This is one of those questions that is difficult to provide a deeply specific historical answer to in part because of much more recent trends that are obscuring a wider range of pre-20th Century ideas and practices.

If I were going to compare albinism in this sense to something similar about which we have more information, twins might be a good example where different pre-20th Century cultures in sub-Saharan Africa are known to have had notably divergent ideas about twin births that are expressed in religious traditions, artwork, oral history, and so on, with some societies viewing twin births as immensely positive, others viewing them very negatively, and still others being relatively indifferent to twins as a concept. Over time, a lot of those views have gotten intertwined during the 20th Century as different cultural and linguistic traditions in postcolonial African nations have become connected and amalgamated in new ways and as many 20th Century African artists, intellectuals, religious leaders and political leaders have engaged self-reflexively with such beliefs in relationship to common global norms and ideals. (e.g., people coming out of cultural communities that have a history of seeing twin births in highly negative terms have had to reckon with common modern legal frameworks and national ideologies that urge them to reconsider or reinterpret those beliefs).

In the case of albinism, there's a lot more noise to contend with as a result of 20th Century processes of transformation under colonial and postcolonial regimes and much less evidence of pre-20th Century perspectives or ideas about albinism. I think the basic thing you could reasonably infer is that different societies within pre-20th Century Africa had different views of albinism in terms of interpreting its spiritual or cultural meaning. On some level, I'm comfortable stating that almost as an axiomatic assumption: the size of sub-Saharan Africa combined with the massive range of linguistic, spiritual, social and cultural practices and systems over the last two thousand years means that there are really no commonalities between all or most spiritual, intellectual or cultural worldviews across the continent about common recurrent patterns in human life like twinning, albinism, disability at birth, intersex births, dwarfism, etc.

The reason it's especially hard to be more specific about varied ideas regarding albinism is first that albinism took on special meaning as conceptions of modern racial identity originating in Western Europe were applied with special intensity to African societies through the late 19th Century establishment of colonial rule. Colonial administrators took a special interest in African cases of albinism in part because they used skin color as the basic marker of racial difference. In a sense, because colonialism fetishized skin color in a system of racial hierarchy, albinism inevitably acquired new meanings and visibility across much of sub-Saharan Africa.

The second kind of "noise" involved here has to do with the rise of what scholars have called "witchcraft discourse" across sub-Saharan Africa. This is a complicated point and it's easy for people to mishear or misunderstand it so stick with me here on this. Pre-20th Century African societies, as with most human societies, had locally meaningful and particular ideas about the nature and causation of malevolent or socially destructive human behavior as well as harmful or painful events like sickness or accident. Many of those ideas assigned both spiritual meaning and spiritual causality to pain, suffering, violence or conflict, e.g., inferred that some forms of suffering and evil in human life derived from forces outside of the immediate material life of human beings. Consequently, many of those societies also sought ways to heal, combat or respond to evil that manipulated spiritual energies or entities.

European colonial authorities and missionaries often viewed these somewhat diverse belief systems and systems of spiritual and medical practice as "witchcraft", using categories and images drawn from European history, and used terms like "witch-doctor" to characterize some practicioners of healing or spiritual work. Colonial administrations paradoxically attempted to outlaw both witchcraft (essentially, the commission of evil through spiritual forces or entities) and accusations of witchcraft on the grounds that both could be socially destructive and were "superstitious", which as you might imagine in many cases looked to colonial subjects as if the colonial state was protecting the commission of evil or even identifying itself as a form of "witchcraft".

The upshot in terms of this answer is that over time, common administrative approaches across sub-Saharan Africa shared by British, French, Belgian and Portuguese systems tended to recreate what had been diverse practices and ideas into a common frame of reference of "witchcraft", much as they tended to amalgamate ideas about sociopolitical belonging into "tribes" or "ethnicity", ideas about political authority into "chiefship", ideas about local indigenous practice into "traditions" or "customs", etc., with those concepts becoming continent-wide reference points that tended to blur distinctions that had existed previously. (In some cases, this blurring was strongly contested--societies that had political traditions that were more communal or consultative really resisted the appointment of 'chiefs', for example.)

As a result, "witchcraft" has become a more a continent-wide framework for ideas about the manipulation of spiritual forces, often for malicious or evil reasons, and for ideas about how to seek protection from malice and misfortune.

Which brings me back to albinism. I think it's fair to say that albinos were always noticed in African societies prior to the 20th Century, as they have been in every society. As in other tropical regions of the world, moreover, albinism has always carried distinctive health risks which surely were observed by pre-20th Century African societies. What has happened in the 20th and 21st Century with the rise of a loose shared set of concepts connected to "witchcraft" is that in many countries albinism has become a powerfully charged phenomenon that is interpreted through the lens of witchcraft discourse, usually though not invariably in negative ways. This in turn has led to rising violence directed at albinos in many African nations, sometimes because of accusations that they involved in witchcraft and in other cases because their body parts are imagined to have usefulness to people involved in witchcraft. The anthropologist Giorgio Braccio has a thoughtful overview of one example of this dynamic, focused on Tanzania, in this 2015 article: Giorgio Brocco (2016) Albinism, stigma, subjectivity and global-local discourses in Tanzania, Anthropology & Medicine, 23:3, 229-243, DOI: 10.1080/13648470.2016.1184009.

There are also numerous NGOs which have taken an interest in the plight of albinos in recent decades that have published descriptions of their current situation, though most of those I have to say are not particularly historical or careful in thinking comparatively--but all of them do try to explain some of the context so that it doesn't sound simply like this is some sort of ancient prejudice that has persisted for centuries unchanged.