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The key to understanding Africa continent is culturally & genetically examining through it’s language families. Often times peoples classified in the same language family have some close, distant, or very distant cultural & genetic affiliation.
The distance often depends on where they fall in the subgrouping of that linguistic family. Native to the African continent are four major language phylum's. Those being the Niger-Congo linguistic family, the Nilo-Saharan linguistic family, the Afro-Asiatic linguistic family, and the Khoisan linguistic family, and each of these can be divided even more into subphylum's. The Afro-Asiatic language family largely found in North & East Africa but also a portion of West & Central Africa also over spills into the Middle East, that being the Levant & the Arabian Peninsula.
The Niger Congo family is predominantly found in West, Central, Southern, & East Africa. Be mindful all these linguistic families as mentioned before can be divided into further subphylums. For example the Bantu linguistic family encompasses mostly Central, East, & Southern Africa is a subphylum of the Niger Congo family. West Africans are not of Bantu stock, a common mistake those who are not detailed thorough students of African anthropology or history. West Africans are the distant cousins of Bantu peoples being broadly all a part of the Niger Congo family, but they are not linguistically or culturally Bantu.
The Nilo-Saharan language family is found for the most part in north central eastern Africa, north central Africa, but also to a very lesser extent the western Sahel of West Africa. The Hausa people of northern Nigeria of today and Niger also have been found to have much of their(Nilo-Saharan) DNA although linguistically they are identified as Afro-Asiatic.
A considerable portion of Hausa males often have DNA on their Y chromosomes that match them with Afro-Asiatic speaking males in the Levant, although the Hausa speak a Chadic Afro-Asiatic language, and not a Semitic one(sole Afro-Asiatic language family existent in the Levant).
The Khoisan language family is predominantly found in southwestern Africa, with an isolated branch of the phylum being Sandawe found in the Dodoma region of Tanzania in East Africa. This could be due to the fact that Khoisan speakers have a long history of being migratory Hunter gatherers.
