I have tried to restrain myself from answering this question for months, but I have kept an eye on it, and an ear. I have seen terrible confusion and misdirected answers, not to be aggressive, but only a few really got down to the answer. So I held the mic and paused, deep in thought, should I, should I not?

Then I gave in. I decided that I will give you the comparison you want, but I won't conform to your format.

Walking onto the stage, it's the 9th season of quora's got talent, the lights dimmed, skeptical applauding and whistles die down, its now stark quiet, can hardly see the crowd, nonetheless their weight is sitting on my shoulders.

There I was stood, looking black! Swallowing my saliva one last time I think to myself ‘well pal, this is it, its time, al either make a spectacular presentation or a spectacle of myself! ’

As the legendary Jamaican Peter Tosh put it in his song, ‘no matter your nationality, no matter where you comin’ froooom, as long as you're a black man, you're an AfricaaaaAAAN’ and the beat goes like chi.. du…du…du.. Phaa… du.du..phaa…phaaa.du.du

Hy, I'm Thabiso, I'm African, specifically African Zimbabwean. My friend Thabo also is African South African. I have my workmate friend Dennis, he's African Kenyan. There's Mohamed Eslam, he's African Egyptian.

Do you see how uncomfortable, unpractical and unsatisfying these descriptions are? Exactly! The term African American should not even exist, its not even an ethnicity (well that’s a discussion for another time) We will use it here today for this article!

I’m trying to shade to you the fact that the words Africa, Europe, Zimbabwe, America define a nationality/political or geographic location or otherwise but not a race. Hence you can't compare an African with an African American. You could try to compare an African American and an African Zimbabwean (which is what I will do later)

Ignorant people tend to group Africans as one uniform bunch coming from one country, Africa.

Africa is not a country, its a continent with 54 countries.

‘African’ is not a race, one third of us are actually Arabic (you could call it a race), we have white authentic Africans, and Indians as well, and yeah blacks!

Now, Africa has more than 1000 different languages, this means there are more than 1000 different ethnicities, of different cultures, values, traditions and population sizes. The group I come from has approximately 7 million people. Other groups can be a mere 5000 people.

For that reason, ladies and gentle-dudes, I will just put Africans into 4 groups for purposes of this article. (Another person can make 10 groups or 100 as they please) , hence allow me to say :

There are 4 main groups in Africa. ( if you are African you may as well skip this and dive straight to the comparisons)

1.East Africans (Somalis, Ethiopian, Tanzanians, Eritrean etc) they have same genetic mix, most of them have sharper high pitched voices, they are lightest black people on the planet.

USource :Ethiopian Hairstyles Every beautiful Woman should Try in their Life time.(pictures) | sexy Ethiopians

These guys are the ultimate marathon runners, you know them. When they register in a marathon competition it's doom for everyone else.

2. West Africans (your normal popular Africans, Nigerians, Ghanaian, Cameroonian etc) Note that African Americans are a direct descent of this group of people. The people who sold the slaves to the white people were tribes in those countries including modern day Sierra Leone, Côte d’Ivoire, Chad, Nigeria etc. They generally look like this.

Source:http://zeenews.india.com/sports/football/serie-a-samuel-etoo-rolls-back-years-as-samp-beat-cagliari_1558036.html

These guys dominate Africa in terms of soccer.

3. Southern Africans (Zimbabweans, South Africans, Zambians, Batswana etc) these Africans are far from the equator (less heat, less rain) , they have savanna climates unlike the 2 groups above.

‘would you please snap the pic dude, my smile is drying out’

Source : me and my friend, typical Southern Africans

4. North Africans :

A fourth category of Africans are Arabs and other North Africans from Egypt, Algeria etc. A side note not to be forgotten concerning the complexity of the ‘African’ identity.(thank you Caren for this addition).

Massinissa (from comments) also requested that I mention the Berber people. Berbers, or Amazighs, are an ethnic group indigenous to North Africa, primarily inhabiting Algeria, northern Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, northern Niger, Tunisia, Libya and a part of western Egypt. They are different from Arabs. Small Berber populations are also found in Niger, Mali, Mauritania, Burkina Faso and Egypt as well as large immigrant communities living in France, Spain, Canada, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and other countries of Europe.

So henceforth, since comparing an African to an African Zimbabwean is not possible. So comparing an African to an African American is pretty stupid as well (sorry for using that word). African Americans are a small (probably 40 million) subset of Africa (1.3 billion). Now include the Africans in the Middle East and in Europe. Doing a quick math, based on estimates easily found on Google, they are roughly 2.5% of all black people.

