Sudan

Sudan
السودان (as-Sūdān)
A waterfall in the Marrah Mountains, Darfur
Capital	Khartoum
Continent	Africa
Subregion	North Africa
Cannabis Status
Legal Status	Illegal
Status Since	1994
Enforcement	Growing banned (Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act 1994, art. 13); life imprisonment for growing to trade, death in aggravated cases
Documentation
Growing Regions	0
Growing Areas	1
Accessions	2
Conservation
Populations	none documented yet

Sudan (Arabic: السودان, as-Sūdān) is a country in North Africa where cannabis, called bango or hashish, is grown illegally. Since 2012 Sudanese police have said that most of the country's cannabis is grown in the locality of Radom, in the south of South Darfur State on the borders with South Sudan and the Central African Republic. By the 1790s hemp had become a regular crop in Darfur. Until 2011 Sudan also took in what is now South Sudan, and several of the older sources, among them the flora of 1929, place the plant in provinces that lie on the southern side of the present border.

The Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act of 1994, which replaced a law of 1924 on hashish and opium, bans growing the plant for any purpose and punishes growing it for trade with life imprisonment.^{: arts 2, 13, 15} Since the war between the army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) began in April 2023, reports from Darfur describe the growing at Radom spreading under RSF control.^: 12–13

Geography

Sudan covers about 1.88 million km²; before South Sudan became independent in 2011, no African country was larger. From north to south it runs through three ecological zones, desert, semi-desert and savanna of low rainfall; the average rainfall ranges from 25 mm a year in the north to 700 mm in the south. The country is generally flat apart from Jebel Marra, the Red Sea Hills and the Nuba Mountains. The Nile system is the dominant physical feature, and the country's streams and rivers drain into it or towards it.

In the mid-1990s hashish was grown in Southern Darfur, the southern states and Blue Nile State.^: 115 In 2011 cannabis was grown in commercial quantities in the southern areas of Darfur, the largest producing area of the country, and in the south of Blue Nile State, Gedaref State and the Upper Nile and Bahr el-Ghazal regions, which are now in South Sudan. The police name Radom locality in South Darfur as the main growing area. In 2015 hashish was grown in three main areas of South Darfur: Songo, Radom and the east of Jebel Marra.

Demographics

Communities with cannabis relationships

A field study made round the town of Radom in 1994 found that village leaders dated hashish growing there to the 1940s and credited merchants of the Runga, Tunjur and Barno peoples with bringing in the seed; traders from Ed Daein, Nyala and El Obeid came to buy it in the 1950s.^: 115 The peoples of the Radom area include the Awlad Arab, who farm, keep livestock and trade along the Bahr al-Arab, and the Binga and Kara, who farm and hunt along the Umbelacha.^: 53

In 2012 a colonel of the General Administration for Combating Drugs said that most users of bango were students, male and female. A survey made in February 2014 at a private university in Khartoum State found that 9.3 per cent of the students had used cannabis at some time, second only to tobacco. In 2018 cannabis, called bangu and hashish locally, was grown illicitly for cash in many parts of the country, and reliable community-based data on drug use were lacking.

Agriculture

The main crops Sudan exports are sorghum, cotton, groundnuts, sesame, sugar cane and gum arabic. The Gezira Scheme, between the Blue and White Niles, is the country's oldest and largest irrigation system. Cannabis is produced illicitly in areas that are hard to reach, or hidden among other crops. In its report for 2003 the International Narcotics Control Board described a shift in Sudan from growing food crops to growing cannabis, which had caused a widespread shortage of food; it named no place.^{: para. 261}

In 1994 farmers round Radom grew rice, chickpeas, sesame, sorghum and fruit; some gave them up for hashish, which traders funded, because the farmers had no transport or market for the other crops.^: 116 In November 2016, after a campaign in which 6,500 acres of cannabis farms were destroyed in Radom locality, the Second Vice-President, Hasabo Mohamed Abdelrahman, urged the people there to grow rice instead, "because the climate is suitable for such cultivation".

Cannabis in Sudan

History

The traveller William George Browne, who lived in Darfur during his travels of 1792 to 1798, wrote that hemp, hashîsh in Arabic, had "now become an article of regular culture" there. It was chewed raw, smoked in a pipe or made with other ingredients into an electuary, maijun, and taken as an aphrodisiac and, in other doses, a narcotic; Egypt consumed much more of it than Darfur. He placed the plants of his list chiefly in the well-watered south of Darfur, without naming a district.

