Is every description knowledge?
Let us call the descriptions of what you see ‘facts’. Are your ‘facts’ a contribution to human knowledge? In one sense they are; the way any description of anything by anybody is a ‘fact’ and thus knowledge. One needs, and one has, a way of not wanting to call every piece of ‘fact’ as knowledge. Hence, we can reformulate the issue: does it contribute towards building a scientific theory of cultural differences? Do your observations in some African country tell us what makes their drinking habits and body decorations into a cultural difference? And how these and other differences allow us to say what the ‘African culture’ is? In other words, not every fact, because it is a fact about people from another culture, is interesting from the point of view of building a scientific theory.