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Europe's technological and political/social advances are relatively recent (within the last millennium) when compared to the entirety of the history of human civilization.
Africans developed agriculture and iron-making long before Europeans did. Many of the first great world civilizations were African--Egypt (whose inhabitants may or may not have been people we would consider "black"), Meroe and Axum.
Even during the European middle ages, sub-Saharan Africa had many centralized states that rivaled Europe in their complexity and advancement. Around 1300 AD, the capital of great Zimbabwe would have looked very similar to London, each having around 30,000 inhabitants.