Spread of cannabis to Africa

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The spread of cannabis to Africa was the movement of the cannabis plant, and of the knowledge of how to grow and use it, from Asia into Africa and the islands of the western Indian Ocean. The plant is not native to the continent: farming began there after the crop arrived from "its evolutionary homeland in southern Asia".^{: para. 9} When, by which routes and with whom it came are argued over. The geographer Chris S. Duvall dates its arrival to at least 1,000 years ago, in Madagascar and on the Mediterranean coast.^{: para. 10} In his account it reached East Africa from South Asia and North Africa through connections around the Mediterranean, then spread widely south of the Sahara.^: 12

Many older accounts credited Arab traders and the spread of Islam with carrying the plant and the habit of smoking it into Africa.^: 17 The sociologist Brian du Toit set out such an account in 1975.^: 82–87 Duvall rejects it. He points to cannabis residue in 14th-century water pipes from Christian Ethiopia and to the earliest written records south of the Sahara, from places far from Arab or Muslim influence.^: 17–18 The plant reached the Mascarene Islands later: on Réunion its name points to Madagascar, on Mauritius to India. West Africa was among the last regions it reached.^{: 228: para. 15}

Accounts of the spread

Sula Benet (1975) placed the origin of the ritual use of hemp, and of the name cannabis, in the ancient Near East. From there, in her view, its ritual uses were carried to Egypt and Africa in the middle of the second millennium BC "through trade contacts, migrations and wars".^: 48

Du Toit, writing in the same volume, held that cannabis "spread down the east of Africa with Arab traders". He dated trade links between Arabia and the East African coast to "the first centuries A.D." and the permanent Muslim settlements on Zanzibar, Pemba and at Kilwa to no later than the 12th century.^{: 82, 84} He thought it most likely that Arab traders brought the plant to the coast of Mozambique from India. The Bantu-speaking peoples of the coast from Lamu to the Zambezi, he suggested, took up smoking from "Arabs who smoked bangi, a practice which they had brought from India", together with the water pipe.^{: 83, 86} The volume's editor, Vera Rubin, wrote that his hypothesis was "bolstered" by an Ethiopian find of 14th-century pipe bowls holding cannabis residue.^: 5 Nikolaas J. van der Merwe, who analysed those bowls, judged that how the plant reached the area was unknown and "an Arabic source seems probable".^: 80

Duvall (2019) argued that the idea of Arabic-speaking Muslims bringing cannabis use into Africa had dominated writing on the plant for 150 years. He traced it from European visitors in Central Africa in the 1860s through F. R. Wulsin (1932), who tied hemp smoking to "the distribution of Islam", to a history of cannabis by Martin Booth (2005).^{: 17, 238} In Duvall's reading the narrative rests on nothing but "its repeated publication". There is no evidence that cannabis was used in Arabia in the time of Muhammad. Clear and consistent evidence appears only about 900 years ago in Persia and 800 years ago in Egypt and Arabia. By then smoking pipes were widespread in eastern and southern Africa. In 14th-century Ethiopia, a Christian country, they held cannabis. The earliest written records of the plant south of the Sahara date from the 1600s and come from southern Mozambique, Madagascar and South Africa, far from Islam.^: 17–18 Arabic- and Persian-speaking merchants lived in coastal towns such as Zanzibar from the first millennium AD but had almost no presence beyond them. The "Arabs" whom 19th-century European travellers blamed for spreading cannabis smoking inland were, in Duvall's account, Swahili-speaking Africans. Their porters smoked the plant. In his words, "Africans at the very bottom of international commerce" carried it across the continent.^: 18

On pipes, Duvall held that smoking pipes were made in Africa south of the Sahara centuries before 1492 and that the water pipe originated in Africa.^: 16 He quoted E. J. Keall (1993), for whom African pipes were more likely to have come from the Middle East. He linked that view to Berthold Laufer (1930), who took water pipes in Madagascar for proof that Portuguese ships had brought them from Persia. He set against both John Edward Philips's review of African pipe archaeology (1983), which in Duvall's reading concludes that water pipes reached Persia from Ethiopia.^{: 16–17, 238} Philips's own conclusion was that "the most likely hypothesis is that cannabis was smoked in water pipes in eastern and southern Africa before the introduction of tobacco". He called for research to prove or disprove it.