Under the Mahdist state of the 1880s and 1890s the use of hashish was entirely prohibited, on pain of 80 lashes, by the account of the priest Joseph Ohrwalder, a captive of the Mahdi.^: 17

Under the Anglo-Egyptian condominium, Sudan acceded to the international opium convention of 1925 on 20 February 1926. Sudan already had a Hashish and Opium law, of 1924; the Act of 1994 repealed it.^{: art. 2} The Flora of the Sudan of 1929, by A. F. Broun and R. E. Massey, records cannabis, under the Arabic names hashish, kamanga and bango, from the provinces of Upper White Nile, Bahr el-Ghazal and Mongalla, all now in South Sudan. Growing the hemp plant was then forbidden in the Sudan, and plants found grown in secret in forest clearings had lacked the resin of the drug.

Sudan was among the countries, with Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, that were asked to help the law enforcement authorities of Egypt by restricting cultivation and trade; the failure to stop smuggling from those countries into Egypt moved Egypt's delegate to propose bringing cannabis under international control at Geneva in 1924–25.^: 11 Seizures of hashish in Sudan rose from 33 kg in 1936 to 346 kg in 1948. A United Nations summary of 1951 reported that hashish grew "in the forest or bush", that there was "considerable traffic" in it from Equatoria Province to northern Sudan, and that it was smuggled from Ethiopia into the southern fringe of Blue Nile Province. J. Bouquet counted "the Egyptian Sudan" among the places where cannabis was supplied from clandestine crops within the country, and wrote that caravans coming mainly from the southern Sudan supplied hemp to the peoples of the Chad, Shari and Upper Ubangi regions under French influence. In the 1950s subsistence farmers in what is now South Sudan had to hide the crop, although they grew it only for their households.^{: para. 22}

Sudan became independent in 1956.^: 6 It acceded to the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs in 1974 and passed the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act in 1994. The south became the separate Republic of South Sudan in 2011; in 2012 cannabis was grown there in Upper Nile and in the Western and Northern Bahr el Ghazal states.

Cultivation

Main article: Radom

Since 2012 the police and the drug administration have said that Radom locality, in South Darfur, is the main growing area. In 2016 the General Office for Combating Drugs said that most of Sudan's cannabis was grown there. The authors of a field study made in 1994 estimated that hashish was grown that year on 182 farms covering about 100 hectares in the Radom area, producing 64,385 kg of processed hashish.^: 117–118 The growing places in the locality include the gold-mining area of Songo and, in the south-west of the locality, the Kafia Kingi enclave, which South Sudan claims.

Before the war the Ministry of the Interior sent a large police force to Radom each year at harvest time to burn the farms. In November 2017 a police colonel reported about 500 farms destroyed in one such campaign, and in May 2021 12 men of the drug police were killed in an ambush by drug traders at Songo. A drug police officer told Darfur24 in January 2025 that the area under bango at Radom had doubled in the previous 20 months, after the drug police were withdrawn, and that some RSF commanders financed farmers there.

Preparations and consumption

Bouquet wrote in 1950 that the crude resin of Indian hemp was called kamonga in the Egyptian Sudan. The processed piece of hashish is the gandoul (قندول). By 1994 it had fallen from about 340 g, when the leafy parts of male and female plants were used, to about 57 g, once only the upper leafy part of the female plant was taken.^: 116 The cannabis is dried, powdered, mixed with honey and wrapped in leaves or paper. Bango is made by fermenting the plant with honey, bananas and waika (powdered dried okra), and tied in bundles with twine and cotton cloth. By 2026 the gandoul was the most common unit of bango, enough for 24 joints and worth about US$20.^{: 2, 13}

The psychiatrist Mohamed El Mahi wrote in 2018 that a more potent kind of cannabis, which he spells shashabendi, smuggled across the eastern borders, had recently come to dominate the drug scene.

Religious and cultural use

Ohrwalder wrote that the Mahdi prohibited hashish, "to which the Turks and Egyptians were addicted"; the Sudanese, in his account, were given to alcohol, which the Mahdi also banned.^: 17 In 1994 the study team explained the religious view of hashish at village meetings round Radom, after which 34 local committees against hashish growing were formed in 17 villages.^: 119 The Africa Organised Crime Index of 2023 wrote that the cannabis trade in Sudan was not so much a criminal market as a culturally established and informal one.

