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Cannabis in South Africa

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Cannabis in South Africa
A forested river gorge opening onto the sea between steep green hills
The Umzimvubu River gorge at Port St Johns, in Mpondoland, the heartland of the traditional crop.
Overview·History·Cultivation·Law
Religion and culture

Cannabis in Rastafari culture·Cannabis in Xhosa culture·Cannabis in Zulu culture

Places

Mpondoland·Eastern Cape·KwaZulu-Natal

Category

Cannabis in South Africa is one of the oldest and best-documented cannabis cultures 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 judged its most plausible source to be the Khoekhoe noun daXa-b, which among other things means "tobacco"; with the qualifier !am ("green") it gives !amaXa-b, "green tobacco", the form used for cannabis.[1]: 89 Cannabis was smoked in southern Africa well before European settlement. Its history 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.[1][2][3]

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, and writers on the trade treat the three countries as one largely closed cannabis market, the "southern African cannabis complex".[4][5][6]: 3

Despite this long history 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

Main article: History of cannabis in South Africa

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 across the Indian Ocean, perhaps a thousand years ago, and spread widely within the continent mostly after 1500.[10][11]: 11–12 Cannabis was smoked in Africa before tobacco arrived: fourteenth-century water-pipe bowls from Ethiopia retain cannabis residue, an East African comparandum rather than direct evidence for the south.[12] An intoxicant the Khoikhoi called dagga was an article of the precolonial exchange economy, sought through trading expeditions to cultivators in the east. The historian David Gordon argues, however, that the narcotic these powerful eastern Khoikhoi, the Inqua and Attaqua, actually cultivated and traded in the seventeenth century was probably not cannabis but canna, a Karoo root chewed after fermentation and botanically distinct from the cannabis plant, their arid country being ill-suited to cannabis; in his account dagga came to denote cannabis in Cape trade by the eighteenth century.[13]

The first written accounts come from 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, though its referent is disputed: Gordon reads this dacha as the canna root, while others have taken it for cannabis or for the unrelated plant Leonotis leonurus ("wild dagga"), so the earliest mentions attest the word rather than, unambiguously, the cannabis plant.[13][1][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.[15]

Prohibition and the international-control role

The earliest official moves against cannabis in Natal targeted not the indigenous crop but the ganja brought by Indian indentured labourers, and none of them took effect. A medical officer's request for prohibition in 1884 left the Executive Council divided and no rule was issued, and the Indian Immigrants Commission of 1885 to 1887 then asked the Governor in Council to exercise his powers under section 70 of Law 2 of 1870 to prohibit the possession and use of the hemp plant by indentured labourers, and again no rule appears to have followed. At the time of Union Natal still had no laws controlling cannabis, while the Cape Colony had prohibited it under Act 34 of 1891.[6] 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.[6][16]

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.[16] 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.[2][17][18]

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.[16][19][20]

Enforcement and aerial eradication

Main article: Herbicide spraying in South Africa

From the 1980s the South African Police Service eradicated rural crops from the air, spraying herbicide over the Transkei and KwaZulu-Natal from low-flying helicopters.[21] 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.[22] In 2018 the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights recommended that South Africa suspend the aerial spraying of cannabis in Mpondoland and offer the affected communities alternative development programmes, including a licensing programme that would admit small-scale community farmers to the medical cannabis market.[24]

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.[3] Parliament passed the Cannabis for Private Purposes Act in 2024 to codify the judgment, although the Act was not yet in force in 2026.

