The issue you note is one that academic historians of Africa, including to various degrees archaeologists, and sociologists, folklorists/literary specialists, and others know very well. Richard Reid identified it as an element of the "foreshortening" of African history in his essay "Past and Presentism" that appeared in the Journal of African History in 2011. (Sorry, paywall there.) There's a lot going on that undergirds the phenomenon beyond Reid's particular point about the focus on the 20th century and explaining "what happened" in late colonial and postcolonial Africa, so I'll try to be comprehensive as I can without my books to hand. I can give you some methodology titles that talk about some of this, but the general points are very well known.

Much of the issue boils down to the valuation of epistolary culture within historical research, and the fact that many very powerful and populous societies were non-literate by that standard (not illiterate--they did not lack knowledge or transmission). Colonial disciplines like the modern history that came of age in the late 19th century thus did not consider them as having history or being meaningful; this meant people did not do the same kind of work on those pasts as they would on Europe, for example. That became a feedback loop that we all groan about: not seeing the signs of culture that you measure yourselves by means that you don't research what is there as something truly historical, so you never see the lives and pasts of people. Oral history, if recent, could be useful to them but for the precolonial era that rarely included anything really meaningful until the 1950s or beyond. Archaeology had (and has) a similar kind of problem: nobody expects to find anything, much less anything really important, so nobody does the work, and nobody finds anything, much less anything really important, rinse and repeat.

All of this cyclical diminution of the value of the African past is compounded to a massive degree by the fact that African history--and most academic disciplines related to Africa--remain dominated heavily by non-Africans, if not people from former colonial powers specifically. The result is that very few active scholars have the toolkits, resources, and bases of local knowledge to work in that deeper past, unless they develop it over a lot of time as distant outsiders. Cultivating African scholars who will take up that work is hard to do when the achievement necessary for them to gain access to the ivory tower is also a ticket to prosperity in some other sector or overseas. [edit: African-based historians of course also have their own questions of interest that rarely fall into the precolonial era, because they're part of the same Westernized education system.] Moving across the oceans is less of a problem than leaving the sector, because even from far away they can still be part of the discussion. Many brilliant African historians want nothing more than to undertake research but the pay and support are miniscule in African nations. Even in a rich country like the USA, we end up putting out a lot of our own money out of pocket to travel and do our work because it's seen as not being as valuable as some other areas unless we can tie it to something very recent and obviously relevant. This makes a life of historical (or related field) research even less sustainable for talented African scholars.

This all works to diminish the effectiveness of African history being done by Africans, and to assure that everyone (well, nearly) is working in more modern eras, so the precolonial era feels the pinch more than most. By using oral history (and folklore), archaeology, and a variety of other investigative tools, it's possible to recover an awful lot of the deeper past, but often it requires very inventive collaboration and the creation of foundational histories of whole nations of people. What's even harder is collecting the kind of list-data you mention reliably: names of rulers, structures, social and cultural norms, et cetera. Those things can survive in popular memory but they aren't encyclopedic at all. I know Chretien talks a bit about this in his The Great Lakes of Africa: Two Thousand Years of History (the French is better than the English, I am told) because he has to dispense with a lot of discussion and so explains it that way. Chris Ehret at UCLA has been using glottochronology (linguistic data) but that has its own perils as he himself recognizes. He wrote a textbook (The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800) but he has told me there are no plans to update the edition because a totally new one will have to be written. The work is being done but it's slow and geographically spotty--remember how big Africa is, and how diverse, and you get an idea.

We have a lot of precolonial (and pre-Atlantic Age) data for a few polities, especially those on the Islamic fringe, but the simple fact is that much of the work hasn't been done because people don't think the work will turn anything up. I have many colleagues with ample evidence to the contrary, but that is a pernicious sort of myth. I could add to this the tendency of Africa-related hires to focus on modern eras--and the ability to tell students in the global north why they should care about Africa today--but that is just one more inertial factor that pushes people towards more modern subjects.

