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Cannabis in Madagascar

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Cannabis in Madagascar (Cannabis sativa) was described in 1661 by Étienne de Flacourt, who wrote that the island's inhabitants grew hemp with care so that they could smoke its leaf like tobacco.[1] The plant's name in Malagasy is rongony, which 19th-century dictionaries define as hemp.[2][3] The geographer Chris Duvall holds that cannabis reached Madagascar at least 1,000 years ago.[4] Pollen of the Cannabis/Humulus type in lake cores from the central highlands has been dated to about 2,200 years ago and read as a sign of the island's first human settlers, an age and a reading that are both disputed.[5][6]

Smoking rongony was made a capital offence by the Merina ruler Andrianampoinimerina, according to the royal traditions collected in the Tantara ny Andriana.[7]: 700–701 Under French rule a decree of 1915 banned its preparation, sale and consumption. A measure of 1958 added its cultivation.[8][9] Law No. 97-039 of 1997 prohibits growing the plant.[10] The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime names Betroka in the south and Analabe in the north as the main producing regions, whose crop largely supplies the island's own towns.[11]

History

Pollen in the highland lakes

Two lake cores from the central highlands hold pollen of the Cannabis/Humulus type, a joint name used because the pollen of the two genera cannot readily be told apart.[5] At Lake Tritrivakely it occurs as traces from about 2,200 calibrated years before present (around 250 BC), in Burney's 1987 study of the lake and in the pollen and diatom record that Françoise Gasse and Elise Van Campo published in 1998.[5][6] At Lake Kavitaha, about 200 km to the north, Burney found the pollen from the base of a core covering roughly the last 1,500 years, from around AD 500.[12]: 316[13]: 182 Hemp is an introduced plant on the island, of Indian origin in Philippe Beaujard's account.[14]: 183[13]: 182

Burney read the pollen as a trace of people. In Merlin's summary, he took cannabis for an early introduction by seafarers who used hemp for rope, sails, water-resistant clothing and the caulking of hulls. He read its wide distribution on the island as a regional signal of human impact.[12]: 316 The pollen, with cut-marked bones of extinct animals, became one of the two main arguments for a settlement of Madagascar in the late first millennium BC.[5] Beaujard (2011) held that hemp "could have been introduced by sailors" and that people were "certainly possible" in the highlands by around AD 500.[13]: 182

Peter Mitchell (2020) argued that the Tritrivakely pollen fails as evidence of early human presence on three counts.[5] Its age is interpolated from two of Burney's radiocarbon dates, 1240 ± 100 BP at 50 cm and 3810 ± 70 BP at 150 cm, across a stretch of the core where more sediment was entering the lake. The plant could have arrived without people: it spreads quickly in moist tropical country unaided, its pollen is carried far by the wind and birds disperse its seed, so that, Mitchell wrote, citing Burney's own discussion of 1988, a human introduction cannot be taken as certain. The identification is also open. Degraded cannabis pollen looks like that of Celtis, another genus of the Cannabaceae, which makes up as much as 40 per cent of the land-plant pollen in the upper part of the Tritrivakely diagram.[5] Pollen of the same type in a speleothem core from a cave in Botswana dates from more than 2,000 years before any evidence of cultivation in Africa south of the Equator.[5][12]: 316 Beaujard allowed that birds might have carried hemp seed from Africa. He also noted that a plant shedding as much pollen as hemp can leave it in sediments where the plant itself is scarce.[13]: 182 Kristina Douglass and colleagues (2019) found it unclear whether the hemp pollen marks a human introduction.[6]

Cut marks on elephant-bird bones more than 10,500 years old led James Hansford and colleagues (2018) to propose an early Holocene human presence, perhaps of transient visitors from across the Mozambique Channel.[15] Robert Dewar and colleagues (2013) dated a forager occupation in the north to before 2000 BC.[16] Douglass's review of the radiocarbon dates supports human presence by at least 2000 cal BP.[6] Atholl Anderson and colleagues (2018) placed the first colonisation 1350–1100 years ago.[17] Mitchell found no convincing evidence of settlement before the middle of the first millennium AD.[5] Asian crops dominate the earliest archaeobotanical assemblages of the Comoros and Madagascar, which date from the 8th to 10th centuries AD.[18] Linguistic estimates place the colonisation of Madagascar by Austronesian-speaking peoples in about the 7th or 8th century.[18] Genetic studies date the admixture of the Asian and African ancestral populations of the Malagasy to between 500 and 900 years ago and to about 1,000 years ago.[19][20] Beaujard wrote in 2011 that there was "as yet, no evidence linking early human presence to Austronesian speakers".[13]: 182

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century accounts

Part of a printed page in seventeenth-century French type from the chapter on plants of a book about Madagascar.
Flacourt's account of hemp, its names and its smoking, in the Histoire de la grande isle Madagascar (1661), p. 146.

