A lot of contemporary African cuisine prominently features ingredients native to the Americas. West African dishes like jollof rice make heavy use of tomatoes, potato samosas are common in East Africa and Maize is used for porridge in South Africa. All around the continent, chili peppers of American origin are massively popular. How, if at all, were these dishes eaten before these new world ingredients were introduced? Was African food spicy before Columbus? Was the only source of heat black pepper? Have wondered about this for a long time.
In West Africa and southern Africa, most of the New World ingredients were used as replacements for existing ingredients. Peanuts were used in place of the similar bambara nut (and in some recipes, in place of sesame, which is not so similar until turned into an oily paste), maize meal instead of millet/sorghum, cassava in place of yams. New World taro was used in the same way as Old World taro.
Of the major New World foods in modern West African cuisine, the tomato is the main common one without a close pre-Columbian analog.
For more on this, see my answer in
Chillies were not the first "hot" spice in Africa; a variety of types of pepper were in pre-Columbian use. However, the chilli does appear to have made African cuisine notably "hotter".
potato samosas are common in East Africa
There have been two waves of Indian influence on East African cuisine. The earlier is Medieval, with East Africa being part of the Indian Ocean world, visited by traders from India and the Near East. This has left many influences in Swahili cuisine and Horn-of-Africa cuisine: Near Eastern/Persian/Indian-style spice mixed, spiced ghee, and pilaf. A much larger Indian presence arrived during the colonial period; these workers and settlers brought many Indian dishes such as curries, breads, and samosas. This newer wave of Indian influence is very post-Columbian, so we need to look below it to see what pre-Columbian East African cuisine might have looked like.
In the north, in the Horn of Africa, a meal might be flatbread with side-dishes:
Dishes like this, while distinctive to the region, belong in the broad spectrum of flatbread + sides meals found in an arc around the Indian ocean, from the Horn of Africa to India.
Further south, a common meal is ugali with side dishes:
Ugali with greens and spiced omena: https://i.pinimg.com/564x/38/44/a8/3844a847fe01f595f5fbad4fdfa7ed1c.jpg
Ugali with fried fish and greens: https://i.pinimg.com/564x/67/f4/82/67f48233cfd60dc78dad35b9b9c7f5d7.jpg
Ugali with meat, greens, and salad: https://i.pinimg.com/564x/6c/fb/e1/6cfbe13c237c77ad34cfb59c2a97e45a.jpg
The ugali can be replaced by other starchy staples, such as plantains:
and rice:
which in this case is boiled in coconut milk. As already mentioned, pilafs also appear:
The spices in this particular pilaf are cumin, coriander, cinnamon and cardamom (and garlic), showing the Indian and Near Eastern roots of the dish.
Omena is Rastrineobola argentea, AKA the Lake Victoria sardine. Ugali is a cornmeal fufu; its pre-Columbian predecessor would have used sorghum/millet meal. Using sorghum ugali and removing the other Columbian exchange ingredient from these dishes (chillies and tomatoes, for a start, and also using greens other than cassava leaves) gives a reasonable picture of pre-Columbian East African dishes.
