There is no one "African scale" - Africa probably has a greater variety of indigenous scale structures than any other region of the world (with most cultures having more than one, as exemplified in hardware by the kora, which usually has two banks of strings so it can play in two different tonalities alternately). And most of Africa (including a sizable part of the area where American slaves were taken from) was not significantly influenced by Arabic music.

Perhaps the implication is that if you throw together a whole bunch of people whose musical systems have almost nothing in common, anything can happen.