The original note, as written at the time
I believe that African societies had no difficulty with colour and texture, it was natural to them, it was easier to appreciate. What was rare and thus valuable was sound. It is probably why we stuck to oral tradition and wrote very little.
Those guys in the temperate regions had to do quite a lot with colour theatre because colour was rare and thus valuable. We loved and still live sound. It is in our DNA, we appreciate it greatly. The meaning of sound to us is almost embedded deep in our DNA. This is why I believe voice based AI systems will triumph in African states much like how the mobile phone triumphed.
Ongoing development
I believe African societies had no difficulty with colour and texture. It was natural to them and therefore easy to appreciate. What was rare, and therefore valuable, was sound.
It is probably why we stuck to oral tradition and wrote very little. Writing is a way of capturing speech for people who cannot be present to hear it. Where sound is abundant and speaking is the ordinary medium, you do not need to freeze it into marks; you need people who can hold it, carry it, and give it again. The library was not a building. It was a lineage of voices.
The temperate regions had the opposite problem. Colour was scarce and therefore precious, so they built a theatre of colour — glass, paint, stained light, gardens formalised into paintings. We had colour everywhere and did not need to dramatise it. We had to dramatise sound.
I think this is not a small cultural curiosity. It is a psychosensory difference that predicts what technology will land. The mobile phone triumphed here at a speed that surprised everyone who had measured the market by income alone, because the phone is a voice instrument before it is anything else. People did not adopt a computing platform. They adopted a way to hear and be heard at a distance, and everything else came along with it.
And this is why I am confident that voice-based systems will win in African states in the same way. Not because they are cheaper, though they may be. Because the response to sound is already there, deep enough that people will accept a slightly worse interface in exchange for being able to speak to it. We love sound and we still live in it.
So if you are building in Africa, build sound-first. Do not build a text system and add a microphone as an afterthought in the settings menu. Build the thing that listens and answers, and let the screen be the secondary channel, the way it already is when two people are talking.
The industry has spent a decade treating voice as an accessibility feature and text as the real product. That ordering was decided in places where colour was rare and sound was ordinary, and it is exactly the wrong way round here. The unique psychosensory response to sound in our part of the world is not a market segment. It is the design brief.