Flacourt wrote about hemp in the chapter on plants of his Histoire de la grande isle Madagascar. The hemp-field, he wrote, was called ahetsmangha and ahetsboule (Rongogne at Manghabé), and the plant grew very well there. The inhabitants cultivated it carefully because they smoked its leaf "ainsi que le tabac" (like tobacco). In his account a smoker became dazed, more so than from a great deal of tobacco, then slept and woke cheerful, freed from care and sadness, after dreams of a thousand pleasing things; someone unused to it could be out of his senses for two or three days. Its habitual users were old women and the diviners who foretold the future; some others smoked it to ease their sadness. The stems were thrown away: Flacourt wrote that the people did not make thread, cloth or rope from the bark as the French did. He added that the leaf was used in the East Indies for the same purpose, under the name Bangue.[1] The dictionary of the language that he published in 1658 translates French chanvre (hemp) with words formed on ahets-.[21]: 75

Robert Drury, an English sailor held captive on the island for fifteen years, described in his Journal (1729) a plant called Jermaughler which, he wrote, the people of one region smoked more than others did. It stood about five feet high, with a small long leaf and a pod holding about a dozen seeds "like Hempseed". Its leaves and seeds were mixed, dried in the sun for three or four days and smoked in pipes of reed or cane (sometimes a long shell). It made the smokers drunk, their eyes "red and fiery"; Drury tried it once and felt sick and drunk for three days.[22]: 276–277 William Ellis's History of Madagascar (1838) retells Drury's description under the name rongona, "native hemp".[23]: 263–264

The Merina prohibition

The Tantara ny Andriana, a collection of Merina royal traditions compiled by the Catholic missionary Father Callet, has a section on rongony. In it Andrianampoinimerina, who disliked the plant, proclaims that anyone caught smoking it will be put to death.[7]: 700–701 Ellis wrote in 1838 that the use of rongona, "a powerful stimulant, usually smoked", had formerly been "very general" and that it was often taken before going into battle. It "has lately been prohibited by the government under the severest penalties", he continued, though he believed it was still smoked in secret, above all in districts far from the capital.[23]: 212–213

Colonial decrees, 1912–1958

Under French rule, local orders (arrêtés) of 4 December 1912 and 17 June 1915 allowed the authorities to punish hemp smokers and the keepers of hemp-smoking dens. The report that accompanied a decree of 1915 stated that the habit of smoking hemp had been spreading for some years in parts of the Malagasy population, on the coast and on the high plateaus. The decree, of 9 October 1915, prohibited the preparation, hawking, sale and consumption of "chanvre à fumer dit Rongony" (smoking hemp called rongony) in the colony and its dependencies. Offences carried a fine of 100 to 3,000 francs and imprisonment of six days to twelve months; a court could impose either penalty alone.[8] Decrees of 12 November 1916 and 20 April 1919 regulated the import, trade, possession and use of poisonous substances in the colony.[8][24][10]

A note prepared for the League of Nations in 1934 stated that "les indigènes ne font pas usage du haschisch" (the natives do not use hashish) in Madagascar and that no prosecution had been brought.[24] Four years later the physician M. Fontoynont wrote in the Bulletin de la Société de pathologie exotique that Malagasy had smoked hemp, which they called rongony, "de tout temps" (at all times). Consumption had lately risen considerably, he wrote, above all in the countryside, where it was harder to watch than in the towns. He linked the rise to the new tobacco legislation. The society adopted unanimously a resolution, to be sent to the Governor-General, asking for control of hemp cultivation.[25]

On 17 April 1958 the Representative Assembly adopted a deliberation (délibération no. 58-34/AR) that prohibited the cultivation, preparation, hawking, sale, possession and consumption of smoking hemp. It was made enforceable by Arrêté no. 145-CG, published on 31 May 1958.[9]

Law after 1960

Ordinance no. 60-073 of 28 July 1960 dealt with "la répression de la consommation du chanvre indien dit rongony" (the repression of the consumption of Indian hemp called rongony).[10] In 1993 the government told the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child that it forbade the growing, preparation, possession and consumption of rongony. The same report said that in Malagasy tradition rongony was regarded as a stimulant, was commonly used and was even taken as a medicine.[26]