Cultivation and landraces

Main article: Cannabis cultivation in South Africa

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. Eastern Pondoland has produced the most cannabis for many decades, its broken countryside of gorges and ravines impeding police access to the plantations.[4] In the country's poorest province, where poor soils limit other cropping, cannabis is a central if unevenly distributed part of rural livelihoods; from fieldwork in a Pondoland village the anthropologist Thembela Kepe found that not all growers prosper and that they capture only a small share of the eventual price, receiving perhaps 16 to 40 rand per kilogram against city dealers' profits of around 1,000 rand.[4] Kepe argued that decriminalisation might not help them, since the illegality of the trade is part of what keeps prices high and an opened market could be captured by larger businesses.[4] After 2018 the traditional crop was undercut on price by commercial genetics.[8]

KwaZulu-Natal and the regional complex

KwaZulu-Natal has long been a source of the crop. In 1929 the magistrate of Weenen in Natal described his district as a "chief supply centre" for the Union, and in the 1950s Natal accounted for more than half of all the cannabis the police seized in the country.[16] In 1997 the Mail & Guardian described the Tugela Valley as a dagga-producing region, with fields in the kloofs and valleys of the river from its lower reaches near the sea to its upper reaches in the Msinga district.[25]

The historian Craig Paterson describes South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland as "a kind of self-sufficient, closed cannabis market", the southern African cannabis complex, in which growing is most concentrated in Lesotho, Swaziland and the former Transkei.[6]: 3 The sociologist Laurent Laniel, after fieldwork in Lesotho in 1997, wrote of a South African "cannabis complex" in which parts of KwaZulu-Natal and the former Transkei, together with Lesotho and Swaziland, had specialised in growing cannabis for the country's urban markets.[26] Lesotho is a major producer whose crop goes largely to the South African market, and the mountainous north of Eswatini is a further source of cannabis reputed for its quality.[27][28][5]

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] 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.[29][30] 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

Main article: Cannabis law in South Africa

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 the third-highest national total in the world that year. In later years South Africa was routinely outranked within Africa, standing second on the continent in 2022 and sixth in 2023.[31][32] 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.[33]

Private adult use, possession and cultivation of cannabis are lawful, following the 2018 Prince judgment.[3] 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.[34] 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.[35] There is no legal commercial recreational market. Medical cannabis is regulated separately by the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority (SAHPRA), which licenses its cultivation under section 22C(1)(b) of the Medicines and Related Substances Act 101 of 1965.[36] Since a 2020 amendment to that Act's schedules, raw cannabis and products made from it for industrial use and not for ingestion, at 0.2 per cent tetrahydrocannabinol or less, are excluded from Schedule 6.[37]

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 licences, and by 2020 not one had gone to the Eastern Cape.[38][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.[9][39] 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][40]

Preparations and consumption

Engraving of a curved ox horn with a long reed entering its side at an angle, a small bowl at the reed's end
"Egoodu, or Smoking Horn": the Zulu water pipe drawn by Allen Francis Gardiner on his 1835 journey, a reed set into the side of a horn filled with water.

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.[1][12]

Among the Zulu the water pipe was a horn, the igudu. Allen Gardiner, who travelled in the Zulu country in 1835, illustrated an "Egoodu, or Smoking Horn": a reed set into the side of an ox's horn filled with water.[41]: 106 A.T. Bryant's Zulu–English dictionary of 1905 defines i(li)-gudu as a horn for smoking wild hemp.[42]: 205 In the Zulu form that du Toit describes, the reed carrying the clay bowl enters the side of an ox or large antelope horn at an angle. The horn is half filled with water and the smoker draws the smoke through the water from its large open end.[1]: 102–103[43]: 281 In 1888 an example from Zululand, given by John Medley Wood of the Durban Botanic Gardens, entered the Economic Botany Collection of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, where it is catalogued as EBC 67634. Its label describes the horn as partly filled with water and the smoke as inhaled from the large end.[44][45][46]: 225 In 1909 a Zululand magistrate asked for a circular "prohibiting boys under the age of puberty and all females from smoking the horn", which the historian Thembisa Waetjen glosses as the customary dagga pipe.[19]: 87

Traditional outdoor material is generally low in tetrahydrocannabinol relative to high-potency indoor product, although the surveys of the modern market that show this sample retail products rather than identified landraces.[47] 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

Main articles: Cannabis in Rastafari culture, Cannabis in Xhosa culture and Cannabis in Zulu culture
A pressed cannabis branch with leaves on a herbarium sheet with handwritten labels
The cannabis branch Henry Callaway sent from Natal to Kew in 1857 under the name Insango.

