For Africa, an approachable set of smaller histories across different regions of Africa is François-Xavier Fauvelle. The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages.

Specifically West Africa/Saharan trade focused, Kathleen Bickford Berzock. Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa. is approachable and has received excellent reviews.

For medieval Africa, I highly recommend Michael A. Gomez's book African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa. As the title suggests, he gives you a great overview of the different empires in West Africa from the early medieval period through to the eve of early modern Portuguese involvement in the continent.

While I don't agree on some important points on the books (especially its possible Norse-American contact evidence), Valerie Hansen, The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World – and Globalization Began, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2020: might be convenient to grasp the overview that possibly connected various parts of Old World (and New World as well) around 1000 CE.

She has originally been an expert of China and Silk Road, so her The Silk Road: A New History, Oxford: OUP, 2012 can also be recommended (NB: don't mix up with its supplemental primary source collection, The Silk Road: A New History with Documents, Oxford: OUP, 2016, though the latter itself is also excellent).