Cleome gynandra L. (Brig.) like many other indigenous vegetables is grown by subsistence farmers in many areas in sub-Saharan Africa. Farmers use their own saved seeds from volunteers, neighbours and from local markets for propagation, although of recent some seed companies have started selling seeds, such as Simlaw in Kenya. In literature, there have been claims that C. gynandra seed has low germination tendency especially for the freshly harvested seeds and this was assigned to endogenous, non-deep physiological dormancy. In addition, different seed lots have shown different germination rates which was assumed to be influenced by the provenance and habitat from where it was collected. The low germination phenomenon is reported to decrease with increasing time of storage and is realised at the three months of storage and beyond. However, this contradicts to a preliminary study on seed germination test of spider plant which was carried out at AVRDC – The World Vegetable Centre, Eastern and Southern Africa in 2013 in Arusha, Tanzania. The test employed freshly harvested seeds from pods with three different maturity status, namely mature green, yellow and brown pods. From the test, seeds from all pods were germinated although those from brown pods had the highest germination rate followed by yellow and finally green pods. It is hereby recommended that further studies on, but more diverse and large number of accessions taken from different storage periods is done to explain the narrow scientific information available with regards to low C. gynandra seed germination.