Cannabis figures in the medicine and material culture of several of the country's peoples. Among the Xhosa a single-author ethnobotanical survey records the plant under the names umya, intsangu and matakwane, its leaves used against whooping cough and asthma and, crushed, to reduce anxiety; Kepe's Pondoland livelihoods study records two of these names independently.[48][4] Among the Sotho the plant is known as matekoane and is recorded in treatments for asthma and other conditions.[49] Among the Zulu the plant is called insangu.[50] Bryant's Zulu–English dictionary of 1905 enters the plant as i-nTsangu, wild hemp, smoked in the horn and used medicinally for thrush, sore eyes and poulticing tumours.[42]: 645

Herbarium and museum labels also record the name. Kew received a branch from the Reverend Dr Henry Callaway in 1857 under the name Insango.[51] Medley Wood's Zululand pipe is labelled as a pipe for smoking Insangu.[44] A sheet collected by Father F. Mayr between 1890 and 1910 is tagged Insangu and records the plant's use for thrush, sore eyes and tumours and for smoking.[52] The name also stands in the locality line of a sheet collected at Durban in 1921.[53]

The foundational compendium for these vernaculars and uses is Watt and Breyer-Brandwijk's Medicinal and Poisonous Plants of Southern and Eastern Africa (1962).[54]

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 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.[55] The sacramental use of cannabis, smoked, taken as tea and baked into food, brought Rastafari into collision with the country's drug law.[55][56] 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.[57][3]

