There have been a few empires in North Africa's history (Mali, Ghana, Carthage). Outside of Carthage, why is there little discussion or knowledge of these empires among the general public? Is it due to Eurocentric perspectives, or racial discrediting, or some other issue?

This is a great question with a complicated answer. First, I would question the premise that there have been few empires in the history of North Africa. In the Middle Ages alone (which is my field of expertise and which I will focus on in this response), we have the Fatimids, Zirids, Hammadids, Almoravids, Almohads, Hafsids, and Marinids - to name a few. Odds are that most people have not read much about these groups or even heard of them. This boils down to a couple of the reasons that you hint at in your question.

Eurocentrism is absolutely key. The history of the Middle Ages has long been dominated by the study of Europe. For most of the twentieth century, the only research to consider medieval North Africa in any detail came from French colonial historians. Writing during the French occupation of Algeria (1830-1962), these historians produced work that imposed modern preconceptions about good governance, ethnic identity, and geography onto the medieval Arabic sources. Gautier, Marcais, Julien, Brunschvig, Idris, Lévi-Provençal, and Lézine are among those that emerged from this tradition. For example, they categorized the peoples of North Africa into categories they were familiar with like “Muslims” and “Arabs” instead of the diverse groups described in the medieval sources. They also emphasized European conquests over groups from North Africa so that the histories of North African empires were defined more by their eventual decline/defeats rather than their dynamic stories. Abdullah Laroui summarizes this when he said that French colonial historians saw medieval North Africa as “a pure object… seen only through the eyes of its foreign conquerors.”

This trend was reinforced in certain circles by philosophies advocated by big names like Hegel, who conceived of history as having four distinct worlds that moved from East to West: Oriental, Greek, Roman, and German. Even though Hegel gives some credence to Roman North Africa in this model, the rest of the continent (geographically and temporally) is absolutely neglected. The reason for this clear bias against Africa? Colonialism and imperialism had embedded awful stereotypes about the continent among European historians, among which racism was a key element. There is a religious component to this as well with the attempts of Christian missionaries to spread their religion to the uneducated “savages” of Africa, whose history in their minds did not exist until the adoption of Christianity and Indo-European writing systems.

Among professional historians, there is a linguistic element to this as well. For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, historians of the Middle Ages were trained in Greek, Latin, French, and German. Proficiency in these languages led these historians to write about the people who used these languages - which skews heavily toward Europe. As a result, historians neglected many rich sources for medieval North African history - Arabic, Coptic, and Geez to name a few. This has led North Africa to largely been ignored in the thoroughly-debunked-yet-still-pervasive theory of Western Civilization that stretches from Mesopotamia to Greece to Rome to the Middle Ages to the New World to America. The region still emerges at various moments, like when it was part of the Roman Empire or when it was colonized by France, but these instances tend to be when the region was invaded by European powers.

Fortunately, historians are slowly changing this trend and expanding the history of the Middle Ages to include understudied groups in the medieval Mediterranean, including North Africa. I have included some examples of these in the bibliography below. I hope that made sense! Happy to clarify and expand upon this answer as I can.

Baadj, Amar. Saladin, the Almohads and the Banū Ghāniya: The Contest for North Africa (12th and 13th Centuries). Boston: Brill, 2015.

Brett, Michael. “The Arab Conquest and the Rise of Islam in North Africa.” In The Cambridge History of Africa: From C. 500 BC to AD 1050, Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

Brett, Michael. The Rise of the Fatimids: The World of the Mediterranean and the Middle East in the Fourth Century to the Hijra, Tenth Century CE. Boston: Brill, 2001.

Brett, Michael, and Elizabeth Fentress. The Berbers. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 1997.

Fierro, Maribel. “Al-Andalus and North and West Africa (Eleventh to Fifteenth Centuries).” In The New Cambridge History of Islam: The Western Islamic World Eleventh to Eighteenth Centuries, edited by Maribel Fierro, 2:21–47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Fromherz, Allen. “North Africa and the Twelfth-Century Renaissance: Christian Europe and the Almohad Islamic Empire.” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 20, no. 1 (January 2009): 43–59.

Kuykendall, Ronald. “Hegel and Africa: An Evaluation of the Treatment of Africa in The Philosophy of History.” Journal of Black Studies 23, no. 4 (June 1993): 571–81.

Laroui, Abdallah. The History of the Maghrib: An Interpretive Essay. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.

MacEvitt, Christopher. The Crusades and the Christian World of the East: Rough Tolerance. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.

Rouighi, Ramzi. The Making of a Mediterranean Emirate: Ifriqiya and Its Andalusis, 1200-1400. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.

Taha, ’Abd-al-Wahid Dannun. The Muslim Conquest and Settlement of North Africa. Routledge: Chapman & Hall, 1989.