Cannabis in South Africa
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Cannabis in South Africa has one of the oldest and most fully documented records of any cannabis culture on the African continent. The plant is known throughout the country as dagga, a term Afrikaans adopted from a Khoekhoe word; the anthropologist Brian du Toit traced it to Khoekhoe daXa-b ("tobacco"), the compound amaXa-b carrying the sense "green tobacco".[1][verification needed] Cannabis was smoked in southern Africa well before European settlement, and the record runs from Khoisan and Bantu-speaking use through a century of prohibition, in which South Africa helped write cannabis into the international drug-control system, to the constitutional decriminalisation of private adult use in 2018.[2][3][4]
The traditional crop is concentrated in the summer-rainfall east of the country, above all in Mpondoland on the Wild Coast of the former Transkei, in the Eastern Cape, with a second belt in KwaZulu-Natal. The growing country continues across the international boundaries into the highlands of Lesotho and the mountainous north of Eswatini, with which the South African crop forms a single regional production complex.[5][6]
Despite this long record the country's cannabis landraces remain scientifically uncharacterised. A 2024 review found no study of the diversity or chemistry of southern African cannabis landraces and no African cannabis genome assemblies in international databases.[7] Since decriminalisation the low-potency traditional crop has been displaced on price by high-potency commercial genetics, and the smallholders who grow it have been excluded from the licensed medical market that the 2018 judgment opened.[8][9]
History
Precolonial and early-colonial documentation
Cannabis reached southern Africa as part of the wider dispersal of the plant through the continent. The geographer Chris Duvall holds that it came to eastern Africa from southern Asia by maritime trade, inferred from about 1000 CE, and spread within the continent mostly after 1500.[10][11] Archaeological work places the smoking habit in Africa before the arrival of tobacco: fourteenth-century water-pipe bowls from Ethiopia have been found to retain cannabis residue, an East African comparandum rather than direct evidence for the south.[12] By the seventeenth century the plant circulated in a regional exchange economy; the historian David Gordon has reconstructed how cannabis structured trading networks among the precolonial Khoikhoi.[13]
Systematic documentary evidence begins with European travellers at and beyond the Cape. The journal kept under Jan van Riebeeck records Khoikhoi esteem for daccha in 1658, the earliest written use of the term, although whether it denotes cannabis or the unrelated indigenous plant Leonotis leonurus ("wild dagga") at that date is disputed, so the first mentions attest the word rather than, unambiguously, the plant.[2][14] The naturalist Peter Kolb, resident at the Cape between 1705 and 1713, gave the first detailed account, describing dacha as a herb the Khoikhoi prized above all others and stating that they had used it before tobacco was known to them, which places the practice before the Dutch settlement of 1652.[15]
Prohibition and the international-control role
Formal restriction began not with the indigenous crop but with the ganja brought by Indian indentured labourers to Natal from 1860. Section 70 of Natal's Law 2 of 1870 controlled its use, and over the following decades administrators, employers and medical officers increasingly linked cannabis to alleged insanity and to fears of disorder among Black and Indian workers, a framing that later scholarship reads as much as evidence of colonial anxiety as of the plant.[16][17]
National prohibition followed in stages. A customs measure of 1922 controlled dagga as a habit-forming drug, and the Medical, Dental and Pharmacy Act 13 of 1928 prohibited its unlicensed cultivation and supply.[17] In parallel South Africa pressed for international control. In 1923 the government of Jan Smuts asked the League of Nations to bring cannabis under the emerging drug-control regime, an intervention that fed into the plant's inclusion in the 1925 Geneva International Opium Convention and gave the country a formative part in the global prohibition of cannabis.[3][18][19]
Enforcement was racially structured, concentrated on urban possession by Black South Africans, and cannabis control operated as one instrument within the wider legal architecture of segregation and later of apartheid. Recorded cannabis arrests rose from 5,762 in 1932 to 23,289 in 1955, and prohibition was tightened under the Abuse of Dependence-Producing Substances and Rehabilitation Centres Act 41 of 1971 and the Drugs and Drug Trafficking Act 140 of 1992.[17][20][21]
Enforcement and aerial eradication
From the 1980s the South African Police Service eradicated rural crops from the air, spraying herbicide over the Transkei and the KwaZulu-Natal foothills from low-flying helicopters. According to reporting by the journalist Kimon de Greef, a civil-society campaign in the former Natal secured a ban on the herbicide paraquat in 1990, and the police thereafter sprayed glyphosate, marketed as "Kilo Max"; the programme was augmented in February 2004 by a helicopter and spraying equipment donated by the United States.[22][23] After the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as a probable carcinogen in 2015 the practice drew legal and civil-society challenge; no aerial spraying was conducted in 2016, and in 2018 the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights called on South Africa to end aerial fumigation in Mpondoland.[22][24][verification needed]
Decriminalisation
The prohibition era ended in 2018, when the Constitutional Court, in Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development v Prince, held that criminalising an adult's private use, possession or cultivation of cannabis for personal consumption unjustifiably limited the constitutional right to privacy. Purchase, dealing and public use were not decriminalised.[4] Parliament passed the Cannabis for Private Purposes Act in 2024 to codify the judgment, although the Act was not yet in force in 2026. The legal detail is treated under Trade, economy and law below; the earlier and distinct 2002 religious-freedom challenge brought by the same litigant is treated under Religious and cultural use.
