Explain in which way the Ethiopians were more advanced than any other Sub Saharan kingdom.
A couple of thousand years of literacy and administration, architecture and engineering in stone, firearms...
Sub-sahara you get roughly similar capabilities in large of west Africa, which could be modelled. They weren't that different from sultanates like Wadai, Cordofan, Darfur, Wadelai etc., which I take it might have been your point?
As far as I understood it, the complaint is about a number east, central and south African societies, which certainly had things metalworking and some impressive political entities (Maasai, Azande federation, Buganda, Bunyoro, Zulus, Matabeles, Swazis etc.), but lacked literacy, engineering more on par with at least the Mid East, and firearms.
Though one problem is that African societies in the 19th c. saw emerging states also as an effect of the pressure from Muslim states and eventually European incursions.
I mean, when Stanley set off on his Emin Pascha Relief Expedition in the late 1880's he was consciously avoiding the lands of the king of Bunyoro, precisely because the king had done his damndest to raise and army of 1500 riflemen armed with relatively up to date army rifles (Spencers and Jocelyn & Starrs). If he had to fight them, Stanley's expedition was armed with US made repeaters, but even then he wasn't confident he could win. He also went in through the Congo, since he anticipated that trying to reach Emin in the Equatoria province from the African east coast, through the land of the Maasai, would simply not be possible, as the Maasai would contest the passage. As it happened the German Emin relief expedition under Carl Peters (arch-bastard) tried precisely that, with Peters trying to literally shoot his way through the Maasau, but failing for running out of ammunition.
As late as the 1870's-80's there were two areas in Central Africa that successfully resisted incursions by slave raiders and European explorers alike; the lands of the Azande federation (the size of France straddling the border of the Sudan, the CAR and the Congo precisely becuase the colonial authorities wanted to break the Azande up), and the Maasai.
Towards the 1890's you get France taking Dahomey in a proper military campaign involving thousands of troops, and being faced by the fire of the Dahomeyan forces sporting modern rifles, and further bolstered by 7 Reffye machineguns with 4 million rounds, as well as couple of Krupp artillery pieces.
It's nothing on par with what you would get in a European war at the time, the 1890's, but I would think not that far from what a European minor in say 1836 might be able to field?
