There may be an interesting thread to pull about whether a western philosophical tendency to focus on an idealised rational individual confronting the world has led to a particular idea of the self. Though I'm not sure whether this has been the dominant view in analytic philosophy post linguistic turn, or whether it has ever been the mainstream in continental philosophy. This would need a lot more work to unpack.
Trying to construct a conflict between Descartes sense of self in the cogito(which as far as I can see amounts to nothing more than 'I exist') and African philosophy seems deeply odd. If Descartes 'sense of self' is mere existence (and I think this is a very odd reading of the cogito), then are we supposed to say that African babies don't exist until they become part of society?