In many kitchens across the continent, there is a small, familiar object that rarely draws attention to itself. It sits among onions, tomatoes, peppers, and oil, part of the quiet rhythm of cooking. It dissolves into stews and sauces so easily that it almost disappears, leaving behind a taste that feels known, expected, and widely shared.
It is the Maggi cube.
For many people, it is simply part of how food is made. It makes cooking faster. It brings a certain richness that people have come to rely on. It is something learned over time, passed from one kitchen to another, folded into everyday life without much question. But for 2025 Sawaba Fellow Edwige Renée Dro, the Maggi cube is not only about taste or convenience. It is a point of entry into a deeper reflection about history, memory, and the shaping of everyday life.
Her project, The Ubiquitous Maggi Cube: Exploring Coloniality Through Cuisine, begins from a place that feels intimate and familiar. The kitchen in Côte d’Ivoire becomes her starting point, not as a backdrop, but as an active site where histories are carried, altered, and sometimes obscured. Through the act of cooking and sharing meals, she invites us to look more closely at what feels ordinary and to ask what has made it so.
What emerges is a story about how colonial systems have quietly but profoundly influenced African food practices. Over time, ingredients that once held specific regional meaning have been replaced or sidelined. Flavors that were once distinct and tied to particular communities have been reshaped into something more uniform. Knowledge that moved across generations through practice and storytelling has been interrupted, sometimes lost, sometimes transformed into something else.
The Maggi cube sits within this history. Its presence in so many kitchens across the continent is not accidental. It is tied to systems of trade, marketing, and consumption that took root during and after colonial rule. It offered consistency and ease, but it also contributed to a gradual shift in how taste itself is understood. What was once diverse and deeply local becomes more standardized, more predictable, and more detached from the specific environments and traditions that shaped it.
Yet Edwige’s work does not remain in a place of critique alone. What makes her project resonate is the way it returns to the kitchen as a space of possibility. Rather than treating the past as something fixed or romantic, she approaches it as something that can be engaged, questioned, and reimagined.
In her exploration, cooking becomes a way of remembering. It becomes a way of asking what dishes might have tasted like before certain ingredients became dominant. It becomes a way of tracing what has been carried forward and what has fallen away. These questions are not asked in isolation. They unfold in conversation, in shared meals, in the presence of others who are also thinking through what it means to reclaim and reshape their relationship to food.
Around the table, something shifts. The act of eating together becomes a space for reflection and experimentation. People try different approaches, revisit older methods, and share stories that might otherwise remain unspoken. There is no pressure to return to a pure or untouched version of the past. Instead, there is an openness to noticing, to paying attention, and to making choices with greater awareness.
In this way, the kitchen becomes more than a place where food is prepared. It becomes a site where decolonial practice takes root in tangible, everyday ways. It lives in the decision to use certain ingredients, in the effort to learn or relearn techniques, in the conversations that happen while food is being made and shared. These actions may seem small, but they begin to reshape how people understand their relationship to food and, by extension, to history and identity.
Edwige Renée Dro’s work reminds us that coloniality does not only operate through large systems or distant structures. It is present in the textures of daily life, in habits that feel natural, in tastes that have come to define what is considered good or complete. At the same time, her work shows that these spaces of everyday life also hold the potential for change.
That change does not arrive all at once. It begins in quiet, intentional ways. It begins in the kitchen, at the table, in the willingness to ask questions, to remember, and to imagine other possibilities for how we live and nourish ourselves.
To explore more of this work, read Edwige Renee Dro’s three essays here:
The Colonised Tongue Modernity Desire and the Maggi Cube Seduction of African Kitchens.pdf
After the Cube Reclaiming Taste Memory and the Feminist African Kitchen.pdf