I’ve been trying to shore up gaps in my historic data on Western Africa. However there’s usually a dearth of particular open info on their know-how or engineering works. The place I’ve had to go looking for various studies or documentation on a lot of it.

Europeans, Center Easterners, and the Chinese language particularly stand out as making nice use of hydropower for mills, forges, engineering work, clocks, automatons, and many others. However my trying to find West Africa runs into quite a lot of points with trendy hydroelectric dams and the like obscuring outcomes past any easy lack of documentation.

Given the big rivers that circulation via Western Africa, I am curious in regards to the state of their efforts earlier than Colonization.
Was there something of notice? If not, is there a particular environmental motive why?