The spiky horned melon grows wild around the Kalahari, where it is one of the few sources of water in the dry season. It was the 'African horned cucumber' until the 1980s, when it was renamed kiwano for export from New Zealand.
📍 Balsas River valley, Mexico
Corn was bred about 9,000 years ago from a wild grass called teosinte in Mexico's Balsas River valley. It was domesticated only once, then spread throughout the Americas.
📍 Buffalo, New York, USA
Named after Buffalo, New York, not the animal. The Anchor Bar says co-owner Teressa Bellissimo first tossed fried wings in hot sauce there in 1964, though local chef John Young said he was frying wings in Buffalo from 1961.
📍 Barbados
The grapefruit is a chance cross of two Asian imports, the pomelo and the sweet orange. It was first described on Barbados in 1750 as the 'forbidden fruit' and only reached Florida in 1823.
📍 Western Sahel (northern Mali)
Pearl millet was first farmed on the southern edge of the Sahara, around today's northern Mali, more than 4,000 years ago. It later spread to India, which now grows more of it than any other country.
📍 Senegal & neighbouring West Africa
Yoté is a fast West African strategy game: players keep their pieces in hand, drop them onto the board and capture by jumping. A 1955 survey of West African games found it so popular in Senegal that French speakers there had coined a verb for playing it: "yoter".
📍 Kasai, DR Congo (Kuba Kingdom)
Kuba cloth comes from the old Kuba Kingdom in the Kasai region of DR Congo. Men weave squares from raffia palm fibre, then women embroider them and snip the stitches into a soft pile that looks and feels like velvet.