Rooted, not staged.

Mizizi means roots. Everything on this table begins there — in the millet fields of the Sahel, the tamarind pods of the Swahili coast, the peanut stews of Ghana and Senegal.

For too long, African cuisine has been photographed in bright light on communal mats, or hidden altogether. This book photographs it the way French food has always been photographed: with reverence, with restraint, with slow shadows.

The recipes are plant-forward because plants have always been the center of African cooking — grains, legumes, greens, roots. Meat, when it appears, is an accent, a punctuation, not the sentence.

Nothing here comes from a marketing meeting. There is no wellness aesthetic. There are no cartoon vegetables. There is only the honest work of cooking, and the deeper honesty of sitting down together when it is done.