This section contains only seven recipes for a continent of more than a billion inhabitants and hundreds of culinary traditions. Sub-Saharan Africa possesses considerable traditions of meat transformation, but in the end, very few cased specialities. These are rarely standardised in recipes and are often poorly documented in accessible sources. This imbalance reflects the state of the available documentation, not the real richness of African culinary traditions.

The seven recipes retained illustrate distinct trajectories of formation. The South African boerewors was born of the meeting between Dutch and German stuffing techniques, the spices brought back by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) via the Cape route, and the beef of the savannahs of southern Africa. The Karoo wors and the Namibian boerewors extend the logic with different local raw materials (game from the semi-desert plateau, meat from the Namibian desert), the same technique giving rise to variants that have become identities of their own.

The Angolan and Mozambican chouriços descend from the Portuguese chouriço, introduced by colonisation on the continent’s Atlantic and Indian faces alike. The Angolan one is smoked using the Iberian process; that of Maputo is a fresh sausage grilled in a spiral, where the piri-piri is markedly more prominent than on the Iberian Peninsula. Both echo the Goan chouriço of the ‘Indian subcontinent’ section, the third branch of the same ancestor.

The Kenyan mutura and the Nigerian suya sausage are two forms of street charcuterie shaped by urbanisation. The mutura, of Kikuyu origin, was a ceremonial preparation that became a product of Nairobi's night markets over the course of the twentieth century. The suya sausage is the cased evolution, which appeared in Lagos and Abuja over the last two decades, of a Hausa preparation of northern Nigeria: the spiced meat skewer traditionally served in the markets. These two examples show how rural, communal traditions transform in contact with the city.

The boerewors is sold in South African grocers in London, Sydney and Auckland; the suya in West African restaurants in major Western cities; the Angolan chouriço follows the routes of the Lusophone diaspora. In the opposite direction, industrial sausages of the Frankfurter type, made locally from beef or poultry, have penetrated the continent’s urban markets. The chapter ‘The circulations’ develops the Kenyan case of the smokies and the safari sausages as an example of this penetration.

To these recipes is added, in the Supplement, the wakalim of Harar: a fermented, dried beef sausage of the Harari community in eastern Ethiopia. Documented at least since the middle of the twentieth century, it belongs to neither colonial transplantation nor recent urbanisation and illustrates a trajectory that the other seven do not embody.