Therefore I will instead, compare an African American only to African Zimbabweans (or generally southern Africans at large since I'm well informed about this type of Africans )

[Before you attack me on the comments, this question requires very huge amounts of generalisation, I had really tried to restrain from answering, but I will. Keep in mind its gonna be GENERALISATION, GENERALISATION AND GENERALISATION]

Ok let's start

We will be comparing African Zimbabweans (thereafter referred to as African Z) and African Americans (thereafter referred to as African A). For better reading i will make African A bold

• African Z can speak a mother tongue, 1 other local language and fluent English. (personally i speak English, Ndebele, Shona, zulu then below average in Arabic, French, xhosa, ) In other African countries like South Africa they have 11 official languages, the average person will surely speak quite a chunk of languages. African A mostly speak English only, the average American speaks only 1 language.
• African A are highly sensitive to racism and usually are ready to fight for their rights at any second, mainly because they live in a racially diverse country. African Z live in a 90% black society and are less conscious of racism. Kids grow up learning that everyone is the same and the real value lies in the brain and heart, not the skin. When they grow up and go to other continents they easily discover the doom that awaits them because they are black. (as an example, i grew up in a society where most of my neighbors are black, the most intelligent kid in class, the dumbest kid, the richest man in town and the country, the poorest, that strict teacher in school, the kid next door, the preacher in church, and the thug in the street, the prostitute, the playboy, the most beautiful girl is also black , the ugliest girl, the most confident guy in the hood, the most timid guy and the most upright men are all black. My world involved black people of all types, skin color has never played as a blanket stereotype feature for all “thugs” or all “rich” people or something similar, you get the point.)

Source : https://goo.gl/images/ktPGxx.

• African Z are highly religious, mostly Christians, ancestral traditions and a very very slight Muslim community. African A are less religious.
• African Z lament all day about the effects of colonialism, African A lament all day about the effects of slavery.
• African Z identify as tribes eg Ndebele, shona, tonga, xhosa, yet African A are generally grouped into one ethnic group .
• African Z have very very low drug abuse rates compared to the world. (other Africans like Nigerians are drug gurus though in terms of dealing, unwittingly, South Africans are the drug haven in terms of consumption, you guessed it, they buy from the Nigerians) . African A have very high rates of drug consumption, its a thing to boast about in hip hop music. This doesn't help at all in the fight against stereotypes and racism!

(this point, of gurus, has caused controversy with a few Nigerian quorans, however I will not be removing it, what's the purpose of quora if we are going to sugar coat things and present a fake Africa to the world. Nigerians do indeed distribute drugs to many African countries and especially South Africa, South Africans have tried national demonstrations and xenophobia (which is bad, illegal and unethical by the way) to combat this issue. The ordinary Nigerian may not be necessarily consuming drugs though, as they have stood up and mentioned it in their comments .

• African Z speak in a slightly deeper accented voices.. Most African A have lost that deep quality, they have strayed (lol) with the American accent seasoned with a pinch of black person speaking. just for illustration here is a 1 minute comedy video of how an american accent will sound vs a zulu accent (Pharaz of today be like)
• A portion of African Z still practice polygamy (having many wives) , African A usually have one wife at a time. Still like having many wives but changing them after a while . The world calls it one man wife woman. Marry, divorce, marry, divorce and marry divorce a third time. To me it really seems a man who just married and kept 3 wives actually did a commendable job. I'm Christian and go with one man one wife thing so don't attack me in the comments.
• Taking a lighter note, as a kid African Z, getting to sleepover at your friend's house is very very hard, mission almost impossible, these black parents! they'll be like “ what sleepover?? More like sleeping around! No child of mine is gonna get permission to go sleep around with their friends, I was once your age you can't fool me young man!”. On the other hand i assume with African A its much easier to get permission for sleepovers as parents have loosened up on the reins. Correct me guys, I could be wrong, did you get to sleep over at your friends’ places?
• African Z have a low number of interracial marriages, Due to this, African Z may regard mixed families as a sub ethnicity of their own.(side note : consider a place like wesbank in Capetown which is predominantly a mixed families only community. No whites, no blacks. ( I don't know how it got to that, most probably some policies of apartheid ). Then African A have higher rates of interracial marriages.
• Those who stay in the United States will testify that African Americans are usually big strong athletic giants, which brings us to our next point. African A went through a process of sifting during the slavery age, kind of like this, the healthy are taken as slaves, piled onto a big ship headed to America, a tough journey of 3 months, where 30% die on the way. On arrival, 10% more die of foreign diseases and environmental issues,on the extremely hard duties, the physically weak say 20%, die or are rendered useless and killed, before they can reproduce. So what we are left with are the ultimate 40% of strong big men and women. When they reproduce they will produce strong big African A, its a sort of selective breeding . On the other hand, African Z on the other hand consists of all possible mixtures of genes, strong dudes, small frail dudes, fast and slow, big and small, light and dark, witty and those dim-witted dudes, always offended, but don't be dismayed for they are standing in the rail of natural selection.
• Ok i decided to add this one, the average African A is way more ‘cooler’ in the conventional sense than the average African Z. [ this is for this generation ] According to the standards of coolness,which makes me wanna visit USA lol. Ok i have a theory why its like this, because they live in a controversial society with many black people fighting for their rights and equality, the society has is that darker people are not as important, the police can shoot and kill unarmed black lads without a second thought. Hence the ordinary expected result is that this group of people should run low on self esteem, feel sorry for themselves about being different and generally accept being inferior and those kind of things. But then how do we respond? By oozing confidence, walking down the street using a bouncy complex walking step pattern, getting into a club and absorbing all the attention to myself, doing complex handshakes with my buddies and speaking on top of our voices. These things are done as if to say “look, we ain't down, we actually value ourselves and don't expect us to walk down the streets, biting our nails in timidity with our heads hanging low”. So i could be wrong but the whole thing about being cool and confident is a resistance mechanism, I love it. Correct me though if I'm wrong.

