coast, this stuff might be somewhere around Xi'an. HUGE.