@matrix Read something related a while ago. Lack of words for abstract concepts, and apparent behaviour that makes it obvious they just dont exist in their heads
https://www.amren.com/news/2017/10/morality-racial-differences/

>My first inklings about what may be a deficiency in abstract thinking came from what I began to learn about African languages. In a conversation with students in Nigeria I asked how you would say that a coconut is about halfway up the tree in their local language. “You can’t say that,” they explained. “All you can say is that it is ‘up’.” “How about right at the top?” “Nope; just ‘up’.” In other words, there appeared to be no way to express gradations.

>White rule in South Africa ended in 1994. It was about ten years later that power outages began, which eventually reached crisis proportions. The principle reason for this is simply lack of maintenance on the generating equipment. Maintenance is future-oriented, and the Zulu entry in the dictionary for it is ondla, which means: “1. Nourish, rear; bring up; 2. Keep an eye on; watch (your crop).” In short, there is no such thing as maintenance in Zulu thought, and it would be hard to argue that this is wholly unrelated to the fact that when people throughout Africa say “nothing works,” it is only an exaggeration.

>The New York Times reports that New York City is considering a plan (since implemented) aimed at getting blacks to “do well on standardized tests and to show up for class,” by paying them to do these things and that could “earn [them] as much as $500 a year.”
>The same New York Times article quotes Darwin Davis of the Urban League as “caution[ing] that the . . . money being offered [for attending class] was relatively paltry . . . and wondering . . . how many tests students would need to pass to buy the latest video game.”

>Whereas Western cultures internalize norms — “Don’t do that!” for a child, eventually becomes “I mustn’t do that” for an adult — African cultures do not. They rely entirely on external controls on behavior from tribal elders and other sources of authority. When Africans were detribalized, these external constraints disappeared, and since there never were internal constraints, the results were crime, drugs, promiscuity, etc. Where there have been other forms of control — as in white-ruled South Africa, colonial Africa, or the segregated American South — this behavior was kept within tolerable limits. But when even these controls disappear there is often unbridled violence.