Angola

Angola
Angola
Serra da Leba, between Lubango and Namibe
Capital	Luanda
Continent	Africa
Subregion	Central Africa
Cannabis Status
Legal Status	Illegal
Status Since	1999
Enforcement	Cultivation and trafficking 8 to 12 years' imprisonment; police destroy fields
Documentation
Growing Regions	1
Growing Areas	0
Accessions	6
Conservation
Populations	none documented yet

Angola is a country in Central Africa where cannabis is grown illegally, mostly for local consumption. Its courts and press call the plant liamba: a judgment of the Supreme Court in 2023 calls the drug "cannabis sativa (vulgo liamba)", "commonly liamba". In 2009 cannabis was grown illicitly in almost all of the country's provinces.^: 35 In the 19th century it was called riamba, liamba and diamba;^: 266 the geographer Chris S. Duvall calls diamba, liamba and mariamba Kimbundu words and mariamba the root of marihuana.^: 8

In the 19th century the plant was grown in small, often hidden plots across the interior and sold in the markets of Luanda. By 1850 most of the supply reaching the coast came from far inland with the caravans of the slave trade.^: 363 Portuguese slave owners forbade the enslaved to smoke it.^: 257 The Brazilian names diamba and liamba were traced in 1975 to "the Angolan language" of the enslaved people carried to Brazil.

Cannabis is listed in Table I-C of the drug law of 1999, Law No. 3/99. Cultivating or trafficking it without authorisation carries eight to 12 years' imprisonment; cultivating or holding it for one's own consumption carries up to three months.^{: arts. 4, 23} Angola acceded to the international drug-control conventions in 2005.^: 35

Geography

In 2003 cannabis was widespread in the central highlands and in the east and north-east of Angola. In 2015 the main growing areas of Malanje Province were the municipalities of Malanje, Cacuso, Calandula, Luquembo, Quirima and Kambundi-Katembo. Police operations of the 2020s destroyed fields in the municipalities of Cambulo and Xá-Muteba in Lunda Norte Province and seized 52 kilograms in the city of Uíge.

The botanist Friedrich Welwitsch, who collected in Angola from 1853 to 1861, found the plant cultivated at Golungo Alto and Huíla, and collected it at Pungo Andongo; Luanda was among its markets. Herbarium sheets gathered in the 20th century come from Malanje (1903), Cazengo in Cuanza Norte (1914), Silva Porto, now Kuito, in Bié (1931), Huíla (1937) and Ganda in Benguela (1962).

Demographics

Communities with cannabis relationships

The British army surgeon William Daniell spent many months in the provinces of the Kongo and Angola. He wrote that the "Ambundas, or aborigines of Angola" (the Mbundu) valued the dried plant for its narcotic effects and for medicinal virtues it was reputed to have.^: 364 In his account "the Dongos, Damaras, and other tribes to the southward of Benguela" grew it extensively.^: 363

In Welwitsch's field notes, published by William Philip Hiern in 1900, the plant is called riamba at Golungo Alto, at Huíla and at Luanda (where it was also pronounced riámba), riambe in "the Congo district", diambe in Golungo and liambe among the Mahungos and Gingos. Among the Maraoes bangue was the name of the plant dried and prepared for smoking. The Portuguese called it canhamo. In 1884 the Conde de Ficalho, a botanist, wrote that riamba, liamba and diamba were one name heard in different ways and preferred the spelling riamba.^: 266

Agriculture

By 1850 the cannabis consumed in the coastal districts came chiefly from the interior. It was also grown occasionally near the coast and could be seen growing wild on waste ground and abandoned farms. Daniell's specimen came from a small plantation on the banks of the Rio Ambriz near the town of Kincolo.^: 363 At Sange in Golungo Alto, in January 1855, Welwitsch found it cultivated almost everywhere, but always in small quantities.

In 1803 a colonial governor mentioned "a hemp plantation" in Bengo "which promised a good harvest and showed that the land was suitable for this crop", and noted that local people grew the "hemp" and smoked it dry.^: 50 Cannabis was a field crop in Angola in the 1890s. Duvall describes farmers across western Central Africa growing it in small quantities among vegetables that complemented manioc and other staples.^: 11

A field destroyed by police in 2015, some 23 kilometres south-west of Cacuso, was a plot of cassava and maize about 100 metres long and 30 wide, with cannabis grown among the food crops.