Trade and commerce

Colonel Salah Sinada of the drug administration said in 2012 that Sudan produced 60 per cent of the bango grown in Africa and that Khartoum State consumed 65 per cent of the Sudanese crop. In 2016 the General Office for Combating Drugs estimated the drug trade in Sudan in the previous year at more than US$7 billion. In 1994 Buram province, in South Darfur, was notorious for storing hashish and distributing it to markets throughout Sudan.^: 117

The Sudan Transparency and Policy Tracker wrote in 2026 that most bango is consumed in Sudan and that limited quantities are smuggled into the Central African Republic and South Sudan. By the account of the Sudan Transparency and Policy Tracker, the bundles of bango were stored in warehouses, most of them in East Darfur, whose capital, Ed Daein, had become the largest hub of the trade. A former member of the RSF said that since the war the routes to Khartoum, Gezira and eastern Sudan had changed as the RSF gained and lost ground.^: 13–14 The Organised Crime Index of 2025 wrote instead that the conflict and the fall in incomes had reduced both the trade and the use of cannabis in Sudan. In 2017 a senior police officer said that the hashish seized in Sudan was usually grown in South Sudan and also came from Ethiopia, and that it was now also grown at Radom.

In 2003 law enforcement authorities believed that tons of cannabis herb were smuggled across the Red Sea into Saudi Arabia and other countries of the Arabian peninsula, and into Egypt and Libya.^{: para. 261} In the mid-2000s the Egyptian authorities estimated that 35 per cent of the cannabis trafficked in Egypt came from Sudan.^: 68

Legal status

The Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act of 1994 repealed the Hashish and Opium law of 1924. It defines hashish as the Indian hemp plant, any plant of the genus Cannabis, and its parts, extracts and preparations, and lists hashish among the narcotic drugs. It bans importing, dealing in or growing the plants or seeds from which narcotic drugs are extracted, whatever the purpose; the minister may license universities, scientific institutes and research centres to hold them.^{: arts 2, 3, 13, 14} Growing them, or holding or trading the drugs, with intent to traffic is punished with life imprisonment and a fine. The death penalty applies to an offender already sentenced to life imprisonment for such an offence, to an official charged with fighting drug crime, to an offender who uses a minor, and to offences committed with an international gang. Growing the plants, or using or holding the drug, for one's own use is punished with up to five years' imprisonment and a fine.^{: arts 15, 17, 20} The Criminal Act of 1991 applies to drug offences that the Act of 1994 does not cover.^{: art. 24}

Sudan acceded to the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs on 24 April 1974 and to its 1972 Protocol on 5 July 1994. It acceded to the Convention on Psychotropic Substances on 26 July 1993, and signed the 1988 Convention on 30 January 1989 and ratified it on 19 November 1993.

Enforcement

The Act of 1994 set up a National Committee for Combating Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances.^{: arts 3, 4} Eradication of cannabis resumed in 2001 and 2002,^{: para. 261} and a specialised department against drug trafficking was set up only in 2003. The Drug Combat Administration seized more than 17 tonnes of cannabis in 2009, against 63 tonnes in 2008, and arrested more than 8,000 people on drug charges in 2009. By the drug administration's figures, 6 tonnes of drugs were seized in 2011 and 36 tonnes in 2012. In June 2012 the President of Sudan ordered a Supreme Council for Drug Control to be formed under his chairmanship, to make and coordinate drug control policy.^{: para. 289} A national drug control strategy followed in 2015. Sudan reported seizing 45 tonnes of cannabis herb in 2016.^{: para. 377}

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:

Growing Area	Has growing region
Radom

Accessions

List

Accession ID	Name	Collected	Region
RSC-SDN-UNK-0120080001	Sudanese General Population 2008	2008
RSC-SDN-UNK-0120080001-R1	2008 RSC Sudanese Reproduction	2008

Conservation status

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility lists one occurrence of cannabis for Sudan: a seed sample from a collecting mission of IITA and IBPGR to the Equatorial Provinces in 1980, with no locality. Those provinces are now in South Sudan.

Recent news

No recent news items.

See also

• Radom
• Bango
• Egypt
• Ethiopia
• Hashish
• Landrace Cannabis