The good thing with food, like, food brings people together. Food doesn't have borders. I believe the new generation really are pushing now to promote the amazing food heritage we have in the continent. My name is Dieuveil Malonga and I'm a chef. I've worked in many restaurants, from Paris, from Germany, US, Japan, Thailand. My experience in fine-dining restaurants around the world was amazing. I've learned amazing technique, I've met amazing people. Then I realized myself, that I wanted to know more about Pan-African cuisine. And I took the initiative to go back to the continent. I wanted to learn. I wanted to go back to school, to the grandmother school. That took two years just traveling in Africa. I've learned about food, about culture, and also about the continent, the history. And go to learn [from] grandmothers about "African cuisine." First, it's not just African cuisine, it's country's cuisine. Africa is a continent, like, we have 54 countries. I visited more than 48 countries. I started with Cameroon. This was amazing. I was like a baby who was learning new things. The first thing I've learned was the national dish, call it ndolé. They call it like, a recipe for king. If someone cooks ndolé for you, it looks like the person loves you because ndolé takes a lot of time. It's, let's say, seven or six hours, and it's a lot of ingredients. When I went to the village, we did it together with a grandmother for my friend, and we spent all day. But ... The taste was amazing. It's, like, difficult to say how many recipes I've learned, but I've learned many recipes, a lot. In Nigeria, we have more than 200 tribes. And every tribe has a different dish. So I can describe more than a million, and billion recipes in the continent. In Senegal, yassa is a stew. But the main product they use is onions. In Rwanda, green banana, they call it igisafuliya. Sometimes they mix it with chicken, it's like a stew. In Congo, DRC, fumbwa is made by yasso, it's leaves that [are found] more in the forest. Spice is very important for me. Spice is life. Penja pepper is one of the best peppers, for me, in the world. The penja have something, sweetness. And also, it's close to lemongrass. You must taste it, really, to understand. Penja pepper grows only in Penja region. I like to go visit the harvest of Penja people, because most of the time the people are singing and it's the same time of mango and mango life. And personally, when I'm there, I like to go to help the people in the farm and also eat mango. In different countries in Africa, people celebrate food. People don't eat, but we celebrate food. It's part of our life. When you taste the dish, firstly, you know the people who are growing the product, you know the story behind. I think it's very different. For me, it was like, I was tasting, but it was also an experience. When I was in Germany, I was working in like, one of the best restaurant in the world. I didn't get the connection with the product because you can have a carrot, but it's come from the market. You don't know the story behind. That was the big difference. My first time that I tasted a carrot when I was in Cameroon, it was different. Number one, like, it was sweet and flavorful and the texture was very different. And it was a very small carrot, it was not like the big carrot that we usually use in Europe. And I was very surprised, I was connected with the product, with the people and with the region. After traveling, my ambition was like, I want to share what I've learned in different countries in one place. Culinary Innovation Village is a food campus that we have created with my team. We have a training center, we train a next generation of, let's say, the big chef of tomorrow. The students come from different countries in Africa. For now we have seven nationalities. And they bring another new dish. They bring another new way of farming. It's a huge exchange between me and the students. When I travel, I bring many seeds from different countries. We have more than 100 varieties of fruit and vegetables. We teach our students how to farm, and also we have a restaurant, Meza Malonga, where we do, most of the time, food experience. I like to promote the African ingredients and spices. I focus more on the story of our people and the product. For me, food is sharing and education. My vision in the future is, we have many places like this in many regions in Africa. Many things are happening globally. People are traveling now for food and the African cuisine is playing a big role. We want really in the future that people can talk about African food, like they talk about Italian food, and people can talk about Nigerian food and Congolese, Rwandese and South African food, like also people talk about American food. [TED Fellows]