Gwassi Hills

Gwassi Hills
Gwasi Hills, Gwassi Forest
ActiveRecorded as grown here since 2000
⛶
Geography
Country	Kenya
Province/State	Homa Bay
Sub-county	Suba South
Coordinates	-0.70, 34.12
Landscape
Area	320 km²
Terrain	A group of steep hills near Lake Victoria, with a gazetted forest and terraced farms on the slopes; approximately the Gwassi North and Gwassi South wards
Growing history
Documentation
Appellations	0
Accessions	0
Conservation
Populations	none documented yet

Gwassi Hills (also spelled Gwasi) is a cannabis growing area in Homa Bay County, in western Kenya, in the hills of Suba South near Lake Victoria. A United Nations study of 1999 named the remote Gwassi Hills among the places said to produce good-quality bhang, as cannabis is called in Kenya.^: 21 In May 2024 officials found cannabis planted in clearings of the hill forest and uprooted it from tens of acres.

Geography

The Gwassi Hills are a group of 24 hills near Lake Victoria. The Nairobian put their area at 37,233 hectares in 2024, of which 4,841 hectares lay within the gazetted forest, and described them as so hard to climb that outsiders kept away. Citizen Digital called the Gwasi forest a gazetted water tower of more than 6,000 acres in Suba South. Suba is hilly and has many forests, and the Nation counted Gwassi among the fragile forests of Homa Bay County, where illegal logging is the main threat.

In 2026 the Nation reported that Gwassi had been gazetted as a nature reserve in 2005, after public protest over encroachment; before that it was trust land, run by the local authorities for the communities round it. Farms were climbing higher up the slopes each year, on terraces cut into the hillsides for maize, sorghum and other crops. No clear boundary divided state land from private land, and residents whose crops and houses stood on government land were often in conflict with rangers of the Kenya Forest Service.

Cannabis in the hills

The 1999 study was The Drug Nexus in Africa, published by the United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention. It reported that cannabis growing in Kenya, long established in the west of the country, had turned in recent years from a minor crop for a limited local market into a commercial crop grown on a large scale. Good-quality bhang, high in THC, was said to come from three districts of Western Province, from the remote Gwassi Hills area, and from four districts of Nyanza Province.^: 21

On 10 May 2024, the national tree-planting day, forest rangers and government officials leading a planting exercise inside Gwassi Forest came on a clearing where tens of acres of trees had been felled and bhang planted in their place. Sebastian Okiring, the deputy county commissioner for Suba, said they had found bhang and vegetables where they expected trees. Over the next days the officials uprooted the plants from 30 acres and treated the ground with chemicals so that they would not grow back. Okiring said that those behind the farms had logged the forest before planting.

By 27 May, Citizen Digital reported, operations led by Okiring had found more than 40 acres of bhang on the hilltops over two weeks. The latest find, five acres, followed a tip from residents, and the officers took several hours to reach the fields. Two camps had been set up at the foot of the hills, at Kinchororio and Kithereka, to clear the crop, and trees were to be planted where it had been uprooted. On 6 June The Nairobian reported that Moses Lilan, the Homa Bay county commissioner, had said that officers had destroyed bhang growing on more than 50 acres of the hills. It had been grown, he said, for sale in Homa Bay County and elsewhere in the country.

In 2026 the Nation wrote that some people in the bhang trade used the rugged hills to grow it undetected. A resident of Kisaku village said that the authorities found it hard to send searchers up the slopes, and that the dealers took advantage of it.

Accessions

No accessions documented yet.

Recent news

No recent news items.

See also

• Kenya
• Mount Kenya forest