You're asking about literature, so I'm answering in that vein--and saying that it's a good time, I think, to be embarking on your reading about this subject. The last two years have seen a number of important studies (which are, at the same time, syntheses) that both orientate the reader and provide huge numbers of citations to further reading if you are inspired.

Some of the discussions over the nature of statecraft and power have come out in the wake of Toby Green's A Fistful of Shells (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019) about coastal West Africa, and it's there where you may wish to start. He goes from the 1400s to the end of the 1700s, but he does know the literature. It's an integrative and regional history so does a lot of that well. If your focus is on the Atlantic Slave Trade, however, remember that around 40% of the traffic departed from modern-day Angola (West Central Africa). For that, John Thornton's new, if unadventurously named, A History of West Central Africa to 1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020) is the place to start. Both usually write in a way that's accessible both to specialized scholars and interested educated readers, although neither is without his detractors. Michael Gomez's African Dominion (2019) is also useful if you want to look into the African empires and kingdoms of the Sahel (north of the coastal belt of West Africa), possibly even earlier and connected to the trans-Saharan trade as well as (later) the longer-legged phases of the Atlantic.

There are older works that deal with specific kingdoms and relationships, as well as a few newer ones from more academic presses, but these authors generally know those studies very well and will raise them. There's also another book coming, I don't know when (originally it was going to be 2021), on the French Atlantic that upturns a lot of what we think about how 'Portuguese' the early African trade was--but COVID threw that into a bit of uncertainty as far as release date. But know that this is an active area of scholarship, and keep an eye out.

I enjoy a podcast called History of Indian and Africana Philosophy by "Peter Adamson, Professor of Philosophy at the LMU in Munich and at King's College London, takes listeners through the history of philosophy, "without any gaps." The series looks at the ideas, lives and historical context of the major philosophers as well as the lesser-known figures of the tradition."

The podcast scripts make their way book form eventually and can be purchased from the Oxford University Press. The Africana book has not been published yet but I am looking forward to it.

This is his description introducing "Slavery and the creation of Diasporic African Philosophy"

"In this second series of episodes on Africana philosophy, we expand our focus beyond the African continent to begin discussing philosophical thought in the African diaspora. In the wake of the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery in the European colonies of the Americas, along with early forms of European colonial activity in Africa, new forms of philosophical thought arose among African peoples and those descended from African peoples. Modern Africana philosophy, in comparison with the precolonial traditions of philosophy we explored in the first part of the series, takes place primarily in European languages and is shaped in many ways by European traditions of philosophy. It is distinct from these European traditions, however, in being concerned above all with questions generated by the traumatic experiences of slavery and European domination. How should these experiences be understood and what do they tell us about the nature of humanity, race, and justice? How should black people respond to forces of oppression?     

Our focus in this part of the series will be on thinkers wrestling with these and other sorts of philosophical questions in the 18th and 19th centuries. We will discuss well-known figures such as Toussaint Louverture, Frederick Douglass, and Sojourner Truth, and many who are not as well-known as they should be, such as Anton Wilhelm Amo, Maria W. Stewart, and Anténor Firmin."

edit: added info and corrected links