It's like (today or 18th century, does not matter) some African dude showing up in the middle of a busy European city center yelling "I discovered Europe!"
I fear I've mangled the analogy, in the original it also was pretty clear what was meant, of course the explorer discovered it from a European perspective. The original storyline included the self-important and presumptuous attitude of the Europeans that made it seem like there was nothing there of any consequence or sophistication.
Another story was about the African drums [0], ow they actually work, that saying "drums talking" was not a figure of speech, but that that actually was exactly what they were doing! The drumming follows some aspects of how you would actually speak the words (the languages are tonal), "The pitch of the drum is varied to mimic the tone patterns of speech". Since lots of information is lost most words are ambiguous, they compensate by embedding every word in a context, saying (drumming) longer phrases instead of one word for disambiguation. And they could just talk over long distances relaying information faster than anything the Europeans had at the time (like semaphores).