South Africa
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| 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 is a country at the southern tip of Africa with one of the oldest and most fully documented cannabis cultures on the continent. The plant is known throughout the country as dagga, a name adopted into Afrikaans from a Khoekhoe word, and southern African peoples were smoking it long before European settlement.[1] The 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.[2] The earliest records are read with caution, because the same vernacular term also denoted the unrelated indigenous plant Leonotis leonurus ("wild dagga"), so the first written mentions attest the word rather than, unambiguously, the cannabis plant.[3] No landrace cannabis growing regions, growing areas or accessions are yet documented on this wiki; the traditional heartland is Mpondoland, in the Eastern Cape.
Cannabis reached southern Africa in the wider dispersal of the plant through the continent, and by the seventeenth century it circulated in a regional exchange economy between Bantu-speaking farmers and Khoisan communities.[4] Distinct vernacular names attach to the plant in the country's languages, including insangu among the Zulu, umya among the Xhosa and matekoane among the Sotho, while ganja was introduced separately by Indian indentured labourers in Natal from 1860.[5]
Cannabis was criminalised through a sequence of colonial measures that began with restrictions on Indian indentured labourers in Natal and culminated in national prohibition in the 1920s.[5] In 1923 the government of Jan Smuts asked the League of Nations to bring cannabis under international control, an intervention that fed into the plant's inclusion in the 1925 Geneva International Opium Convention and gave South Africa a formative role in the global prohibition of cannabis.[6][7] Prohibition was tightened under apartheid and enforced in the rural growing districts through decades of policing and, from the 1980s, aerial herbicide spraying.[8]
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 (see Legal status).[9] 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.[10] Since decriminalisation the low-potency traditional crop of Mpondoland has been displaced on price by high-potency commercial material and smallholders have been excluded from the licensed medical market, while the country's landraces themselves remain scientifically uncharacterised.[11][12]
Geography
South Africa occupies the southern tip of the African continent, with a long coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans and an interior plateau rising to the Great Escarpment.[citation needed] Drug-type cannabis cultivation is concentrated in the wetter, summer-rainfall east of the country, where the escarpment and its seaward foothills give the terrain, rainfall and relative inaccessibility that have long favoured the crop.[11] The principal growing landscape is the Eastern Cape Wild Coast, the former Transkei, and in particular the Mpondoland districts around Lusikisiki, where cannabis is grown on smallholdings in broken, high-rainfall coastal country.[11] A second belt lies in the foothills and river valleys of KwaZulu-Natal.[8] The growing country continues across the international boundary into the highlands of Lesotho and the mountainous north of Eswatini, with which the South African crop forms a single regional production complex.[13][14]
Demographics
South Africa has a population of roughly 63 million and recognises twelve official languages.[citation needed] Its cannabis history runs across several of the country's population groups, from the Khoisan peoples who used the plant at the Cape before European settlement to the Bantu-speaking farming communities of the east and the Indian indentured population brought to Natal in the nineteenth century.[1][5]
Communities with cannabis relationships
Several communities figure in the historical and ethnographic record for their relationship to cannabis. The Khoikhoi and wider Khoisan peoples are the earliest documented users at the Cape, recorded from the seventeenth century onward.[1][2] Among Bantu-speaking peoples the plant was an established cultivated crop: Zulu communities grew insangu, and the Mpondo and other Xhosa-speaking communities of the Eastern Cape are the smallholder cultivators of the country's principal growing region, where cannabis has been a significant if unequal source of rural income.[1][11] The Indian-descended communities of Natal introduced and retained the use of ganja from the 1860s.[5] Cannabis is also used as a sacrament by South Africa's Rastafari communities, and by traditional healers in medicine and divination.[15][verification needed][16][verification needed]
Agriculture
Cannabis is one of the few high-value cash crops available to smallholders in the impoverished former-homeland districts of the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal, and in Mpondoland it has been a central, if unequally distributed, part of rural livelihoods, grown mainly 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.[11] A 2020 provincial policy paper estimated that traditional cannabis (insangu) could generate farm sales of up to R150,000 per hectare a year, while a typical Mpondoland grower working about half a hectare received an income of around R30,000 a year, the farm-gate price being roughly 30 per cent of the eventual retail value.[17] Beyond this informal crop, low-tetrahydrocannabinol hemp was declared an agricultural crop in 2021 and is regulated under the Plant Improvement Act, whose 2018 successor statute raised the permitted hemp threshold to two per cent when it commenced in December 2025.[10][better source needed]