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]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 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.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 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.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 "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.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 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.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Gastrow, P. (2003). Mind-blowing: the cannabis trade in southern Africa (Report). Cape Town: Institute for Security Studies.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 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.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 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.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 Nowicki, L. (29 July 2024). "Mpondoland dagga growers left out to dry". GroundUp.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 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.
  10. ↑ 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.
  11. ↑ Duvall, Chris S. (2019). The African Roots of Marijuana. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. doi:10.1215/9781478004530. ISBN 978-1-4780-0394-6.
  12. ↑ 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.
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 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.
  14. ↑ 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.
  15. ↑ 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.
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 16.2 16.3 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.
  17. ↑ 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.
  18. ↑ Mills, J.H. (2003). "'An allusion was made to hemp in the notes appended to the Hague Opium Convention': 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.
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 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.
  20. ↑ Waetjen, T. (2022). "South Africa's century of cannabis politics, 1922–2022". South African Historical Journal. 74 (2). doi:10.1080/02582473.2022.2128274.
  21. ↑ Eliseev, A. (18 September 2006). "Aerial assault destroys R200m dagga fields". IOL. Retrieved 21 October 2026.
  22. ↑ 22.0 22.1 de Greef, K. (7 April 2016). "Cash crops poisoned in Pondoland". GroundUp.
  23. ↑ "Cannabis: forced crop eradication in South Africa". International Drug Policy Consortium. 19 January 2016.
  24. ↑ UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (29 November 2018). Concluding observations on the initial report of South Africa (E/C.12/ZAF/CO/1) (Report). United Nations. paras. 68–69.
  25. ↑ Koch, E.; Mthembu, E. (25 July 1997). "The crop that clothes, feeds and educates … is illegal". Mail & Guardian. Retrieved 21 October 2026.
  26. ↑ Laniel, L. (August 2001). "Cannabis in Lesotho". Seminar. No. 504. Retrieved 21 October 2026.
  27. ↑ Bloomer, J. (2019). "Turning cannabis into cash: agrarian change and Lesotho's evolving experience". EchoGéo (48). doi:10.4000/echogeo.17612.
  28. ↑ 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.
  29. ↑ Dumani, A.; Silwana, T.T.; Mpambani, B.; Oyedeji, A.O.; Egbichi, I.; Seepe, A.H. (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.
  30. ↑ Dumani, A.; Silwana, T.T.; Egbichi, I.M.; Oyedeji, A.O.; Mpambani, B.; Seepe, H.A. (2025). "Effect of propagation techniques on growth, development, oil yield, and quality of medicinal Cannabis (Cannabis sativa) found in Lusikisiki, Eastern Cape, South Africa". Horticulturae. 11 (12) 1428. doi:10.3390/horticulturae11121428.
  31. ↑ United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2007). Cannabis in Africa: an overview (Report). UNODC.
  32. ↑ United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2025). World Drug Report 2025, Statistical Annex (Report). UNODC.
  33. ↑ United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Regional Office for Southern Africa (2002). South Africa: country profile on drugs and crime (Report). UNODC.
  34. ↑ "Cannabis for Private Purposes Act 7 of 2024". Republic of South Africa. 3 June 2024.
  35. ↑ 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.
  36. ↑ "Pre-licence status: status of application for a licence in terms of section 22C(1)(b) of Medicines and Related Substances Act, 1965 (Act 101 of 1965)" (PDF) (Template letter). South African Health Products Regulatory Authority. Retrieved 8 October 2026.
  37. ↑ "THC and CBD information". South African Health Products Regulatory Authority. Retrieved 8 October 2026.
  38. ↑ "Permits to change the lives of farmers". SAnews. South African Government News Agency. 31 October 2023.
  39. ↑ 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.
  40. ↑ Clark, C. (14 October 2019). "'People feel betrayed': small-scale dagga growers fear exclusion from legal trade". GroundUp.
  41. ↑ Gardiner, A.F. (1836). Narrative of a journey to the Zoolu country, in South Africa, undertaken in 1835. London: William Crofts – via Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.
  42. ↑ 42.0 42.1 Bryant, A.T. (1905). A Zulu-English dictionary (PDF). Pinetown, Natal: Mariannhill Mission Press – via Wikimedia Commons.
  43. ↑ Shaw, M. (1938). "Native pipes and smoking in South Africa" (PDF). Annals of the South African Museum. 24: 277–302 – via Wikimedia Commons.
  44. ↑ 44.0 44.1 "Pipe for smoking cannabis, catalogue number 67634". Economic Botany Collection. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Retrieved 24 September 2026.
  45. ↑ "How to use the Economic Botany Collection database". Economic Botany Collection. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Retrieved 24 September 2026.
  46. ↑ Schrire, B.D. (1983). "Centenary of the Natal Herbarium, Durban, 1882–1982". Bothalia. 14 (2): 223–236. doi:10.4102/abc.v14i2.1167.
  47. ↑ 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.
  48. ↑ 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.
  49. ↑ 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.
  50. ↑ Bryant, A.T. (1949). The Zulu People, As They Were Before the White Man Came. Pietermaritzburg: Shuter & Shooter. pp. 222–223.
  51. ↑ "Occurrence 6194769666: Cannabis sativa L." GBIF. Global Biodiversity Information Facility. Retrieved 23 September 2026.
  52. ↑ "Digitised sheet NU0039265". The Bews Virtual Herbarium. Bews Herbarium, University of KwaZulu-Natal. Retrieved 23 September 2026.
  53. ↑ "Cannabis sativa L., barcode NBG1533367-0, in the Botanical Database of Southern Africa (BODATSA)". Plants of southern Africa. South African National Biodiversity Institute. Retrieved 23 September 2026.
  54. ↑ Watt, J.M.; Breyer-Brandwijk, M.G. (1962). The Medicinal and Poisonous Plants of Southern and Eastern Africa (2nd ed.). Edinburgh: E. & S. Livingstone.
  55. ↑ 55.0 55.1 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.
  56. ↑ 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.
  57. ↑ "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.
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