Madagascar signed the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs on 30 March 1961 and ratified it on 20 June 1974.[27] It acceded to the Convention on Psychotropic Substances on the same day.[28] Its accession to the United Nations Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances followed on 12 March 1991.[29] Law No. 97-039 of 4 November 1997, on the control of narcotics, psychotropic substances and precursors, prohibits the cultivation of the cannabis plant on national territory. It repealed the ordinance of 1960 and the decrees of 1916 and 1919.[10]

Eradication and seizures

The director of the Tsaratanana Reserve, in the northern mountains, told Mongabay in 2020 that cannabis was the main cause of forest clearing there and that the problem went back to 1960.[30] In May and June 2020 a single gendarmerie operation in the north destroyed more than 80,000 plants and seized more than 16 tonnes. Over the year the Gendarmerie seized nearly 53 tonnes.[11] In June 2023 gendarmes seized 4,023 kg of plants on 30 hectares inside the Tsaratanana protected area.[31] In July 2024 gendarmes and park staff pulled up about 600,000 plants on 10 hectares in the same protected area.[32] In the south, at the end of July 2024, gendarmes at Ranomena caught six of about 25 men carrying some 650 kg brought from the Andriry area of Betroka District.[33]

Names

Abinal and Malzac's Dictionnaire malgache-français (1888) defines rongony as "Chanvre. Cannabis" and gives mifoka rongony, "to smoke hemp". It also enters soroma, hemp that is smoked; angafa or angafo, hemp and above all dry hemp; and jia, hemp leaves prepared for smoking.[2] Richardson's New Malagasy–English Dictionary (1885) identifies the plant as Cannabis sativa, whose leaves are smoked. It also has jamala, a provincial word for hemp used for smoking.[3] In Édouard Heckel's survey of the island's useful plants (1910) Rongony is Cannabis sativa, introduced hemp; soroma and jea are other names for it.[14]: 183

Earlier written forms include Flacourt's Rongogne of 1661 and Ellis's rongona of 1838.[1][23]: 212–213 Colonial decrees of 1915 and 1958 and the ordinance of 1960 name the plant "chanvre à fumer dit rongony" or "chanvre indien dit rongony".[8][9][10] A Malagasy-language newspaper report of a seizure in 2024 calls the plant rongony.[33]

Cultivation and fibre

Hemp was also grown for fibre. Heckel's entry for jea (1910) reads "chanvre introduit pour ses tiges textiles" (hemp introduced for its textile stems).[14]: 183 Duvall writes that Madagascar was the one part of sub-Saharan Africa where cannabis fibre was harvested in quantity, for hemp cloth.[4] Fontoynont wrote in 1938 that every hemp plant in the countryside was protected: farmers often spared the plants standing in their fields when they ploughed.[25]

The two producing regions that the Global Initiative names are the mountainous Andriry area near the town of Betroka and the Analabe area of Ambanja district in the north.[34][11] It reports the crop grown by subsistence farmers to add to their incomes, with local young people working in the fields or carrying the harvest. It quotes the mayor of Antsahabe commune, in Ambanja district, saying that the commune produces at least 200 tonnes a year.[11] Mongabay reported that in the Tsaratanana mountains cannabis can be grown several times a year with little care.[30]

The Real Seed Company lists Malagasy landrace lines under the name Dzamal, collected in 2025 and 2026. Its listings describe two of them as from the humid highlands of the north and the dry interior highlands of the south.[35][36]

Preparations and consumption

Fontoynont wrote that Malagasy smoked the leaves and the female flowering and fruiting tops alike. Smokers often used the hollow stem of the plant itself as a pipe, he wrote, filling it with hemp.[25] In its 1993 report the government said that rongony taken in the first fortnight of viral hepatitis was almost certain to cure it. It also said that rongony appeased hunger.[26]

The Global Initiative cites an adult prevalence of 9.1 per cent, the government's latest figure reported to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, from 2004. It also cites a figure of 14.2 per cent for past-year use reported in 2019 by the consultancy New Frontier Data.[11]

Trade

Most of the crop supplies the island's towns, the capital Antananarivo among them. Some is smuggled to the Seychelles, Mauritius, the Comoros and Mayotte.[11] Growers were reported selling green cannabis at about 20,000 ariary a kilogram, while traffickers took between 100,000 and 150,000 ariary a kilogram selling on to consumers.[11] Betroka's crop goes mainly to Antananarivo and to regional markets in the south. The Analabe crop is shipped to the Comoros by way of Nosy Be.[34]

