Rule in Africa often was very indirect, it relied on association and local tribes and there were only very small corps of European administrators.
Sure, they were colored the colonizer's colors on the map, but it relied extensively on local elites for doing the vast majority of the work. In that way, it isn't really that different than having client states. The British fetishized it with lauding it to the heavens about how glorious their indirect rule was and how all of the other Europeans were brutal direct monsters who didn't respect local traditions (while the British merely invented them for their own advantage and ignored them where it was convenient), but pretty much everybody did the same thing, as the presence of a large white presence in black Africa to actually do direct rule was limited, and even the French weren't interested in a mass assimilated elite.
So really, original time line largely fulfills it with puppet/client kingdoms, just the Europeans called them tribes, not kingdoms.