Cannabis in South Africa
Cannabis in South Africa is among the oldest and most fully documented cannabis traditions in Africa, running from pre-colonial Khoisan and Bantu-speaking use through a century of prohibition to the constitutional decriminalisation of private adult use in 2018.[1][12] The traditional low-potency crop is concentrated in the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal and remains scientifically uncharacterised even as it is displaced on price by high-potency commercial genetics.[12][11]
History
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.[1][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 and stating that they had used it before tobacco was known to them.[2] Archaeological work places the smoking habit in Africa well before the arrival of tobacco, including fourteenth-century water-pipe bowls from Ethiopia that retained cannabis residue.[18] 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 and spread within the continent mostly after 1500, while the historian David Gordon has traced how dagga structured trading networks among the precolonial Khoikhoi.[4][19][verification needed]
The first restrictions targeted the ganja brought by Indian indentured labourers, through section 70 of Natal's Law 2 of 1870, and the association of cannabis with racial anxiety and alleged insanity spread through the colonies.[5] 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. In parallel, South Africa pressed for international control, asking the League of Nations in 1923 to schedule the plant and so helping to write it into the 1925 Geneva Convention.[6][7][20] Enforcement was racially structured, targeting urban possession by Black South Africans while cannabis control operated as one instrument within the wider legal architecture of segregation; 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.[8][21][22]
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.[23][24] 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.[23][25][verification needed] The prohibition era ended in 2018 with the Prince judgment and the enactment of the Cannabis for Private Purposes Act in 2024 (see Legal status).[9][10]
Cultivation
The former Transkei districts of Mpondoland, on the Eastern Cape Wild Coast, are the country's best-known cannabis-growing region, where the crop is grown mainly by smallholders on plots of well under a hectare.[11] Cultivation is also long established in the foothills of KwaZulu-Natal, and 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.[13][14] Traditional South African 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 material without a peer-reviewed basis.[12] A morphological survey of eight landrace collections from Lusikisiki confirmed them as Cannabis sativa but did not quantify their cannabinoid content.[26]
Preparations and consumption
Dagga is consumed mainly by smoking, a habit documented among the Khoikhoi and Bantu-speaking peoples from the earliest colonial accounts, and southern African smoking traditions include earth pipes and water pipes as well as hand-rolled forms.[1][18] Surveys of the modern South African market confirm that traditional outdoor material is generally low in tetrahydrocannabinol relative to high-potency indoor product, although they sample retail products rather than identified landraces.[27] 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.[28]
Religious and cultural use
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 a 2002 religious-freedom challenge and the litigation that ended in the 2018 privacy judgment.[9][15] 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.[29][16]
Trade and commerce
Historically South Africa has been a significant producer and exporter of cannabis. 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.[30] 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.[31]
Since decriminalisation a commercial "green rush" has developed from which the traditional growers have largely been excluded. Medical cultivation requires a licence from the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority; by late 2023 the authority had issued 83 cultivation licences, and by 2020 not one had gone to the Eastern Cape.[17] 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.[17][32] 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", a projection rather than a realised outcome.[33][verification needed] 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, an exclusion community leaders had anticipated when licensing began.[28][34]
Legal status
Private adult use, possession and cultivation of cannabis are lawful, following the Constitutional Court's 2018 judgment in Prince, which held that criminalising an adult's private use, possession or cultivation for personal consumption unjustifiably limited the right to privacy; purchase, dealing and public use were not decriminalised.[9] The Cannabis for Private Purposes Act 7 of 2024 was assented to on 28 May 2024 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 sets no quantities of its own and comes into force only on presidential proclamation, which had not been issued by 2026.[10] Draft regulations published for comment in February 2026 proposed limits of 750 grams and five plants per adult.[10] 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.[17]
Growing Regions
Landrace cannabis growing regions currently documented on the wiki: No growing regions documented yet.
