As am I.
The introduction of gunpowder didn't stave off the death of the native Americans.
Without a highyielding crop that would significantly boost the population demographics. Guns would make little difference if your enemy could simply overwhelm you with numbers.
Guns, Germs, and Steel
As for high yielding crops- what's wrong with millet and sorghum? These had been the traditional grain crops on the Zimbabwean plateau for nearly 2000 years prior to the advent of colonialism. Accounts of early European travelers echoed the fact that the plateau settlers grew a variety of food crops. In 1893, the first European settlers in the eastern part of the plateau observed the existence of an extensive, productive, and prosperous African population in this area. Because of the food security they gave to the people, traditional grain crops were cultivated throughout the plateau.
Millet and sorghum were ground into mealie-meal, which was prepared into some thick paste called sadza (which formed the main dish of the Shona, and remained the main dish up to today). Sadza is often eaten as porridge. The floor from the grains was also made into cakes or unleavened bread. Millet and sorghum were both rich in carbohydrates and also contained the ingredients of a balanced diet. Traditional grain crops also served the Shona communities in many other ways. Bulrush millet and sorghum were peeled and cooked like rice; both varieties of millet and sorghum were used to prepare traditional beer (which played a very important role in Shona society).
The grain was abundant enough to often be used for barter trading, especially during times of serious drought and famine. Some sweet sorghum reeds were chewed like sugarcane, and so sorghum served a dual purpose. Sorghum and bulrush millet gains were used as chicken feed, while the stalks were used as animal feed. Stalks were often used as building, bedding, and fencing material. In particular, the stalks were also used to build granaries to store the variety of the grain crops harvested. The stalks could also be turned into manure by way of compost.
They already had the best steel by far (even if they lacked some of the steel-related tech which would become important IOTL- for instance, the African ironworkers apparently never developed the techniques to harden their steel by quenching and tempering, or to manufacture composite tools which combined a hard steel cutting edge with a soft but tough iron body. In this regard, it would appear that their early advantage eventually became a disadvantage IOTL- they could already produce the strongest carbon-steel in the world, and had been able to since before the birth of Christ. So there was no real impetus to take risks and attempt to improve the strength of their steel further through innovation. At least, not IOTL- ITTL, once the introduction of gunpowder starts to necessitate the development of stronger armor and stronger guns, it may well be a very different story). The POD would provide the potential for guns to be developed.
As for germs- well, you're having a laugh. If anything, the Africans would wipe out the Europeans with their (far more lethal and virulent ITTL, with Sub-Saharan Africa's population virtually guaranteed to be larger and more urbanized) epidemics when they eventually make contact. The epidemics of the Columbian exchange were so one-sided because of the massive disparity between the population bases and genetic bases of the Americas and the Old World. But first, Africa, even Sub-Saharan Africa, is still a part of the Old World- second, its genetic base, especially that of Sub-Saharan Africa, is effectively larger and more diverse than that of the rest of the world put together. That Black Death, which killed off somewhere between 30% to 60% of Europe's population? Modern analysts of archaeological evidence from sub-Saharan Africa seems to prove conclusively that the Black Death did indeed cross the Sahara and roll across the Sahel into sub-Saharan Africa, at exactly the same time that it rolled across Europe. It clearly took its toll, with records from Ethiopia of "no-one being left alive to bury the dead", and several previously prominent Ghanaian villages abandoned permanently after the epidemics. In the Senegambia region, the previously elaborate funeral practice of erecting megalithic circle would be abandoned entirely, because the surge in deaths from the Black Death made them unsustainable.
Overall though, the Black Death took a far smaller death toll in sub-Saharan Africa than it did anywhere else, and it was barely documented, because for them, it wasn't a big deal- plagues with those levels of mortality were, and are, pretty run-of-the-mill by African standards. Practices were already in place to mitigate the spread of these sorts of epidemics. Geneticists who compared the strain of the pathogen that caused the Black Death to those strains of plague still alive in the world today, made the finding that the closest strain genetically is in sub-Saharan Africa; the only way to explain that is to draw the conclusion that this strain got to Africa at around the same time the Black Death got to Europe.