Some modernists have been pushing further into the past, especially in South Africa (the 500 Years project come to mind), but it's not uniform and there is nothing like the necessary body of scholars to do that work. Political instability in various places does not help matters; there's a lot of great work that could be done in the eastern Congo, and Sudan, and Burkina Faso, but it's not safe for researchers of any background right now. These are also very big brushstrokes--the specific issues and legacies in SA, Nigeria, or Senegal (to give three with relatively robust historical professions) are all different.

This is kind of a mess but I hope it explains some of the inertial and logistical(?) reasons why the skew is so powerful. I agree with your point that it's a problem, and so does most of the profession. But addressing it has been pretty spotty, even in areas with very good academic coverage like SA.

[edit: broke up mammoth paragraph; edit 2: fixed a really bad sentence, added some adjectives, clarified]

I agree with the points that /u/khosikulu makes, but I think he might be answering a question you aren't actually asking.

While he is right to point out that there are some structural barriers to doing research in pre-coloinal African history which leads to relatively fewer scholars and relatively less research being done. However, you should not take that to mean that research has not been done.

If I am reading your question correctly, you are asking "how do I, as a layman, find more books to read that provide reliable and up-to-date standard of information".

I was in your position about 5-6 years ago, having a poor base of knowledge and a desire to learn. I have learned a few tricks that have helped me find and quickly assess the quality of the work that I am reading.

1. Wikipedia is ok to use as an encyclopedia. That is to say, I would look at wikipedia articles, and click through links to familiarize myself with very basic information. Information like what the Mapungubwe site is, where, and why it is important. Or to first hear about Kanem-Bornu. Or first hear about the Zemane Mesafint.

Of course, Wikipedia is not the final word. It is only the very first step in familiarizing myself with the search terms that I will use to look for more authoritative/academic writing.

2. Google books is helpful for secondary literature, but be careful!. Having checked Wikipedia, and now with an idea of who Mai Idris Alooma was, and why he was important to the history of the Bornu Empire, I might search google books for "Idris Alooma". This turns up some stuff that is good, and some that is not so good. For instance, "Encyclopedia of African History" by Kevin Shillington will provide another encyclopedia entry about Idris Alooma, written by S. Ademola Ajayi. Looks promising!

On the other hand, sometimes google books will have "books" which are just repackaged wikipedia articles. Thankfully, these entries will usually mention "from wikipedia" in the synopsis.

Or, there will be books that look promising, but have hidden problems. For instance, in our "idris alooma" search, one of the results was The History of Africa: the quest for eternal harmony by Molefi Kete Asante, and published by Routledge. Routledge is a respected academic publisher^1, and the book gives the appearance of being an anodyne overview of African history. However, Mr Asante is notorious for pushing afrocentrist claims such as the idea that all african cultures ultimately derive from Egypt, that Egyptians were racially black. (Incidentally, Cheikh Anta Diop was also notorious for such claims, and Molefi Kete Asante is generally seen as a protege of Diop)

3. JSTOR your nearest metropolitan library might have access to JSTOR and other online journal aggregators. At least, it is the case that large city libraries in the US like Chicago and New York and Boston have such subscriptions and provide access to all patrons. I don't know if that holds true for british libraries.

In any case, if you can get access to JSTOR through your library or through another institution, it will be quite helpful.

Firstly, through JSTOR you can search for academic reviews of the books you have found through Google Books. For instance here is Toyin Falola's review of The History of Africa: the quest for eternal harmony.

Secondly, through JSTOR you can find articles from academic journals about African History, Linguistics, Archaeology and Ethnography. The Journal of African History is probably the most prestigious journal of Africanist scholarship, and other good ones include African Archaeological Review, Journal of African Archaeology, South African Historical Journal, The International Journal of African History and the Journal of West African History.

Of course, articles in academic journals will be written with a narrow academic audience in mind, and so some will presume quite a lot of familiarity with the subject the article covers. Also, you are more likely to run into dense academic verbiage.