Cannabis in Angola

History

Main article: History of cannabis in Angola

On the plant's arrival, Daniell thought it more probable that it had been "introduced from central countries at some remote period" and had become naturalised than that it was native.^: 364 Ficalho believed that the smoking habit reached the Angolan interior through the centre of the continent, by the upper Zambezi and the Lovale country or further north through the states of the Muata Yanvo. He saw no reason to think that it had come in from the western coast.^: 266 Brian du Toit proposed in 1975 that riamba, the usual name in the Congo basin and northern Angola, derived from a term carried inland by Swahili and Arab traders.^{: 86–88, 101} Duvall reads the geography of the names differently: cannabis reached Central Africa from south-eastern Africa and crossed the Atlantic from there.^: 8

The principal supply was brought from a great distance inland by the slave caravans to the European factories on the coast. It was esteemed for "supporting the strength and condition of the slaves" on the long marches to the place of embarkation.^: 363 Slavers in Angola supplied cannabis to their captives while making the enslaved carry commercial shipments of the drug.^: 8 The explorer David Livingstone wrote in 1857 that the Portuguese in Angola believed so firmly in its harmful effects "that the use of it by a slave is considered a crime". The traveller Joachim John Monteiro recorded the same prohibition in 1875.^: 257 Ficalho wrote that in Angola any slave who took up "that fatal habit" was considered lost.^: 267

Ficalho also wrote that enslaved Africans carried the plant to America and that Cannabis sativa grew naturalised in several places in the northern provinces of Brazil.^: 267–268 The Brazilian psychiatrist Alvaro Rubim de Pinho wrote in 1975 that most of the enslaved people brought to Brazil at the time of the plant's arrival came from Angola and that nearly all the traditional Brazilian synonyms for marijuana, among them maconha, diamba and liamba, had their origin in "the Angolan language". He also cited the old Brazilian name fumo d'Angola, "smoke of Angola". The historian Marta Macedo has studied how cannabis entered the lives of people from Angola recruited to the plantations of São Tomé in the late 19th century.

In 1970 Portugal extended its narcotics law, Decree-Law No. 420/70 of 3 September 1970, to all its overseas provinces except Macau. Angola became independent in 1975. The law of 1999 revoked the Decree-Law of 1970, decrees of 1958 and 1967 and the drug provisions of a Decree-Law of 1968.^{: art. 45} A national committee for drug-control coordination followed in 2001 and a national drug-control strategy in 2003.^: 35 Angola acceded on 26 October 2005 to the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs and its 1972 Protocol, the Convention on Psychotropic Substances of 1971 and the 1988 Convention.

Cultivation

Welwitsch found the plant grown in all the interior districts, "always in situations more or less retired or lonely, in order to withdraw the plantations from the notice and greed of passengers". At Huíla some of the inhabitants grew it "in concealed places". Ficalho wrote that it was grown in small quantities and in secluded spots, as if the growers wished to keep it from the plunder of travellers or to keep its cultivation something of a secret.^: 266 Monteiro wrote that the plant was "cultivated round the huts everywhere in Angola".^: 257 The sheets gathered at Malanje in 1903 and at Cazengo in 1914 are of cultivated plants, cultivada on their labels.

In a police operation in Malanje Province in 2015, more than 10,000 plants were destroyed in Cacuso. In Lunda Norte in 2024 the Criminal Investigation Service seized 1,567 plants, put three fields out of use and arrested three growers. Seed of a line sold as an Angolan sativa was bought in Kinshasa in 2024 from dealers who said that it came from northern Angola.

Preparations and consumption

The flowering tops were collected and dried for smoking.^: 257 For sale, the larger stalks were separated from the leaves and seeds and the smaller stems compressed into a conical mass.^: 364 Welwitsch saw the dried herb packed for sale "in cylindrical sausage-shaped parcels, 2 to 3 ft. long and about 4 in. thick".

The drug was smoked through water. Monteiro described a straight clay pipe bowl set into the closed end of a long gourd holding a little water, through which the smoke was drawn. On caravan journeys in the cold, misty season the porters crouched in circles round the morning fires and passed the gourd from hand to hand; they said it woke and warmed them for the day's march.^: 257 Daniell describes the same arrangement of clay bowl and large gourd.^: 364 The pipes varied little in form from Angola to the Zambezi; in the interior they were called mutopa.^: 266–267 The fruits of the baobab, called mucua, also served for smoking riamba. A horned water pipe was also in Angolan use, and a variant of it in which the open end of the horn was closed and a small opening made in its top.^{: 99, 103}

The gangars, the healers of Ambriz, sometimes gave the plant medicinally as an infusion combined with Abrus precatorius and astringent barks.^: 365 Welwitsch noted that nosebleeds often followed the smoking of riamba; the people of the interior of Huíla treated them with the powdered panicles of a grass. In 2009 the International Narcotics Control Board called cannabis "the most commonly abused drug in the country".^: 35

