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Fair I said this too strongly. And was more referencing the ancient regimes and movement of people.
Still fairly limited considering Africa is closer than to Europe and the new world was largely settled first.
It's about over 2400 miles from northern France to Nova Scotia. The only sane way get to Nigeria would be by sea, which is nearly 5000 miles, which about the same as the distance to New York.
When you arrive in Nigeria, you are facing a land full of unfamiliar diseases, before vaccines. You are competing with many established civilisations. When you arrive in Nova Scotia, you arrive in lands that have already been considerably emptied by European diseases, and with diseases that have not been enhanced by urbanisation, and the nearest civilisations are thousands of miles to the south.
To put some numbers on that, estimates I could find put the African population at a lower figure of 50 million in 1500 (mostly Sub-Saharan, I think) whereas the North American population was 1 or 2 million.
Except the places that were settled quickly in the Americas were farther away and had higher populations like the Caribbean’s, Aztec/Mayan empires. 50 million for all of Africa is about the same estimates for the Americas.
There were special political factors in the case of the Aztecs that made colonisation easier. That's a long story, which you probably already know.
It's actually a very similar distance (by sea, of course) from Europe to the Caribbean vs. Europe to Nigeria. In terms of places where Europeans ultimately settled (South Africa, Zimbabwe) it is much further to Africa.
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