video gamers in Africa are not going to like that their pings to European servers are higher than they already were
Yeah, that is *the* most important thing 
one of four things must be going on here:
1.I don't understand how IP (Internet protocol) works (seems unlikely, but I'm biased)
2.you don't understand how IP works
3.Africa is, for some reason, not using the same IP the rest of the world uses (seems like I would have heard about that)
4.some fourth thing I am currently ignorant of
as I understand IP, this won't prevent anyone from connecting to anyone else, it will just take more hops to get your packets out and back from wherever they are connecting. Faster is better of course, especially for online gaming, hence my comment.