Trade and commerce

In the mid-19th century the markets of Luanda were supplied mainly by the Bongos and other nearby peoples and from São Salvador (M'banza Kongo) and the towns near the upper Kongo, which traded with the Portuguese settlements on the coast.^: 364 Welwitsch found the herb "eagerly sought for in the markets by the natives at Loanda and in all the interior of Angola". By 1875 it was among the goods sold in quantity in the Luanda market.^: 26

Before independence, by the account of farmers in north-eastern Angola whom Peter Gastrow of the Institute for Security Studies interviewed in 1973, the region's cannabis was sold to visiting ships at Luanda. Gastrow classed Angola among the countries of southern Africa that produced substantial quantities but whose trafficking across borders appeared insignificant; some of the cannabis consumed in Namibia came from Angola. By 2009 the high profits of the trade were drawing more people into it.^: 35

Legal status

Law No. 3/99, on trafficking in and consumption of narcotic drugs, psychotropic substances and precursors, was approved by the National Assembly on 11 May 1999 and published on 6 August 1999. It took effect 90 days after publication. Its Table I-C lists cannabis (the leaves and flowering or fruiting tops of the plant from which the resin has not been extracted), cannabis resin and cannabis oil.^{: arts. 2, 46, Table I-C}

Whoever cultivates, produces, sells, transports, imports, exports or unlawfully holds a scheduled plant or substance without authorisation, other than for personal consumption, faces eight to 12 years of prisão maior; an authorised person who diverts it into trade faces 12 to 16 years. Lesser trafficking carries two to eight years. A trafficker who deals only to supply his or her own use faces up to two years and a fine, unless the quantity held exceeds five days' average personal consumption. Consuming the drug, or cultivating, acquiring or holding it for one's own consumption, carries up to three months' imprisonment, rising to a year where the quantity exceeds three days' average consumption.^{: arts. 4, 8, 9, 23}

In October 2023 the Supreme Court confirmed a sentence of five years passed in Uíge in March 2021 for trafficking 52 kilograms of cannabis under article 4 of the law. The court accepted the extraordinary mitigation applied at first instance under the Penal Code of 1886. The defendant received a pardon that cut the sentence by a quarter under Law No. 35/22.

Enforcement

Angola reported cannabis seizures of 2,223 kilograms in 1995 and 4,734 kilograms in 2000 to the United Nations. In 2001 the authorities publicly burned about 300 kilograms on the International Day against Drug Abuse. In November 2021 the police burned more than a tonne of liamba and more than 100 kilograms of cocaine; the Criminal Investigation Service had seized 1,109 kilograms of liamba from 2020 onwards, in operations that led to 257 criminal cases for the two drugs.

Growing Regions

Landrace cannabis growing regions currently documented on the wiki:

Region
Malanje

Growing Areas

Landrace cannabis growing areas currently documented on the wiki: No growing areas documented yet.

Accessions

List

Accession ID	Name	Collected	Region	Area
Almeida s.n., Malanje (1903)	Almeida herbarium specimen, Malanje (1903)	1903	Malanje
Cardoso s.n., Silva Porto (1931)	Cardoso herbarium specimen, Silva Porto (Cuíto), Bié (1931)	1931
EAG-AGO-UNK-0120240001	Angola Sativa 2024
Gossweiler s.n., Cazengo (1914)	Gossweiler herbarium specimen, Cazengo, Cuanza Norte (1914)	1914
Powell-Cotton 510 (1937)	Powell-Cotton 510 herbarium specimen, Huíla (1937)	1937
VIB-AGO-LUA-0100000001	Luanda General Population

Conservation status

The LISC herbarium in Lisbon holds nine sheets of cannabis from Angola, including two pairs of duplicates, gathered between 1903 and 1962 by J. J. Almeida, J. Gossweiler, A. Cardoso, A. R. Torre and J. M. L. B. Teixeira with A. M. Andrade. The Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris holds a sheet from Welwitsch's collections without a locality; the Missouri Botanical Garden holds a sheet gathered by A. Powell-Cotton in 1937 in Huíla, between Chicomba and the Quepungo River. Welwitsch gave his dried specimens from Huíla to the medical school in Lisbon. Seed of lines named for Angola and for Luanda is kept by seed sellers and collectors.

Recent news

No recent news items.

See also

• Cannabis and Culture (1975)
• Democratic Republic of the Congo
• Diamba
• Landrace Cannabis
• The African Roots of Marijuana (2019)