I know there were some cases of sub-Saharan African empires expanding out of sub-Saharan Africa. The Kingdom of Aksum/Axum had a foothold in Yemen, and Egypt fell under Nubian rule for a time. There might also be some other examples I'm unaware of.
So I can't help but wonder what other sub-Saharan African empires might've been able to hold territory outside of sub-Saharan Africa.
Does the Kilwa Sultanate's control over the Comoros, Seychelles, and coastal trading posts on Madagascar count? Do those constitute "territory outside sub-Saharan Africa!? And if not, then what if they extended their control even further afield? Apparently, in 1944, a bunch of coins later identified as being from the Kilwa Sultanate were discovered on a beach in Jensen Bay on Marchinbar Island, part of the Wessel Islands of the Northern Territory of Australia, with only one such coin having ever previously been found outside east Africa (unearthed during an excavation in Oman). The inscriptions on the Jensen Bay coins identify a ruling Sultan of Kilwa from the 12th century (the 11th Sultan of the Shirazi era, Dawud ibn Suleiman), and several historians and archeologists believe that this discovery may constitute evidence that the Kilwans (or whoever else happened to bring those exclusively Kilwan coins to that beach, for whatever unfathomable reason they'd have done so if they hadn't hailed from the Kilwan thalassocracy themselves) made landfall in Australia long before the first generally accepted such discovery. So, could they have a decent shot of holding territory there, if they had established trade posts and/or settlements there in NW Australia?