Cultivation and landraces
The Mpondoland heartland
The former Transkei districts of Mpondoland, on the Eastern Cape Wild Coast and in particular the country around Lusikisiki, are the best-known cannabis-growing region in South Africa. The crop is grown mainly by smallholders on plots of well under a hectare, in broken, high-rainfall coastal terrain whose relative inaccessibility has long favoured it.[5] Cannabis is one of the few high-value cash crops available in the impoverished former-homeland districts, and it has been a central, if unequally distributed, part of rural livelihoods, traded through a chain in which the grower captures only a small fraction of the eventual retail price.[5][8]
KwaZulu-Natal and the regional complex
Cultivation is also long established in the foothills of KwaZulu-Natal, around Msinga among other districts. The wider region forms a single production complex with neighbouring Lesotho and Eswatini. Lesotho is a major producer whose crop is trafficked largely through South Africa, and the mountainous north of Eswatini is a further source of cannabis reputed for its quality.[25][26][6]
Landraces and varieties
Traditional South African cannabis is often referred to by market names such as Durban Poison and Swazi Gold. These are reputational trade terms rather than scientifically defined varieties, and the potency figures attached to them circulate in commercial seed material without a peer-reviewed basis.[7] The scientific record is thin. A 2024 morphological survey of eight landrace collections from Lusikisiki confirmed them as Cannabis sativa but did not quantify their cannabinoid content, and a companion study examined the agronomy of the same material.[27][28] A 2024 review concluded that no study had examined the diversity or chemistry of southern African cannabis landraces, and that international genome databases contained no African cannabis assemblies at all.[7]
Trade, economy and law
South Africa has long been a significant producer of cannabis, though its standing has often been overstated. In 2005 the country seized an estimated 292 tonnes of cannabis herb, about 42 per cent of all African seizures and, in that year, the third-highest national total in the world; this figure is specific to 2005 and does not describe later years, when South Africa was routinely outranked within Africa, standing second on the continent in 2022 and sixth in 2023.[29][30] Estimates of the area under cannabis generally fall between 1,000 and 2,000 hectares; a mid-1990s figure that implied South Africa was the world's largest producer was repudiated by the UNODC as a dry-plant-weight calculation error and should not be repeated.[31]
Private adult use, possession and cultivation of cannabis are lawful, following the 2018 Prince judgment.[4] The Cannabis for Private Purposes Act 7 of 2024, assented to on 28 May 2024, was intended to codify the judgment; it removes cannabis from the schedules of the Drugs and Drug Trafficking Act and provides for the expungement of past convictions, but comes into force only on a date fixed by presidential proclamation, which had not been issued by 2026, so the operative legal position remained that set by the 2018 judgment.[32] Draft regulations published for comment in February 2026 proposed that an adult be allowed to possess up to 750 grams of cannabis, in a private or a public place, at any given time during a single day, and to cultivate up to five plants; the limits are framed per adult rather than per household.[33] There is no legal commercial recreational market. Medical cannabis is regulated separately by the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority (SAHPRA) under the Medicines and Related Substances Act 101 of 1965, and low-tetrahydrocannabinol hemp is excluded from control under that Act rather than under the Drugs and Drug Trafficking Act.[9][verification needed]
Since decriminalisation a commercial sector has developed from which the traditional growers have largely been excluded. Medical cultivation requires a SAHPRA licence; by late 2023 the authority had issued 83 cannabis cultivation licences, and by 2020 not one had gone to the Eastern Cape.[34][9] The cost of meeting the security, quality-control and facility requirements, estimated in the millions of rand, places a licence beyond the reach of smallholders, a barrier documented both by the provincial development council and in comparative research on cannabis reform in South Africa and Zimbabwe.[9][35] On the ground, growers in Mpondoland reported that the farm-gate price of a twenty-litre measure had fallen from about 1,500 to 2,000 rand before 2018 to around 500 rand, an exclusion that community representatives had anticipated when licensing began.[8][36]
Preparations and consumption
Dagga is consumed mainly by smoking, a habit documented among the Khoikhoi and Bantu-speaking peoples from the earliest colonial accounts. Southern African smoking traditions include earth pipes and water pipes as well as hand-rolled forms.[2][12] Surveys of the modern market confirm that traditional outdoor material is generally low in tetrahydrocannabinol relative to high-potency indoor product, although these surveys sample retail products rather than identified landraces.[37] Growers in Mpondoland report that the traditional crop runs at roughly 2.5 to 8 per cent tetrahydrocannabinol against about 20 to 28 per cent for the commercial material now undercutting it.[8]
Religious and cultural use
Cannabis figures in the medicine and material culture of several of the country's peoples, although the ethnobotanical record is uneven and, for ritual use specifically, thin. Among the Xhosa the plant is recorded under the names umya, intsangu and matakwane, its leaves used against whooping cough and asthma and, crushed, to reduce anxiety; this comes from a single-author ethnobotanical survey rather than a dedicated study.[38] Among the Sotho the plant is known as matekoane and is recorded in treatments for asthma and other conditions.[39] Among the Zulu the plant, insangu, is recorded in the early ethnography of A.T. Bryant, whose colonial-era framing is treated with caution.[40] The foundational compendium for these vernaculars and uses is Watt and Breyer-Brandwijk's Medicinal and Poisonous Plants of Southern and Eastern Africa (1962).[41] No dedicated peer-reviewed study documents cannabis in Xhosa initiation or as a discrete rite in Xhosa or Sotho ceremony; the psychoactive-plant ethnobotany of the region, including cannabis in divination and healing, is itself a recognised gap in the literature.[42][43]
The most visible modern religious use is by the country's Rastafari communities, for whom cannabis is a sacrament. Academic study of the movement in South Africa effectively begins with a 1986 survey by G. C. Oosthuizen, and the historian Midas Chawane, its principal synthesist, notes that there is no recorded history of when Rastafari first entered the country; individuals are traceable from the late 1970s, and the movement was submerged within the anti-apartheid struggle and largely unorganised before 1994, taking formal shape with the establishment of a Rastafari National Council in December 1997.[44] The sacramental use of cannabis, smoked, taken as tea and baked into food, and its collision with the country's drug law have been examined in the religious-studies literature.[44][45] That collision produced the first cannabis case to reach the Constitutional Court. In Prince v President of the Law Society of the Cape of Good Hope (2002), Gareth Prince, a Rastafari candidate attorney refused registration because he intended to keep using cannabis as a sacrament, challenged the prohibition on freedom-of-religion grounds; the Court held by five votes to four that the limitation was justified and declined to read in a religious exemption. The same litigant's later challenge, on the ground of privacy rather than religion, succeeded in 2018.[46][4]
Conservation status
South Africa's cannabis landraces face the combined pressure of market displacement and scientific neglect. Since decriminalisation the low-potency traditional crop has lost its market to high-potency commercial genetics, and smallholders excluded from the licensed sector have little incentive to maintain landrace seed.[8] At the same time the material has never been systematically collected or characterised: the 2024 review that surveyed the field found no study of the diversity or chemistry of southern African cannabis landraces, and no African cannabis assemblies in the international genome databases.[7] The varieties are therefore being eroded before they have been documented, a gap that makes their conservation both urgent and, as yet, unaddressed.[7][5]
See also
References
- ↑ du Toit, B.M. (1980). Cannabis in Africa. Rotterdam: A.A. Balkema. ISBN 90-6191-030-7.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 du Toit, B.M. (1975). "Dagga: the history and ethnographic setting of Cannabis sativa in southern Africa". In Rubin, V. (ed.). Cannabis and Culture. The Hague: Mouton. pp. 81–116. doi:10.1515/9783110812060.81.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Chattopadhyaya, U. (2019). "Dagga and prohibition: markets, animals, and the imperial contexts of knowledge, 1893–1925". South African Historical Journal. 71 (4): 587–613. doi:10.1080/02582473.2019.1641738.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 "Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development and Others v Prince; National Director of Public Prosecutions and Others v Rubin; National Director of Public Prosecutions and Others v Acton and Others (CCT108/17) [2018] ZACC 30". Constitutional Court of South Africa. 18 September 2018 – via SAFLII.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 Kepe, T. (2003). "Cannabis sativa and rural livelihoods in South Africa: politics of cultivation, trade and value in Pondoland". Development Southern Africa. 20 (5): 605–615. doi:10.1080/0376835032000149252.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Gastrow, P. (2003). Mind-blowing: the cannabis trade in southern Africa (Report). Cape Town: Institute for Security Studies.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 Ndlangamandla, V.V.; Salawu-Rotimi, A.; Bushula-Njah, V.S.; Hlongwane, N.; Sibandze, G.F.; Gebashe, F.; Mchunu, N.P. (2024). "Finally freed—cannabis in South Africa: a review contextualised within global history, diversity, and chemical profiles". Plants. 13 (19): 2695. doi:10.3390/plants13192695.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link) - ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 Nowicki, L. (29 July 2024). "Mpondoland dagga growers left out to dry". GroundUp.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 Lewis, M. (2020). Cannabis in the Eastern Cape: a policy discussion document (Report). Eastern Cape Socio Economic Consultative Council. ISBN 978-1-77593-076-1.
- ↑ Duvall, C.S. (2017). "Cannabis and tobacco in precolonial and colonial Africa". Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History. doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.44.
- ↑ Duvall, C.S. (2019). "A brief agricultural history of cannabis in Africa, from prehistory to canna-colony". EchoGéo (48). doi:10.4000/echogeo.17599.
- ↑ 12.0 12.1 van der Merwe, N.J. (2005). "Antiquity of the smoking habit in Africa". Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa. 60 (2): 147–150. doi:10.1080/00359190509520494.
- ↑ Gordon, D. (1996). "From rituals of rapture to dependence: the political economy of Khoikhoi narcotic consumption, c.1487–1870". South African Historical Journal. 35 (1): 62–88. doi:10.1080/02582479608671247.
- ↑ Nsuala, B.N.; Enslin, G.; Viljoen, A. (2015). ""Wild cannabis": a review of the traditional use and phytochemistry of Leonotis leonurus". Journal of Ethnopharmacology. 174: 520–539. doi:10.1016/j.jep.2015.08.013.
- ↑ Kolb, P. (1745). Beschreibung des Vorgebürges der guten Hoffnung und derer darauf wohnenden Hottentotten. Frankfurt und Leipzig: Peter Conrad Monath. pp. 138–140 – via archive.org.
- ↑ Paterson, C. (2009). Prohibition and resistance: a socio-political exploration of the changing dynamics of the southern African cannabis trade, c. 1850 – the present (MA thesis). Rhodes University.
- ↑ 17.0 17.1 17.2 Nkosi, P.I.; Devey, R.; Waetjen, T. (2020). "Cannabis policing in mid-twentieth century South Africa". Historia. 65 (1). doi:10.17159/2309-8392/2020/v65n1a4.
- ↑ Kozma, L. (2011). "The League of Nations and the debate over cannabis prohibition". History Compass. 9 (1): 61–70. doi:10.1111/j.1478-0542.2010.00740.x.
- ↑ Mills, J.H. (2003). "The League of Nations and British legislation, 1912–1928". Cannabis Britannica: Empire, Trade, and Prohibition 1800–1928. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 152–188. doi:10.1093/oso/9780199249381.003.0007.
- ↑ Waetjen, T. (2021). "Dagga: how South Africa made a dangerous drug, 1902–1928". In Richert, L.; Mills, J.H. (eds.). Cannabis: Global Histories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pp. 83–107.
- ↑ Waetjen, T. (2022). "South Africa's century of cannabis politics, 1922–2022". South African Historical Journal. 74 (2). doi:10.1080/02582473.2022.2128274.
- ↑ 22.0 22.1 de Greef, K. (7 April 2016). "Cash crops poisoned in Pondoland". GroundUp.
- ↑ "Cannabis: forced crop eradication in South Africa". International Drug Policy Consortium. 19 January 2016.
- ↑ UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (2018). Concluding observations on the initial report of South Africa (E/C.12/ZAF/CO/1) (Report). United Nations.
- ↑ Bloomer, J. (2019). "Turning cannabis into cash: agrarian change and Lesotho's evolving experience". EchoGéo (48). doi:10.4000/echogeo.17612.
- ↑ Bloomer, J. (2009). "Using a political ecology framework to examine extra-legal livelihood strategies: a Lesotho-based case study of cultivation of and trade in cannabis". Journal of Political Ecology. 16 (1): 49–69. doi:10.2458/v16i1.21691.
- ↑ Dumani, A.; Silwana, T.T.; Mpambani, B.; Oyedeji, A.O. (2024). "Identification of medicinal Cannabis landraces found in Lusikisiki, Eastern Cape Province, South Africa". Journal of People, Plants, and Environment. 27 (4): 259–267. doi:10.11628/ksppe.2024.27.4.259.
- ↑ Dumani, A.; Silwana, T.T.; Mpambani, B.; Oyedeji, A.O. (2025). "Effect of propagation techniques on the growth of medicinal Cannabis landraces from Lusikisiki". Horticulturae. 11 (12): 1428. doi:10.3390/horticulturae11121428.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link) - ↑ United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2007). Cannabis in Africa: an overview (Report). UNODC.
- ↑ United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2025). World Drug Report 2025, Statistical Annex (Report). UNODC.
- ↑ United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Regional Office for Southern Africa (2002). South Africa: country profile on drugs and crime (Report). UNODC.
- ↑ "Cannabis for Private Purposes Act 7 of 2024". Republic of South Africa. 3 June 2024.
- ↑ Department of Justice and Constitutional Development (2 February 2026). "Draft Cannabis Regulations, General Notice R.7067, Government Gazette No. 54061" (PDF). Republic of South Africa.
- ↑ "Permits to change the lives of farmers". SAnews. South African Government News Agency. 31 October 2023.
- ↑ Howell, S.; Rusenga, C. (2025). "Comparative analysis of cannabis legalization in South Africa and Zimbabwe: trajectories, commonalities, and divergences". Journal of Illicit Economies and Development. 7 (2): 70–84. doi:10.31389/jied.283.
- ↑ Clark, C. (14 October 2019). "'People feel betrayed': small-scale dagga growers fear exclusion from legal trade". GroundUp.
- ↑ Viviers, H.J.; Petzer, A.; Gordon, R. (2021). "An assessment of the potency related to Cannabis-based products in the South African market". Forensic Science International. 322: 110754. doi:10.1016/j.forsciint.2021.110754.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: article number as page number (link) - ↑ Bhat, R.B. (2013). "Plants of Xhosa people in the Transkei region of Eastern Cape (South Africa) with major pharmacological and therapeutic properties". Journal of Medicinal Plants Research. 7 (20): 1474–1480. doi:10.5897/JMPR12.973.
- ↑ Moteetee, A.; Van Wyk, B.-E. (2011). "The medical ethnobotany of Lesotho: a review". Bothalia. 41 (1): 209–228. doi:10.4102/abc.v41i1.52.
- ↑ Bryant, A.T. (1949). The Zulu People, As They Were Before the White Man Came. Pietermaritzburg: Shuter & Shooter. pp. 222–223.
- ↑ Watt, J.M.; Breyer-Brandwijk, M.G. (1962). The Medicinal and Poisonous Plants of Southern and Eastern Africa (2nd ed.). Edinburgh: E. & S. Livingstone.
- ↑ Sobiecki, J.F. (2008). "A review of plants used in divination in southern Africa and their psychoactive effects". Southern African Humanities. 20 (2): 333–351.
- ↑ Nyazema, N.Z.; Chanyandura, J.T.; Egan, B. (2024). "The use and potential abuse of psychoactive plants in southern Africa: an overview of evidence and future potential". Frontiers in Pharmacology. 15: 1269247. doi:10.3389/fphar.2024.1269247.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: article number as page number (link) CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link) - ↑ 44.0 44.1 Chawane, M.H. (2012). "The Rastafari movement in South Africa: before and after apartheid". New Contree (65): 163–188. doi:10.4102/nc.v65i0.311.
- ↑ Pretorius, S.P. (2006). "The significance of the use of ganja as a religious ritual in the Rastafari movement". Verbum et Ecclesia. 27 (3). doi:10.4102/ve.v27i3.199.
- ↑ "Prince v President of the Law Society of the Cape of Good Hope (CCT36/00) [2002] ZACC 1". Constitutional Court of South Africa. 25 January 2002 – via SAFLII.