Question 1

What does “benne” mean?

Accepted Answer

Sesame — the West African word, carried into Gullah and then into the whole Lowcountry. In an English document in Charleston in 1746.

Question 2

Where does “benne” come from?

Accepted Answer

West Africa, carried into Gullah Geechee speech on the Georgia and South Carolina coast and out of it into general Lowcountry English by the mid-1740s. Lorenzo Dow Turner, whose Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect of 1949 rests on fieldwork with Sea Island speakers, gives Wolof and Bambara: Wolof bene, sesame; Gullah bene, sesame. Merriam-Webster gives Malinke, the OED tradition gives Mende. Bambara, Malinke, Mandinka and Mende are all Mande languages, so a Mande source is the safest single statement, with Wolof as a parallel regional form. The mechanism of transfer is documented rather than assumed: enslaved West Africans grew benne in their own garden plots on the rice plantations, and white planters hunting a second cash crop next to rice noticed the African crop and took the African name with it. South Carolina's 1744 bounty on oil crops set off a brief benne boom; by 1748 Henry Laurens was writing that the sesame seed and oil is no more talk'd of as an article for exportation. White commerce dropped it. Black gardens kept it, which is the whole story of the word.