The historian Samson Ndanyi (2021) set Barney Warf's date of 1100 AD for the plant's arrival in Kenya beside Duvall's. In Ndanyi's quotations Duvall's book of 2019 dates the arrival "perhaps 1 000 years ago" and, in another passage, "as early as 2 000 years ago", while a book of 2015 brings the plant to Kenya "by 700 CE".^: 6 The carriers are disputed too. Ndanyi noted that scholars who reject du Toit's "Arab thesis" have proposed Indians such as Gujaratis, Axumite Ethiopians or Sabaean Arabs instead. Others warn against resting an Indian origin on the evidence of words alone.^: 5

Egypt and North Africa

The necropolis of Dra' Abu el-Naga at Thebes, where towels, bands and shrouds of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Twenty-second Dynasties were found to be made of hemp.

Cloth woven from hemp has been identified among excavated textiles at Thebes. At Dra' Abu el-Naga, Pía Rodríguez Frade found by polarised-light microscopy that towels, bands and shrouds from contexts of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Dynasties and of the Twenty-second Dynasty were made of hemp. She noted that electron microscopy or infrared spectroscopy could add support to the identification.

Ahmad Khalifa (1975) reported that, according to modern Arabic historians, cannabis came to be planted and used in Egypt around the mid-12th century, under the Ayyubid dynasty, after mystic devotees emigrated there from Syria.^: 199 Writers in North Africa began describing its psychoactive uses in the 12th century. Duvall traces that knowledge to the Levant, where edible cannabis drugs were consumed by 1000 BC. The cannabis cultures of Egypt and the Red Sea coast stayed close to the Levant's, while those of the Maghreb grew more distinct.^{: para. 12} His map of the dispersal brings the plant into Egypt by trade or travel in the 1100s and west along the coast in the 1200s to 1400s, the second date marked with a query.^{: Illustration 1}

In the Maghreb, hemp grown for fibre and seed came first. In Jamal Bellakhdar's reading, the 10th-century geographer Ibn Hawqal recorded it in the Sous and around Carthage. The resin-bearing plant came later and from the east. Ibn al-Bayṭār met it only in Egypt, during his stay there between 1224 and 1227. Leo Africanus, travelling between 1511 and 1519, described hashish eaten at Tunis and Constantine. Bellakhdar places the change that made the Rif a producing region in the 17th and 18th centuries, with cultivars probably brought from eastern Algeria. The anthropologist Roger Joseph (1975) found the origins of kif use in Morocco "too hazy" to reconstruct. He listed an Arab invasion, a pilgrim returning from Mecca and enslaved people brought from West Africa as possible carriers.^: 191 Duvall dates the earliest evidence of hashish production in the region to 1921, in eastern Algeria. Before then hashish was imported, chiefly from Lebanon, Turkey and Greece.^{: para. 12}

The Horn and the East African coast

Lalibela Cave, near Lake Tana in Ethiopia, yielded two ceramic water-pipe bowls from a level radiocarbon dated to 1320 ± 80 AD. Van der Merwe tested their residues by thin-layer chromatography and found two unidentified cannabinoids that also appeared in modern cannabis pipes. He concluded that cannabis was smoked around Lake Tana in the 13th or 14th century.^: 77–80 Duvall calls the residue the "earliest direct evidence of cannabis smoking anywhere".^: 16

Duvall's map brings cannabis to the coast of East Africa by trade or travel from South Asia "before 1000 CE?" and into the Horn from the Arabian Peninsula.^{: Illustration 1} The coast lay within the Indian Ocean trade that linked it to Arabia, Persia and India. Du Toit took the "fairly early trade contacts with Zanzibar" for a likely route. He also allowed for a route through Ethiopia, but judged the east coast the most likely path.^: 83–84 Ndanyi places the arrival of cannabis in Kenya on the Indian Ocean routes that reached the coast at Mombasa, Kilifi and Lamu. By the 1500s, he writes, Portuguese sailors in eastern Africa had met with cannabis.^: 8 European sailors themselves, in Duvall's account, took up cannabis in India before 1540 and carried the habit to ports around the world, many of them in Africa.^: 22 Trade with India continued: in 1872 the bhang used on Zanzibar was imported from Bombay and Cutch.

Du Toit divided Africa into three areas of names: dagga in the south, forms of bangi in the east and centre and forms of diamba in the west.^: 81 He linked bhang to India and thought the word could have spread into East Africa "centuries ago".^: 82 For Ndanyi, bangi is a Hindi loanword in Swahili that also draws on Persian bang and Arabic banj.^: 6 Duvall maps the words for cannabis language by language and finds broad regions of shared understanding, but too little evidence to describe their cannabis cultures.^{: para. 10}

Inland and to the south

In Duvall's account cannabis came to eastern Africa from southern Asia and "dispersed widely within Africa mostly after 1500". Swahili traders organised caravans from the coast to the interior. The porters who carried their goods smoked cannabis and carried it with them.^: 18 Du Toit saw the plant carried by Swahili and Arab traders from the coast to the Great Lakes. He thought that Swahili traders from Zanzibar brought it into the Congo basin after the 1850s, where it was called rhiamba.^{: 87, 99} Accounts from 1843 and 1850 already describe cannabis use among enslaved and freed people from Angola.^{: 26, 28}

At Sebanzi Hill in Zambia, B. M. Fagan and D. W. Phillipson found four clay smoking pipes, the oldest two in use around 1100 to 1300 AD by radiocarbon dating and pottery sequences. Merlin (2003) reported that no chemical test of them had yet been possible. The excavators argued that they were used for cannabis because tobacco could not have been known there at the time.^: 315 A speleothem core from Drotsky's Cave in the Kalahari, Botswana, holds pollen of the Cannabis/Humulus type from a sample dated to about 3,800 years ago.^: 316 Peter Mitchell (2020) noted that this is more than 2,000 years older than any evidence of cultivation in Africa south of the Equator.

Duvall dates the earliest written records of cannabis south of the Sahara to the 1600s.^: 18 Du Toit knew, through Walton (1953), of an account by João dos Santos of cultivation by the Eastern Shona in the 16th century.^: 83 Duvall dates the value placed on cannabis as an appetite suppressant in southern Africa to at least the 1580s. Cannabis gardens were recorded in South Africa and Mozambique in the 18th century.^{: paras. 13–14} Du Toit judged that the daccha of the journal kept under Jan van Riebeeck at the Cape in 1658 was probably not cannabis but Leonotis leonurus.^: 88 The southern history is told in Cannabis in South Africa. From western Central Africa the plant crossed the Atlantic with enslaved people. In Duvall's account the main path of Cannabis indica to the rest of the world ran from southern Asia across the Indian Ocean to Africa south of the Sahara and from there across the Atlantic.^: 11

West Africa and the Sahara

Du Toit wrote that "Cannabis was not present in West Africa prior to World War II". If the plant had entered Africa through Egypt, he reasoned, it should have spread along the caravan routes across the Sahara. As it had not, he concluded that it either never reached West Africa or was not accepted there.^{: 81, 101} Duvall, quoting du Toit's book of 1980 to the same effect, cites primary sources for cannabis drug use in 19th-century Gambia, Liberia, Niger, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Senegal.^: 13 He agrees that the plant came late to West Africa, where it was not prominent until the 1950s.^{: para. 15} In many African places it became common only after the Second World War, when returning servicemen and merchant sailors brought it to the ports.^{: para. 20}

Duvall's map marks a crossing of the Sahara from the Maghreb to the south by trade or travel in the 1800s. The map also marks arrivals on the West African coast with the slave trade and, with a query, with Afro-Brazilian settlers.^{: Illustration 1} Cannabis use has never been prominent in the Sahel immediately south of the desert.^: 18 In 1951 J. Bouquet reported that the peoples of the Chad, Shari and Upper Ubangi regions under French rule were supplied with hemp by caravans coming mainly from the southern Sudan.

Madagascar

Main article: Cannabis in Madagascar

The passage on hemp in Étienne de Flacourt's history of 1661: the inhabitants grew it carefully to smoke its leaf and made no thread, cloth or rope from its stems.

Duvall dates the arrival of cannabis in Madagascar to at least 1,000 years ago.^{: para. 10} His map links the island with Mozambique "before 1400?".^{: Illustration 1} Older dates come from pollen. Cores from two highland lakes hold pollen of the Cannabis/Humulus type, which can be dated at Lake Tritrivakely to about 2,200 calibrated years before present. Mitchell (2020) questioned the date, which is interpolated between two radiocarbon dates, and the identification, since degraded cannabis pollen resembles that of Celtis. He also argued that the plant could have spread without people. Kristina Douglass and colleagues (2019) found it unclear whether the pollen marks a human introduction.

Du Toit allowed that early contact between Indonesia and Madagascar might make the island a stepping stone. He rejected a route through Madagascar on the evidence of the words and because the Arab link to the mainland was better documented.^: 83–84 The earliest written account comes from Étienne de Flacourt's history of 1661. The inhabitants grew hemp carefully to smoke its leaf and did not make thread, cloth or rope from its stems; Flacourt compared its use with that of Bangue in the East Indies. For Duvall, Madagascar was the one place in Africa south of the Sahara where hemp fibre was harvested in quantity, for cloth.^{: para. 11} The Malagasy name is rongony. Jamala was a provincial word for hemp used for smoking.

The Mascarenes

A specimen of cultivated cannabis gathered by the botanist L. H. Boivin on Réunion in 1848. His field slip reads cultivé par les noirs.

Duvall's map carries cannabis from Madagascar to the Mascarene Islands on slave ships in the 1700s.^{: Illustration 1} On Réunion, then the Île Bourbon, its introduction was, in the words of the anthropologist Jean Benoist (1975), "apparently quite ancient", but undocumented. The common name there, zamal, seemed to him to be of Malagasy origin. He cited Chaudenson (1973), who found the word jamala in Robert Drury's vocabulary of western Madagascar, published in 1729. Benoist judged it probable that the plant came to the island with enslaved people brought from Madagascar.^: 227–228 An unpublished parish history he cites records a crime committed in 1830 by a man who had smoked amale beforehand.^: 228 In 1848 the botanist L. H. Boivin gathered a specimen of cultivated cannabis at La Source on the island. His field slip reads cultivé par les noirs (cultivated by the Black people).

The growth of sugar cane in the early 19th century brought more enslaved Africans and Malagasy to Réunion and then indentured labourers from southern India.^: 228 Benoist recorded a memory of old Indians from the region of Calcutta who smoked zamal for pleasure in a small coconut filled with water.^: 231 On Mauritius the word zamal is not used. Mauritians call the plant ganja. Its traditional social uses there belong wholly to the Indian community.^: 228

The colonial government of Mauritius banned the import, sale and cultivation of the plant by Ordinance No. 2 of 1840, enacted at Port Louis on 2 March 1840. Its preamble stated that "Gandia (cannabis indiæ)" was "daily imported and openly sold in the Colony", and that its use, "carried to excess among the labouring class", caused disorder and some deaths. Offenders faced a fine of up to 20 pounds sterling and the destruction of their crops. The ban on import was repealed by an ordinance of 1854.

See also

• Cannabis in Madagascar
• Cannabis on the Silk Road
• Cannabis in South Africa
• Diamba
• Hashish
• Lalibela Cave
• The African Roots of Marijuana (2019)