Herbarium specimens

The herbarium of the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris holds two sheets of Cannabis sativa from Madagascar collected by "Baron, R.", recorded without locality or date.[37][38] A third sheet came from the herbarium of the botanic garden of Tananarive and was collected at Tsimbazaza on 16 September 1935.[39] Leaf was sampled from the 1935 sheet and from one of the Baron sheets in March 2021 for C. J. Grassa of Harvard.[39][37]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Flacourt, Étienne de (1661). Histoire de la grande isle Madagascar (in français). Troyes and Paris: Nicolas Oudot and Gervais Clouzier. pp. 145–146 – via Gallica.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Abinal, A.; Malzac, V. (1888). Dictionnaire malgache-français (in français). Tananarive: Imprimerie de la Mission catholique.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Richardson, J. (1885). A New Malagasy–English Dictionary. Antananarivo: London Missionary Society.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Duvall, Chris S. (2019). "A brief agricultural history of cannabis in Africa, from prehistory to canna-colony". EchoGéo (48). doi:10.4000/echogeo.17599.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 Mitchell, Peter (2020). "Settling Madagascar: When Did People First Colonize the World's Largest Island?". The Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology. 15 (4): 576–595. doi:10.1080/15564894.2019.1582567.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 Douglass, Kristina; Hixon, Sean; Wright, Henry T.; et al. (2019). "A critical review of radiocarbon dates clarifies the human settlement of Madagascar". Quaternary Science Reviews. 221 105878. doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2019.105878.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Callet. Tantara ny Andriana eto Madagascar: documents historiques d'après les manuscrits malgaches (in Malagasy). Vol. 1 (Académie malgache reissue of the 2nd ed.). Tananarive: Imprimerie officielle – via Internet Archive.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 Pruvost, Henry (1917). Substances vénéneuses : étude de législation comparée (Pharmacy thesis) (in français). Laval: Université de Nancy, École supérieure de pharmacie.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 "Arrêté n° 145-CG rendant exécutoire la délibération n° 58-34/AR en date du 17 avril 1958 de l'Assemblée représentative". Journal officiel de Madagascar et dépendances (in français) (3875). 31 May 1958 – via Gallica.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 Loi n° 97-039 du 4 novembre 1997 sur le contrôle des stupéfiants, des substances psychotropes et des précurseurs (in français), 4 November 1997
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 11.5 11.6 Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (April–May 2021). Madagascar's large-scale cannabis market remains a criminal enterprise. East and Southern Africa Risk Bulletin (Report).
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 12.2 Merlin, M. D. (2003). "Archaeological Evidence for the Tradition of Psychoactive Plant Use in the Old World". Economic Botany. 57 (3): 295–323. doi:10.1663/0013-0001(2003)057[0295:AEFTTO]2.0.CO;2.
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4 Beaujard, Philippe (2011). "The first migrants to Madagascar and their introduction of plants: linguistic and ethnological evidence". Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa. 46 (2): 169–189. doi:10.1080/0067270X.2011.580142.
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 14.2 Heckel, Édouard (1910). "Les plantes utiles de Madagascar". Annales du Musée colonial de Marseille. 2e série (in français). 8.
  15. ↑ Hansford, James; Wright, Patricia C.; Rasoamiaramanana, Armand; Pérez, Ventura R.; Godfrey, Laurie R.; Errickson, David; Thompson, Tim; Turvey, Samuel T. (2018). "Early Holocene human presence in Madagascar evidenced by exploitation of avian megafauna". Science Advances. 4 (9) eaat6925. doi:10.1126/sciadv.aat6925.
  16. ↑ Dewar, Robert E.; Radimilahy, Chantal; Wright, Henry T.; Jacobs, Zenobia; Kelly, Gwendolyn O.; Berna, Francesco (2013). "Stone tools and foraging in northern Madagascar challenge Holocene extinction models". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 110 (31): 12583–12588. doi:10.1073/pnas.1306100110.
