The popular grand strategy game Europa Universalis IV depicts this region as a large chunk of impassable wasteland, indicating that it is unfit for colonization. This is presumably intended to represent how European imperialists did not penetrate into the African interior until the Scramble for Africa of the 1880's.
However, an unfortunate side effect of this design decision is that there is no representation of the various states and empires that existed in this region prior to colonization, or even of the fact that there were people living there at all.
There is also a question of internal consistency, since a variety of "primitive" societies indigenous to North America, South America, and Siberia are recognized as "states" in this manner, ostensibly on the basis that they had more significant interactions with the outside world (i.e. European colonizers). The game's conception for what constitutes a "state" is rather Eurocentric, but it seems rather dubious to me that this construct can be applied to Native American societies but not states of the African Great Lakes.
Yes and no. African states pre-European contact were not like Euro/Asiatic states, due to their geography, natural circumstances, and elephants. In many parts of Africa, there existed what have been called "citadels without walls," which were unorganized clusters of small villages that lived within extreme proximity (often described as being within shouting distance), where each cluster focused on exploiting a particular lifestyle or resource, and helping support other clusters whenever their particular resource would have an off year (and off years were a very common thing in Africa). Even with this level of cooperation, there was very rarely any major abundance or surplus of resources, as well as a lack of major warfare, that would necessitate the formation of a centralized authority. This meant that these tribes would essentially be leaderless, and promoted a genocentric society where responsibilities and privileges were based on age (It was often common practice by the Portuguese to simply nominate the most influential man in the village the King, and then give him all the resources to legitimize him, no matter what the tribe said). Centralized authority was largely unknown to them.
Even with European contact of Africa and the coastlines, the Great Lakes region held on to this style of society simply because it was the most effective form of government for them, and due to their environment, to deviate from what worked could very, very easily be a death sentence for you and your people. They did participate in trade through other African societies along the coast, but Europeans largely didn't penetrate into that region simply due to the difficulty of getting there and the lack of exploitable resources (not that there weren't resources, just that it largely would not have been profitable to exploit them with their tech and resources at that time).