4. African Archaeology textbooks as /u/khosikulu noted in his response, large swathes of Africa are without precolonial written records. For those areas, oral traditions can provide some guidance (see Vansina Oral Tradition as History), although with some substantial limitations. On the other hand, Archaeology has provided quite a lot of contributions to generating knowledge about eras prior to writing.

Archaeological textbooks like African Civilization: an Archaeological Perspective by Graham Connah (now in it's 3rd edition), or African Archaeology: a Critical Introduction edited by Ann Brower Stahl provide accessible overviews for various historical sites and civilizations, and introduce historical/archaeological questions like the spread of Bantu language, spread of blacksmithing, and the emergence of social complexity (i.e. chiefdoms and kingdoms).

I also like to consult the Oxford Handbook of African Archaeology which is a very recent and very comprehensive (1200 pages) overview of the current state of archaeological inquiry into africa both in the pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial context. Of course, Oxford Handbook costs more than $130 to purchase, and so I recommend requesting it through your local library.

In addition to the information provided in those textbooks, they also will provide quite a lot of references to specific works in the bibliography section. By mining the bibliography, you can start to get a deeper understanding of a subject you are interested in, and know which authors you should be following for the archaeology of Ethiopia, for instance (D.W. Phillipson, Rodolfo Fattovich, Niall Finneran, etc).

Oxford Bibliographies derive from the same idea. The entry for African Studies includes articles with bibliographies of important and thought-provoking works on specific topics in african history, compiled by experts in the field. This again will provide you with new leads to follow, and and idea of which scholars are producing important work.

5. After a time, you will become familiar with prominent scholars and then you can follow their earlier and later work, as well as finding the work of scholars they have collaborated with. Sometimes you will find videos or papers from an academic conference with a specific theme like the Kongo Kingdom, which will have papers and talks from several researchers on a subject.

If you know that there is a particular scholar whose work you often find fascinating, you can then check out Academia.edu and see if they have uploaded any of their papers there. Also, again, you can see who that scholar is following, and thereby get new leads on who/what to follow.

And on the other hand, you might learn to be wary of other scholars whose work advances themes well outside the scholarly consensus

6. Sometimes, old books are OK. Jan Vansina's book Kingdoms of the Savanna is over 50 years old by now, but it is still useful because there hasn't really been a more recent book that attempts to do a regional history of pre-colonial atlantic Central Africa.

Similarly History of West Africa by JF Ade Ajayi and Michael Crowder is a solid introduction, but can't include the research that has been conducted in the almost 40 years since publication. However, more recent books on West African history like Emmanuel Akyeampong's Themes in West Africa's History have an entirely different style and intent. Rather than replicating the narrative/chronological state-level focus of Crowder and Ajayi, Akyeampong's work focuses on themes like disease, climate change, archaeobotany, religious interaction.

So, in cases like that, I recommend reading Kingdoms of the Savanna or History of West Africa and then proceeding to look for more recent, focused scholarship on specific topics like the Oyo empire, or Kongolese christianity, etc.

As a broad rule, I don't really bother with secondary scholarship earlier than 1970s, unless it is from an author who I know continues to have a strong reputation. Earlier than 1970s, a lot of scholarship was still contending with the legacy of the Imperialist school, and a lot of the conclusions are very out of date.

On the other hand, direct translations of primary sources, like Maurice Delafosse's translation of the Tarikh al Sudan is still valuable. Similarly, firsthand accounts in missionary diaries, or ethnographic observations can still contain valuable information, but must be approached with a critical eye as to what the worldview and biases of the author are.

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1- If I am unfamiliar with an author, who the publisher is will sometimes be helpful in estimating how good a history book might be. /u/Cordismelum gave this helpful overview on how to evaluate secondary sources.

Hi there! While you await an answer here, you may also want to check out our books list. Though it is sadly deficient in specifically pre-Colonial Africa, there are some recommended overviews that may be of interest. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/books/africa