African food is having its moment. From Suya on London menus to jollof rice in New York Times dining guides, from Egusi soup in Michelin-starred tasting menus to Akara reimagined in São Paulo brunch culture, the cuisine of a continent long marginalised in global gastronomy is arriving at the table where it has always deserved to sit. The question that moment now demands is harder than the celebration: who benefits, who decides, and who controls the narrative of a culinary tradition that reaches across five thousand years and fifty-four nations?
Who Captures the Value
The answer is not straightforward, and the discomfort it generates is productive. African cuisine’s emergence into global visibility is not happening on terms that African communities and food producers automatically dictate. The fine dining establishments that have put West African ingredients on their menus are predominantly owned and operated outside Africa. The food content creators who have built international audiences on the back of African recipe traditions operate on platforms owned by technology companies headquartered in California. The packaged West African ingredient lines appearing in European and North American supermarkets are often produced, processed, and branded by multinationals that source commodities from African farmers at a fraction of the retail price their brands command. The cuisine is global. The value capture is not.
This is not a new problem. It is the same problem that has structured Africa’s relationship with its natural resources across commodities from cocoa to coltan: the continent produces the raw material; the value-added processing, branding, and distribution, the stages where margins are highest, happen elsewhere. Coffee is Africa’s most illustrative food case. Ethiopia is the birthplace of coffee and the source of Arabica varieties that underpin the global speciality coffee industry. Ethiopian coffee farmers receive between two and four per cent of the final retail price of a speciality cup sold in a London or New York café. The rest of the value accumulates in roasters, distributors, retailers, and the brand identities of the chains that serve it. African food’s global moment risks replicating this structure at scale across a much broader range of culinary traditions.
The Cultural Reckoning
The cultural dimension runs parallel to the economic. African cuisine carries a specific burden that European and Asian culinary traditions do not share in equal measure: it has historically been invisible or actively denigrated within the global imagination shaped by Western food media. The tropes of African food as subsistence-level, as monotonous starch and irregular protein, as food eaten from necessity rather than pleasure, are familiar to anyone who has observed how mainstream food journalism treated the continent as recently as a decade ago. That framing was not accidental; it was the culinary expression of broader colonial narratives about African culture as primitive and underdeveloped. Dismantling it is politically significant work, not just gastronomic promotion.
What is now happening is a genuine revaluation, driven partly by the African diaspora’s growing confidence in asserting its cultural heritage and partly by a global food culture that has finally recognised the limits of its own geography. Restaurants like Ikoyi in London, Alkebulan in Dubai, and dozens of diasporic establishments from Lagos to Accra to Johannesburg are demonstrating that African cuisine can sustain fine-dining price points and international critical engagement. The 2022 inclusion of Nigerian chef Adejoké Bakare’s Chishuru in London’s Michelin Guide was not a novelty; it was an acknowledgement long overdue.
But the mainstream food industry’s engagement with African cuisine involves dynamics that African food communities should scrutinise rather than celebrate. The appropriation question is live: when non-African chefs present “African-inspired” dishes without clear attribution, without purchasing from African suppliers, and without any structural relationship to African culinary knowledge holders, they are extracting cultural value in ways that follow an old colonial pattern. The language of “inspiration” has historically served as a buffer between appropriation and accountability. African culinary communities are increasingly unwilling to accept that buffer.
The Sovereignty Test
The structural opportunity in African cuisine’s global moment lies in value chain ownership. Agricultural processing capacity, the infrastructure that transforms raw cassava into garri for export, cocoa beans into finished chocolate, palm oil into premium cooking oils positioned in the global wellness market, represents the lever that African food producers most urgently need to control. Investments in that processing capacity, combined with strong geographical indication protections for African food products comparable to those enjoyed by French champagne or Italian prosciutto, would allow African nations to capture a greater proportion of the value their cuisines generate as they achieve international recognition.
The question of cultural sovereignty is equally urgent. Who tells the story of African food, its origins, its regional diversity, its historical depth, determines who shapes the terms on which it enters and persists in global food culture. The answer cannot exclusively be food writers and documentarians operating from outside the continent. African storytellers, chefs, historians, and food technologists need to be the primary narrators of their own culinary heritage. That is not protectionism. It is the basic condition of cultural self-determination. The global arrival of African food is a genuine achievement. What it produces for African communities depends on whether Africans are at the table when the terms of that arrival are set.