Growing Areas
Landrace cannabis growing areas currently documented on the wiki: No growing areas documented yet.
Accessions
Map
List
No accessions documented yet.
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.[28] At the same time the material has never been collected or characterised: a 2024 review states that no study has examined the diversity or chemistry of southern African cannabis landraces, and that international genome databases contain no African cannabis assemblies at all.[12] The varieties are therefore being eroded before they have been documented, a gap that makes conservation both urgent and, as yet, unaddressed.[12][11]
Recent news
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See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 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.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 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.
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Duvall, C.S. (2019). "A brief agricultural history of cannabis in Africa, from prehistory to canna-colony". EchoGéo (48). doi:10.4000/echogeo.17599.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 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.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 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.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 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.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 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.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 "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.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 "Cannabis for Private Purposes Act 7 of 2024". Republic of South Africa. 3 June 2024.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 11.5 11.6 11.7 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.
- ↑ 12.0 12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4 12.5 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.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link) - ↑ 13.0 13.1 Bloomer, J. (2019). "Turning cannabis into cash: agrarian change and Lesotho's evolving experience". EchoGéo (48). doi:10.4000/echogeo.17612.
- ↑ 14.0 14.1 Gastrow, P. (2003). Mind-blowing: the cannabis trade in southern Africa (Report). Cape Town: Institute for Security Studies.
- ↑ 15.0 15.1 Chawane, M. (2012). "The Rastafari movement in South Africa: before and after apartheid". New Contree. 65: 163–188.
- ↑ 16.0 16.1 Sobiecki, J.F. (2008). "A review of plants used in divination in southern Africa and their psychoactive effects". Southern African Humanities. 20: 333–351.
- ↑ 17.0 17.1 17.2 17.3 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.
- ↑ 18.0 18.1 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.
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ Mills, J.H. (2003). "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.
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ Waetjen, T. (2022). "South Africa's century of cannabis politics, 1922–2022". South African Historical Journal. 74 (2). doi:10.1080/02582473.2022.2128274.
- ↑ 23.0 23.1 de Greef, K. (7 April 2016). "Cash crops poisoned in Pondoland". GroundUp.
- ↑ "Cannabis: forced crop eradication in South Africa". International Drug Policy Consortium. 19 January 2016.
- ↑ UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (2018). Concluding observations on the initial report of South Africa (E/C.12/ZAF/CO/1) (Report). United Nations.
- ↑ Dumani, A.; Silwana, T.T.; Mpambani, B.; Oyedeji, A.O. (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.
- ↑ 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.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: article number as page number (link) - ↑ 28.0 28.1 28.2 Nowicki, L. (29 July 2024). "Mpondoland dagga growers left out to dry". GroundUp.
- ↑ Nyazema, N.Z.; Chanyandura, J.T.; Egan, B. (2024). "The use and potential abuse of psychoactive plants in southern Africa: an overview of evidence and future potential". Frontiers in Pharmacology. 15: 1269247. doi:10.3389/fphar.2024.1269247.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: article number as page number (link) CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link) - ↑ United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2007). Cannabis in Africa: an overview (Report). UNODC.
- ↑ United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Regional Office for Southern Africa (2002). South Africa: country profile on drugs and crime (Report). UNODC.
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ Ramaphosa, C. (10 February 2022). "2022 State of the Nation Address". Republic of South Africa.
- ↑ Clark, C. (14 October 2019). "'People feel betrayed': small-scale dagga growers fear exclusion from legal trade". GroundUp.