Open Sesame

Anyone familar with the story of Ali Baba in the Arabian Nights will remember that the password to the thieves' cave was 'Open Sesame". When I was first told the story, back in 1970s pre-McDonalds Britain, I had no idea what sesame was, but the globalisation of cuisine has changed all that. Now I know the delicious taste its seed imparts to middle eastern favourites like hummus bi tahini and baba ghanoush, among others, and the delicate flavour of its oil in many Asian dishes. I also learned that sesame is in fact one of the oldest crops cultivated by humankind, dating back to the Babylonian era. It was perhaps the most valuable oilseed in the ancient world because of its tolerance to drought, its high oil content (about 50% oil), the ease of oil extraction and its stability.

I didn't know much about sesame cultivation until my recent hot and dusty road trip to North West Uganda, where, along with cotton, it is an important cash crop. Sesame (usually called by its Arabic name of Simsim) is very often grown in tandem with cotton: it is drought-tolerant and withstands high temperatures. It makes an excellent rotation crop for cotton as it has different nutritional requirements and it suppresses two significant cotton pests, root rot and nematodes. Several of the cotton farmers we visited were also growing simsim, harvesting manually and allowing the cut plants to dry off in bales (pictured above) to reduce the risk of crop loss resulting from seed pod shattering while in field. In the USA, plant breeders have developed simsim varieties which are not prone to shattering, but these are not yet available in Africa.