benne

[Malay bijen.]
(Bot.) The name of two plants (Sesamum orientale and S. indicum), originally Asiatic; -- also called oil plant. From their seeds an oil is expressed, called benne oil or sesame oil, used mostly for making soap. In the southern United States the seeds are used in candy. [Also spelled benni.]

In most of the English-speaking world, sesame is sesame. (In the seventeenth century we got that word from Latin, which got it from Greek, which got it from one of the ancient Semitic languages of the Middle East.) But in South Carolina, influenced by the Mende language of Africa, sesame is also known as benne. Interviewed for the Dictionary of American Regional English in the 1960s, residents of South Carolina spoke of several kinds of candy made with benne seed, including benne brittle and benne wafers.

Benne was brought into English by slaves from Africa who were speakers of Mende, a Niger-Congo language now spoken by one and a half million people in Sierra Leone and Liberia. We find the word in a 1769 letter from Georgia, just south of South Carolina, to the American Philosophical Society: "I send you a small keg of Bene or bene Seed, which you will please to present to your Society for their inspection." One other Mende word more recently arrived in English is nomoli (1910), the name for small soapstone carvings of men and animals found in caves and fields in Sierra Leone. No one knows who made these figures or for what purpose.

The Mende language had a starring role in the 1997 movie Amistad, a largely true story about the trials in America of slaves from Sierra Leone who captured the ship in which they were being transported. The historical version is slightly different from the movie. To learn the Africans' language, Professor Josiah Gibbs of Yale College visited them in jail and held up his fingers, counting aloud. When he said "one," one of the Africans responded with "hita" in the Bandi dialect of Mende. Gibbs learned the Mende numbers and walked the docks of New Haven, Connecticut, counting aloud: hita, fele, sawa, nani, dolu, woita, ngofera, ngohakpa, tau, pu. (In the main dialect of Mende the numbers are yilá, felé, sawá, nááni, lóólu, wóíta, wófela, wáyákpá, táálú, pu.) By this means he found translators who knew Mende and English.

The noun has one meaning:

Meaning #1: East Indian annual erect herb; source of sesame seed or benniseed and sesame oil
  Synonyms: sesame, benni, benny, Sesamum indicum