We Call It African Tech But the Stack Says Otherwise
I was debugging a freight tracking agent at 11 pm in Abuja when the real problem announced itself.
Not the bug I was chasing — a webhook timing issue between the Twilio handler and the Google Sheets state layer. The other problem. The one you don't see until you're deep enough in a system to count the dependencies.
AWS. Twilio. OpenAI. Google. Pinecone. Every critical node in the architecture I'd just shipped — every piece that actually had to work for the agent to work — owned, operated, and priced in USD by a company with no operational presence in the country I was building for.
The agent was African. The problem it solved was African. The clients who needed it were African. The stack it ran on? American, Irish, or somewhere in between.
I've seen this pattern before. In a different cycle.
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