I cannot finish all points at once, but as a bonus I will roughly touch on the similarities of all Africans

NOW LETS TALK ABOUT MORE CONSTRUCTIVE THINGS.

As I type this, i’m listening to a concert of one of the proudest patriotic black people of all time Bob Marley - The Legend Live @ Santa Barbara County Bowl 1979 full . He constantly sang against racism, colonialism and all inequality. he sang countless times about Africa, Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, South Africa and even has a song calling for the independence of Zimbabwe ( yay!) . Jamaican by nationality but always identified himself as African, his dream was to see Africa uniting, prospering and all black people to return to Africa [ Bob Marley - Exodus , Africa Unite - Bob Marley (lyrics) ] . Needless to say no one is eager to go back to Africa because our African politicians are messing up most of our countries.

So lets jump in to some similarities of black people all over the globe.

• We like our women big butted , not every man but I'm generalizing ok.

source : Big Booty Jane 1

• We like being cheerful

DJ Tira. South Africa

• Our hair is unique and pride ourselves of it. Except maybe for a portion of the women, who envy Brazilian hair, but not all of them.

Source : afro hair male - Google Search

• We tend to be more Conservative than most white people societies
• We hardly send old chaps to old people's homes, we take care of our own
• We have extended families, sending my deceased sister's kid to an orphanage isn't an option, she is my kid. When you hear me talking about my brother, he may not even be from my mother and father, he could be my aunty's child but you may never know without asking me for clarity.
• We can run like hell, East Africans are Kings of long distance running,

Source :Ethiopian News - Ethiopian Athletics

We also sprint hard also.

This lad needs no introduction. I hope we have some Jamaicans on quora. We have a group of black Americans also who have relentlessly competed with this man in every tournament! Why do blacks run this much? Share with me your scientific responses on the comments.

• We like hip hop,mostly the youth
• I had forgotten a rather obvious point, music, we are perhaps the ultimate music masters. Africa is home to a huge variety of music producers. With legends such as Brenda fassie, Lucky Dube, Fela Kuti, Ali Farka Toure, King Sunny Ade, Yousssou N dour, Kofi Olomide, Pepe Kalle, Mafikizolo, Miriam Makeba, Lovemore majaivana and of cause the legend Oliver Mtukudzi.

The young African generation of cause will be more familiar with artists like Tekno Miles, Davido, Oskido, Wizkid, Stella Mwangi, Chris Kantai, K.O, AKA, P-Square, Jah Prayzah, Diamond Platnumz (Tanzania), Gazza, Makoya and Exit, the Kings of Namibia kwaito (yes there's an artist called EXIT from Namibia and he's seriously killing it there) .

TeknoMiles (Nigeria) at BET awards. (I chose this picture just to bribe the Nigerians who are still angry at me for that drug guru point, they have forgiven me surely now)

Source :Tekno Assures His Fans To Win A Grammy Award.

Now open the door to Africans outside of Africa and what you get is absolute total chaos of music flavours. Michael Jackson, Bob Marley, Ray Charles, Whitney Houston, Tupac SHAKUR!!!!!! Lil Wayne, James Brown, Stromae, Stevie Wonder. I don't even have space for Beyoncés, Alicia Keys, the Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar etc

What would be this article without a single picture of an African American?

Kendrick Lamar,

Source: Kendrick Lamar Opens BET Awards 2015

That wraps my 2 minutes of fame and the lights are switched back on.

The crowd stands in applause, exquisite, another section of angry Nigerians are booing this horrible presentation and shoes are being thrown, some white folks are screaming we didn't know all this, thank you, some African Americans are clapping in approval, well said bro, yet a crowd from the back seats is triggered, get off the stage you stereotypical goat! I ain't going anywhere I declare, until I answer all the questions in the comments! Thank you guys.

A friend of mine jokingly said I will give you a billion dollars but you don't get to see Africa again, I told him “you know very well you have to dig deeper into your pockets than that”

Cheers pals!