The Table below lists the Old World tropical crops reported growing as subsistence staples in slave food plots and in the maroons' crop fields in Suriname. These crops were planted along with important Amerindian dietary staples such as maize, sweet potato, manioc (cassava) and peanuts. The seeds of some of the less familiar African plants are depicted in a painting by William J. Titford, an English resident of Jamaica in the early nineteenth century (Figure 1). His illustration was used to accompany a compendium of the 'new and valuable plants' encountered on the island, to about a dozen of which he correctly attributes African origin. Titford's drawing depicts two with African vernacular names: the African domesticate akee and the New World peanut, pindars. The linguistic borrowing of African words to describe plants of distinct Old and New World tropical heritage was common. It reflects their surreptitious appearance and calls attention to Africans as sources of knowledge and the instigators of the crops' cultivation. The nomenclature for the peanut reveals prior African familiarity with some Amerindian staples. Introduced to Western Africa in the seventeenth century, the peanut acquired African names: mpinda in the Kongo language and nguba in Kimbundu. When peoples speaking these languages were brought to New World plantation societies, the peanut became known by the respective word derivations pindar and goobers (Sauer, 1993, p. 82-83; Pollitzer, 1999, p. 115).  
Table 1. African plants in the early plantation period  
| Common name | Species name |
| :-- | :-- |
| Cereals |  |
| Millet | Pennisetum glaucum |
| Sorghum | Sorghum bicolor |
| Rice/malo | Oryza spp. |
| Tubers |  |
| Yams | Dioscorea cayenensis |
| Plantain/banana | Musa spp. |
| Taro/eddo | Colocasia esculenta |
| Legumes |  |
| Blackeye pea/cowpea/calavance | Vigna unguiculata |
| Yard or "Asian" long bean | Vigna unguiculata ssp. sesquipedalis |
| Pigeon/Angola/Congo pea/wando/guandul | Cajanus cajan |
| Bambara groundnut/woandzeia/gobogobo | Vigna subterranea |