African origins of sesame cultivation in the Americas

Abstract

Contributions from Africa to crop introduction in the Americas have received insufficient recognition. A cultural, ecological, economic, geographical, and historical study of the transfer of sesame from Africa to the New World, this chapter surveys knowledge about sesame in the American colonies concerning medicine, myth, magic, culinary, and industrial use. African and New World usage by subsistence farmers was strikingly similar. Preference for mucilaginous foods, shown here, is widespread throughout Africa. A benefit already known by enslaved Africans, their masters in the American colonies eventually recognized the mucilage properties of the leaves and its value in treating summer dysentery. On both continents, according to folk belief, sesame has attributes as a good luck plant. Sesame is a valuable crop introduced to Africa from Asia long ago. Language reveals important clues about transmission routes in the absence of written textual evidence. Surviving traces of African languages and customs in modern African-American and Caribbean material culture vis-à-vis sesame appear with culinary and healing traditions of Africa and the African diaspora. Eyewitness reports, including correspondence of Thomas Jefferson, provide firsthand data, supplementing herbarium specimens and limited, widely scattered published passages about the dynamic nature of contributions by African-born slaves in the dissemination and use of sesame in the Americas.