The African Roots of Marijuana (2019)

The African Roots of Marijuana

Publication

Author	Chris S. Duvall
Affiliation	University of New Mexico
Publisher	Duke University Press
Place	Durham, North Carolina
Published	2019
Status	Published
Pages	360
Language	English

Coverage

Subjects	Cannabis history, African history, Atlantic slave trade, Colonialism, Drug prohibition
Relevance	Traces the arrival, African diffusion and Atlantic transfer of cannabis cultivation and smoking cultures, and the racialised colonial myths built around them: foundational context for African and diaspora landrace history and for the origins of cannabis prohibition.

Access

ISBN	978-1-4780-0394-6
DOI	10.1215/9781478004530

The African Roots of Marijuana is a 2019 book by the geographer Chris S. Duvall, published by Duke University Press. It is a historical and biogeographical study of cannabis in Africa and of the plant's movement from Africa into the Atlantic world, and argues that African smoking cultures and the Atlantic slave trade were central to the global history of cannabis as a smoked drug.

Duvall traces cannabis from its arrival in Africa from South Asia about a thousand years ago through its spread across the continent, and argues that European colonial accounts, often fictionalised and built on racial stereotypes, produced durable myths that cast Africa as a cultural backwater and Africans as predisposed to drug use. He holds that these myths continue to shape contemporary thinking about the plant.

Author

Chris S. Duvall is Professor of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of New Mexico and a biogeographer of people-plant relationships. He has written widely on the history of cannabis in Africa, including a 2019 article in EchoGéo setting out four historical phases of African cannabis cultivation.

Background

The book gives a book-length, Africa-centred treatment to the history of cannabis, a subject that European colonial writing had, in Duvall's account, long distorted through fictionalised and racialised description.

Argument

Duvall argues that cannabis reached Africa from South Asia roughly a thousand years ago and was cultivated and used across much of the continent, where African smoking cultures reworked it into what he describes as a fast-acting and easily dosed drug. He connects the plant's African history to colonialism, the Atlantic slave trade and global capitalism, and reads cannabis use in Africa and its diaspora as bound up with oppressive labour, with recreation and with religious and political movements. A chapter on the plant's passage across the Atlantic sets out his case that African precedents, carried by enslaved people, shaped the later smoked cannabis of the Americas.

Contents

The book comprises ten chapters:

1. Cannabis and Africa
2. Race and Plant Evolution
3. Roots of African Cannabis Cultures
4. Cannabis Colonizes the Continent
5. A Convenient Crop
6. Society Overturned: The Bena Riamba
7. Cannabis Crosses the Atlantic
8. Working under the Influence
9. Buying and Banning
10. Rethinking Marijuana

Reception

The book was reviewed in journals of history, African studies and the history of medicine, including The American Historical Review, the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Social History of Medicine, the Journal of Global South Studies, and the journal Africa.

See also

• Cannabis: Global Histories (2021)
• Ganja matters (2026)
• A brief agricultural history of cannabis in Africa (Duvall, 2019)