  17. ↑ Anderson, Atholl; Clark, Geoffrey; Haberle, Simon; et al. (2018). "New evidence of megafaunal bone damage indicates late colonization of Madagascar". PLOS ONE. 13 (10) e0204368. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0204368.
  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 Crowther, A.; et al. (2016). "Ancient crops provide first archaeological signature of the westward Austronesian expansion". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 113 (24): 6635–6640. doi:10.1073/pnas.1522714113.
  19. ↑ Pierron, Denis; Heiske, Margit; Razafindrazaka, Harilanto; et al. (2017). "Genomic landscape of human diversity across Madagascar". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 114 (32): E6498–E6506. doi:10.1073/pnas.1704906114.
  20. ↑ Alva, Omar; Leroy, Anaïs; Heiske, Margit; et al. (2022). "The loss of biodiversity in Madagascar is contemporaneous with major demographic events". Current Biology. 32 (23): 4997–5007.e5. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2022.09.060.
  21. ↑ Flacourt, Étienne de (1905). Ferrand, Gabriel (ed.). Dictionnaire de la langue de Madagascar d'après l'édition de 1658 et l'Histoire de la grande isle Madagascar de 1661 (in français). Paris: Ernest Leroux.
  22. ↑ Drury, Robert (1729). Madagascar: or, Robert Drury's Journal, during Fifteen Years Captivity on that Island. London: W. Meadows.
  23. ↑ 23.0 23.1 23.2 Ellis, William (1838). History of Madagascar. Vol. 1. London: Fisher, Son & Co.
  24. ↑ 24.0 24.1 League of Nations, Advisory Committee on Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs (23 May 1934). Note préliminaire sur les aspects principaux du problème du chanvre indien et sur la législation y relative en vigueur dans certains pays (Report) (in français). O.C.1542.
  25. ↑ 25.0 25.1 25.2 Fontoynont, M. (1938). "A propos de l'intoxication des Malgaches par le « Rongony » (chanvre)". Bulletin de la Société de pathologie exotique (in français). 31 (5): 446–448.
  26. ↑ 26.0 26.1 Committee on the Rights of the Child (13 September 1993). Consideration of reports submitted by States parties pursuant to article 44 of the Convention: addendum, Madagascar (Report). United Nations. paras. 297–298. CRC/C/8/Add.5 – via Internet Archive.
  27. ↑ "Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, 1961". United Nations Treaty Collection. Chapter VI, 15. Retrieved 3 October 2026.
  28. ↑ "Convention on Psychotropic Substances". United Nations Treaty Collection. Chapter VI, 16. Retrieved 3 October 2026.
  29. ↑ "United Nations Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances". United Nations Treaty Collection. Chapter VI, 19. Retrieved 3 October 2026.
  30. ↑ 30.0 30.1 Carver, Edward (29 May 2020). "Marijuana cultivation whittling away Madagascar's largest connected forest". Mongabay. Retrieved 18 October 2026.
  31. ↑ Léonard, Hajatiana (22 June 2023). "Ambanja – Les gendarmes saisissent 4 tonnes de cannabis" [Ambanja: gendarmes seize 4 tonnes of cannabis]. L'Express de Madagascar (in français). Retrieved 18 October 2026.
  32. ↑ Mparany, Gustave (17 July 2024). "Stupéfiant – Une plantation de cannabis sur dix hectares rasée" [Narcotics: a ten-hectare cannabis plantation razed]. L'Express de Madagascar (in français). Retrieved 18 October 2026.
  33. ↑ 33.0 33.1 "Ranomena Vangaindrano : Tra-tehaka ny rongony 650kg" [Ranomena, Vangaindrano: 650 kg of cannabis seized]. Midi Madagasikara (in Malagasy). 9 August 2024. Retrieved 18 October 2026.
  34. ↑ 34.0 34.1 Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (August–September 2020). Cannabis trafficking and endangered-tortoise trade drive corruption in Madagascar. East and Southern Africa Risk Bulletin (Report). Retrieved 18 October 2026.
  35. ↑ "Dzamal – Madagascar (North)". The Real Seed Company. Retrieved 24 September 2026.
  36. ↑ "Dzamal – Madagascar (South)". The Real Seed Company. Retrieved 24 September 2026.
  37. ↑ 37.0 37.1 "Occurrence 436961449: Cannabis sativa L. (P00108131)". GBIF. Global Biodiversity Information Facility. Retrieved 21 October 2026.
  38. ↑ "Occurrence 438625501: Cannabis sativa L. (P00108132)". GBIF. Global Biodiversity Information Facility. Retrieved 21 October 2026.
  39. ↑ 39.0 39.1 "Occurrence 439292544: Cannabis sativa L. (P00108130)". GBIF. Global Biodiversity Information Facility. Retrieved 21 October 2026.
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