With start of Colombian exchange centuries earlier, by the sixteenth century Africans had started sowing different legumes from Europe in their fields and according to the young French naturalist and explorer Michel Andanson (1727-1806), they flourished to “great perfection” in Senegal. Speaking of the Congo, the French traveler and writer L’ abbé Proyart (1743-1808) tells us that during the rainy season people cultivated as many as “four or five sorts of small beans . . . several species of them, of which they can gather three crops in less than six months.” He goes on to say, they also sow a “earth pea” that is “agreeable to the taste. . . . ” The Atlantic slave trade became the medium through which African derived rice and beans and peas and rice dishes developed across the Americas:
