South Africa

South Africa
Suid-Afrika · iNingizimu Afrika
Capital	Pretoria (executive), Cape Town (legislative), Bloemfontein (judicial)
Continent	Africa
Subregion	Southern Africa
Cannabis Status
Legal Status	Private adult use and cultivation lawful; no commercial market
Status Since	2018
Enforcement	Limited; unlicensed commercial trade policed
Documentation
Growing Regions	0
Growing Areas	0
Accessions	0

South Africa has one of the oldest and most fully documented cannabis cultures in Africa. The plant is known across the country as dagga, a name adopted into Afrikaans from a Khoekhoe word, and southern African peoples were smoking it long before European settlement. The German naturalist Peter Kolb recorded the Khoikhoi use of dacha at the Cape between 1705 and 1713, noting that they had used it before tobacco reached them, which places cannabis use in the region before the Dutch settlement of 1652. The earliest records are treated with caution, because the same vernacular term was applied to the unrelated indigenous plant Leonotis leonurus ("wild dagga"), so the first written mentions attest the word rather than, unambiguously, the cannabis plant.

Cannabis was criminalised in South Africa through a sequence of colonial measures that began with restrictions on Indian indentured labourers in Natal and culminated in national prohibition in the 1920s. In 1923 the government of Jan Smuts asked the League of Nations to bring cannabis under international control, an intervention that fed into the inclusion of the plant in the 1925 Geneva International Opium Convention and gave South Africa a formative role in the global prohibition of cannabis.

Prohibition held for most of a century until 2018, when the Constitutional Court, in Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development v Prince, decriminalised the private use, possession and cultivation of cannabis by adults on the ground of the constitutional right to privacy. The Parliament later passed the Cannabis for Private Purposes Act, assented to on 28 May 2024, to codify the judgment, although the Act was not yet in force in 2026 and no legal commercial market for the plant existed.

The traditional heartland of drug-type cannabis is Mpondoland in the Eastern Cape, where the crop has underpinned rural livelihoods for generations. Since decriminalisation, low-potency landrace growers in the region have been displaced on price by high-potency commercial material and locked out of the licensed medical market by cost, while the South African landraces themselves have never been scientifically characterised: no peer-reviewed study has profiled the chemistry or genetics of a named South African landrace, and international genome databases hold no African cannabis assemblies at all.

Etymology and vernacular

The word dagga entered South African Dutch, and from it Afrikaans and South African English, as an adaptation of a Khoekhoe term rendered by early writers as dachab, dacha or daxa-b. The ethnographer Brian du Toit argued that the root is the Khoekhoe word for tobacco and that cannabis was distinguished as a kind of "green tobacco". The same term was also applied to Leonotis leonurus, an indigenous plant of the mint family whose jagged leaves resemble cannabis and which the Khoikhoi smoked for a mild effect; the two plants are unrelated, and the overlap is the source of lasting ambiguity in the early colonial record.

Cannabis carries distinct names in the country's other languages, including insangu in Zulu, umya in Xhosa and matekoane in Sotho; these terms are unrelated to the Khoekhoe dagga, and the separation of the Khoisan and Bantu-language vocabularies has been noted as a question in the history of the plant's spread.^{[verification needed]} The term ganja was introduced separately by Indian indentured labourers in Natal from 1860.

Early history

Precolonial and early-colonial use

Systematic documentary evidence begins with the accounts of European travellers at and beyond the Cape. The journal of Jan van Riebeeck records the Khoikhoi esteem for daccha in 1658, the earliest written use of the term, although whether it denotes cannabis or wild dagga at that date is disputed.^{[verification needed]} Kolb's Caput Bonae Spei Hodiernum (1719) gives the first detailed account, describing dacha as a herb the Khoikhoi prized above all others, mixed with tobacco and carried as a travelling provision, and stating that they had used it before tobacco was known to them. Later eighteenth-century travellers distinguished the two plants more carefully: Carl Peter Thunberg separated hemp from "wild dakka", and François Le Vaillant identified the smoked dagha explicitly as "the hemp of Europe".

Among Bantu-speaking peoples the plant was long established as a cultivated crop. The missionary-ethnographer A. T. Bryant recorded that Zulu communities grew insangu in every homestead, a claim that, like other colonial-era ethnography, carries the racial framing of its period and is cited here as attributed testimony rather than neutral fact. Archaeological work places the smoking habit in Africa well before the arrival of tobacco: dated pipe finds across the continent, including fourteenth-century water-pipe bowls from Ethiopia that retained cannabis residue, establish an indigenous smoking tradition into which cannabis was absorbed.

Dispersal

How cannabis reached southern Africa is not settled. The geographer Chris Duvall holds that the plant came to eastern Africa from southern Asia by maritime trade, perhaps by about 1000 CE, and spread within the continent mostly after 1500, reaching a regional exchange economy between Bantu farmers and Khoisan hunter-gatherers by the late seventeenth century; he stresses that the archaeobotanical record is thin and the geography inferred. Du Toit argued earlier for an introduction by Arab maritime traders and a southward spread carried by Bantu-speaking migrants. The historian David Gordon has traced how indigenous psychoactive substances, dagga among them, structured trading networks among the precolonial Khoikhoi, and how consumption shifted as those communities were drawn into colonial dependence.^{[verification needed]} The relationship between the developments in Asia and those documented for the Cape connects South Africa to the wider dispersal history recorded in sources such as the Herbarium Amboinense.

Legal history

Colonial prohibition

The first restrictions targeted the ganja brought by Indian indentured labourers: section 70 of Natal's Law 2 of 1870 empowered the prohibition of the plant's use among "coolies", and the association of cannabis with racial anxiety and alleged insanity spread through the colonies, reinforced by texts such as C. J. G. Bourhill's 1912 Edinburgh dissertation on "the smoking of dagga among the native races". National prohibition followed: 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. Enforcement was racially structured, targeting urban possession by Black South Africans while tolerating cultivation in the rural reserves, and cannabis control operated as one instrument within the wider legal architecture of segregation.

The international dimension

South Africa did not only prohibit cannabis domestically; it pressed for its international control. In 1923 the Union government asked the League of Nations to add "Indian hemp" to the list of controlled drugs, a request the Advisory Committee on Traffic in Opium took up and which, alongside Egypt's intervention, led to cannabis being written into the 1925 Geneva International Opium Convention. The episode is a recurring theme in the history of international drug control, in which South Africa and Egypt are credited with fixing cannabis into the global prohibition regime.

Apartheid-era law

Prohibition was tightened under apartheid. The Abuse of Dependence-Producing Substances and Rehabilitation Centres Act 41 of 1971 introduced severe penalties, and the Drugs and Drug Trafficking Act 140 of 1992 became the principal statute governing the plant, listing it in its schedules and providing the framework of offences that stood until 2018. Across the century from 1922, cannabis policy remained bound up with the country's racial order.

The 2018 Constitutional Court judgment

On 18 September 2018 the Constitutional Court, in a unanimous judgment written by Zondo ACJ, confirmed that criminalising an adult's use, possession or cultivation of cannabis in private for personal consumption unjustifiably limited the right to privacy in section 14 of the Constitution. The Court read down section 4(b) and, for cultivation, section 5(b) of the Drugs and Drug Trafficking Act 140 of 1992 and section 22A(9)(a)(i) of the Medicines and Related Substances Act 101 of 1965. It held that privacy is not confined to the home, substituting "in private" for the High Court's narrower "private dwelling", and it declined to fix any permitted quantity, leaving that to Parliament. The purchase of cannabis, dealing, public use and use by or in the presence of children were not decriminalised, and the declaration of invalidity was suspended for 24 months with interim relief read into the statutes. The case followed an earlier challenge by the same litigant, the Rastafari lawyer Gareth Prince, whose 2002 claim for a religious-use exemption the Court had rejected; the 2018 outcome turned on privacy rather than religion.

The Cannabis for Private Purposes Act

The Cannabis for Private Purposes Act 7 of 2024 was assented to on 28 May 2024 and published on 3 June 2024 to give effect to the judgment. The Act removes cannabis from the schedules of the Drugs and Drug Trafficking Act, provides for the expungement of past convictions for private use, and creates a framework of offences for exceeding prescribed personal limits. It sets no quantities of its own; these were left to regulations, a draft of which the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development published for comment in February 2026, proposing limits of 750 grams of cannabis and five plants per adult. Because the Act comes into force only on a date fixed by presidential proclamation, and no such proclamation had been issued by 2026, the current lawfulness of private use rests on the Prince judgment rather than on the Act. Commercial cultivation and sale, and any formal recognition of traditional growers, fall outside the Act.

Current legal status

Private adult use, possession and cultivation of cannabis are lawful; there is no legal commercial recreational market. Medical cannabis is regulated separately by the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority under the Medicines and Related Substances Act 101 of 1965, and low-tetrahydrocannabinol hemp is regulated as an agricultural crop by the Department of Agriculture under the Plant Improvement Act, whose 2018 successor statute raised the permitted hemp threshold to two per cent when it commenced in December 2025.^{[better source needed]}

Cultivation

The Eastern Cape heartland

The former Transkei districts of Mpondoland, on the Eastern Cape Wild Coast, are the country's best-known cannabis-growing region. Fieldwork in the Lusikisiki area recorded cannabis, locally insangu, as a central if unequal source of rural income, grown mainly by smallholders on plots of well under a hectare and traded through a chain in which the grower captures only a small fraction of the eventual retail price. Cultivation is also long established in the foothills of KwaZulu-Natal. 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 Eswatini's mountainous north is a further source of high-quality cannabis for the regional and European markets.

Landraces and genetics

South Africa's traditional cannabis is often referred to by market names such as "Durban Poison" and "Swazi Gold", but these are reputational trade terms rather than scientifically defined varieties, and the potency figures attached to them circulate in commercial seed-bank material without any peer-reviewed basis. The scholarly position is that the country's landraces remain uncharacterised: a 2024 review states plainly that no study has examined the diversity or chemistry of southern African cannabis landraces, and that international genome databases contain no African cannabis assemblies. A morphological survey of eight landrace collections from Lusikisiki confirmed them as Cannabis sativa but did not quantify their cannabinoid content, leaving even the chemotype of the marquee Mpondoland material formally undocumented. Surveys of cannabis on the wider South African market confirm that traditional outdoor material is generally low in tetrahydrocannabinol relative to modern indoor product, but they sample retail products rather than identified landraces.

The market and the green rush

Decriminalisation opened a commercial "green rush" from which the traditional growers were largely excluded. Medical cultivation requires a licence from the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority under section 22C of the Medicines Act; by late 2023 the authority had issued 83 such cultivation licences, four manufacturing licences and 30 research permits, and by 2020 not one cultivation licence had gone to the Eastern Cape. 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.

Government has framed the sector as an engine of rural development. President Cyril Ramaphosa told Parliament in the 2022 State of the Nation Address that the hemp and cannabis sector could create "more than 130 000 new jobs", and the National Cannabis Master Plan of 2021 set out to commercialise the value chain with the stated aim of including small growers.^{[verification needed]} Those figures are official projections rather than realised outcomes. On the ground, growers in Mpondoland report that the farm-gate price of a twenty-litre measure has fallen from about R1,500 to R2,000 before 2018 to around R500, as low-potency landrace crop, reported at between about 2.5 and 8 per cent tetrahydrocannabinol, is undercut by high-potency material at around 20 to 28 per cent. Community leaders had anticipated this exclusion when licensing began. The most widely quoted figure for the number of people who depend on cannabis income, around 900,000 growers, originates in an advocacy estimate rather than a survey and should be treated with caution.

Enforcement

For most of the twentieth century cannabis was policed heavily. Recorded seizures rose from tens of thousands of pounds in the 1930s to more than two million pounds a year by the 1960s, and mid-century United Nations returns recorded South Africa as the source of a large share of the world's reported cannabis seizures, though those early global comparisons are unreliable. 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 often-cited standing is specific to 2005 and does not describe later years, when South Africa was routinely outranked within Africa. 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 later repudiated by the UNODC as a calculation error and should not be repeated.

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. The programme used paraquat until about 1990 and glyphosate thereafter, and in 2004 it was augmented by a helicopter and spraying equipment donated by the United States. Residents reported spray drift into homes and the destruction of food crops, and after the World Health Organization classified glyphosate as a probable carcinogen in 2015 the practice drew legal and civil-society challenge; the police conducted no aerial spraying 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 and to open the medical market to small-scale community farmers.^{[verification needed]} Modern police reporting folds destroyed plants into a combined seizure weight and publishes no separate figure for the area or number of plants eradicated.

Culture and religion

Cannabis has a place in several of South Africa's cultural and religious traditions. It is used as a sacrament by the country's Rastafari communities, whose most prominent legal advocate, Gareth Prince, brought both the 2002 religious-freedom challenge and the litigation that ended in the 2018 privacy judgment.^{[verification needed]} Cannabis also appears in the practice of traditional healers, who are reported to use the plant, sometimes with others, in medicine and divination, although the strongest such claims rest on individual testimony and are presented as reported rather than established.

Growing regions

South Africa's growing regions and areas are documented on the wiki through the accession and hub records that carry the property <syntaxhighlight lang="text" class="" style="" inline="1">Has country=South Africa</syntaxhighlight>. No formal growing-region pages have yet been created; the Eastern Cape and Mpondoland heartland and the KwaZulu-Natal foothills are the primary candidates.

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. At the same time the material has never been collected or characterised: with no chemotype or genetic study of any named South African landrace and no African cannabis genome in the international databases, the varieties are being eroded before they have been documented, a gap that makes conservation both urgent and, as yet, unaddressed.

See also

• Cannabis sativa
• Landrace Cannabis
• Caput bonae Spei hodiernum (1719)
• The African Roots of Marijuana (2019)