I think back to civilizations like Egyptians, Mayans, Greece, Rome, Medieval Europe eventually to Enlightenment era Europe, and think of how all of these groups had well-established periods of growth in architecture, art, math, science, etc.
Africa seems like a place full of biodiversity in all aspects of terrain, animals, peoples and vast in natural resources - it would make me expect to have learned about them somewhere in my education. The only group I've really learned of from Africa is the Egyptians, and I feel like they consider themselves part of the Middle East.
I expect some archeologists and anthropologists have discovered some sort of art and culture from ancient Africa somewhere and the technologies they developed to adapt to their environment, right?
I'd meant to respond earlier; while I can't speak to more contemporary contexts, there have been some historical acknowledgements of Africa's accomplishments in years' past. Among those that acknowledged that there were at least some talented individuals of African heritage would be the Abbé Grégoire around the time of the French Revolution.
For some context on Grégoire, he was among the clergy that supported the Revolution, having previously been in the public eye for his work in fighting for the rights of Jews and for better treatment of enslaved Africans. The latter of these would shift towards full-blown abolitionism with the French Revolution.
In his arguments against slavery- and more broadly, ill-treatment based upon race- the Abbé started to publish and recount the biographies of notable Africans (most notably in An Enquiry Concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties, and Literature of Negroes: Followed with an Account of the Life and Works of Fifteen Negroes & Mulattoes, Distinguished in Science, Literature and the Arts). With this work, he pointed towards the fact that European powers had essentially been willfully ignorant or outright repressive in regards to the notion that Africans were capable of rivalling- or surpassing- European accomplishments.
Of course, this all comes with the caveat that the Abbé Grégoire's chief motivation was that he wished to convert freed slaves, Jews, and the rest of the world to Catholicism, but nonetheless his criticism of how downplaying or repressing African accomplishments was a factor in the slave trade still stands.
Sources:
Alyssa Sepinwall, “Eliminating Race, Eliminating Difference: Blacks, Jews, and the Abbé Grégoire,” in The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France, ed. Sue Peabody and Tyler Stovall (Duke, 2003), 28-41.
David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France, (Harvard University Press, 2001), chapter 6.