Talk:East Africa Genes
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Sources read
- The seller's website (eastafricagenes.blog), read on 8 October 2026: all 11 blog posts and four pages, with their publication dates as the hosting service records them, and 49 Wayback Machine captures from August 2020 to January 2026 of the home page, the About page, the catalogue page Pure African Strains and an author page. A capture of the catalogue page of 20 September 2025 could not be read (the archive returned an error three times).
- Overgrow, read through its public interface on 8 October 2026: every topic (84) and post (596) by the seller's account, Kidete, the threads in which they appear, and searches for the business's name, the account name and the line names. Threads with many unrelated posts were read only around the relevant posts, so grow reports elsewhere in those threads may have been missed.
- Other venues, searched on 8 October 2026: THCFarmer, Rollitup and the Growers Network forum, where the account Kidete posted from February 2020; the business's YouTube channel (its own page, About tab, feed and video pages); the SeedFinder breeder index, which has no entry for the business; and English Wikipedia. ICMag, Grasscity and a strain-review page on another growers' site could not be read (access refused or a captcha).
- Reddit and Instagram were not read. The seller's Instagram account is cited only through the seller's own Overgrow post about its suspension.
- No news report, scholarly mention, trade-press profile or seed-database entry for the business was found. On the other forums, replies by other members comment on the blog; none reports buying seed.
Who runs the business
The article names no one. The evidence for a name:
- In a Sponsored post the account Kidete introduces itself as "Mike from Nairobi, Kenya" (Overgrow, 26 April 2025).
- The member Upstate wrote "Mike Kago of East Africa genes" (Overgrow, 1 January 2025). No post by the seller read here gives the surname, so it rests on that one third-party post.
- The site's About page in August 2020 linked accounts under the name Kidete on two cannabis social-media sites, Duby and TheWeedTube, so the handle is older than the Overgrow account.
The seller's contact address and payment details appear in several forum posts and on the site. They are not reproduced anywhere on the wiki.
When the business began
The seller's statements give more than one date:
- "launched in 2020" (Overgrow, 10 September 2023); the hosting service dates the site's home page to 28 February 2020 and the first blog post to 12 March 2020;
- "In 2019, I sold some seeds to a grower based in California" (Overgrow, 22 November 2023);
- the Kisumu line "since 2018" (the catalogue, from 2020).
Before the blog's first post, the account Kidete was offering free East African seed on THCFarmer (14 February 2020) and Rollitup (22 February 2020); a THCFarmer classified advert for "this seedbank known as East Africa Genes" dates from 24 August 2020. The business's YouTube channel shows a joining date of 18 December 2015, but the oldest of its videos that could be listed dates from October 2024; whether the channel was renamed from an earlier use is not shown, so the 2015 date is not used. The earliest third-party mention found is a grow report of 14 August 2021 crediting the seed to "east Africa genetics". The infobox gives 2020 as the seller's own statement.
The Landrace Team
- The catalogue page as archived on 4 June 2023 carries the line "The sativa strains from Kenya are also available on The Landrace Team". It is not in the capture of 22 March 2023 or on the live page; the 2025 capture could not be read.
- Upstate, 4 January 2024: "East Africa Genes has a good Malawi. Tejas grew tlt Malawi for a Freaker Preservation. Same Malawi basically, but East Africa Genes is much cheaper and comes from Malawi." (Overgrow)
- Upstate, 24 July 2024, of the seller's Pineapple Malawi: "Kidetes version is the pure one." (Overgrow)
- Asked in September 2025 whether it was the source of a Black Magic line The Landrace Team was selling, the seller replied "No, I have never sold seeds to TLT." (Overgrow, 21 September 2025)
The sources do not say which Kenyan lines The Landrace Team sold, when, or on what terms. The article states only the 2023 catalogue sentence.
Dates and places that differ
- Kinshasa trip. The seller announced a flight for 27 March 2024; a post of 24 April 2024 says "Towards the end of March"; a post of 22 December 2024 says "I flew to Kinshasa in April". The article gives the announced flight date.
- Uganda trip. Posts during the trip date it to mid-June 2025, and the seller reported being back in Nairobi on 19 June 2025. Posts of July and August 2026 say "last year July" and "In August 2025". Fort Portal is placed in western Uganda in the seller's report of the trip and by Upstate, and in eastern Uganda in a 2026 post.
- Birere is in eastern Uganda in a 2023 advert and in western Uganda, near the Rwandan border, in 2024. The article gives both.
- Kilimanjaro and Moshi. The seller has called Moshi "a variation of the Kilimanjaro sativa" (2023) and Kilimanjaro "a different strain" from Moshi (2023). The article lists them as two lines, as the catalogue does.
- Zambia. No post saying the trip took place was found as of 8 October 2026.
The Masisi line
- The seller identifies the Masisi line as the Black African Magic. It has also asked whether its Rutshuru line could be "a close relative of the Black African Magic" (November 2025).
- Upstate's post of 1 November 2024 describes the island's inhabitants with a collective term for several Central African forest peoples. The article gives the location only, because no source names the community.
- In May 2025 the member Roms questioned whether the seller had reached remote forest communities on a trip of a few weeks.
- Members growing Upstate's reproduction disagreed in December 2025 about whether one member's plants looked like an unmixed Congolese line.
Grow reports counted
Distinct usernames reporting that they grew or germinated a line they say came from the seller (or from Upstate's reproduction of its Masisi seed), in the Overgrow material read:
| Line | Posters |
|---|---|
| Masisi | 8 (all but Upstate from Upstate's reproduction or a later increase) |
| Shashamane | 4 |
| Kilimanjaro | 2 |
| Northern Angola | 2 |
| Birere, Kampala, Malawi Gold, Moshi, Rutshuru, "South Congo", an unnamed Ugandan line | 1 each |
These are counts of posters, not of plants or posts. No grow report was found for Migori, Kisumu, Kwale, Central Kenya, Kambi, South African Skunk or Fort Portal.
The blog on Wikipedia
English Wikipedia's Cannabis in Kenya and Cannabis in Uganda cite the seller's blog three times. The citations were added by two accounts whose names match the seller's (one registered in May 2020, one in August 2023). Most of the first account's additions were reverted the same day by another editor as unsourced. That the accounts are the seller's is an inference from the names, so it is not used in the article.
Material left out
- The blog's posts on Kenyan and Ugandan cannabis law, healing practice in Kisumu and the history of prohibition are the seller's own commentary on other subjects. They are not used.
- A buying guide on the blog from 2020 to 2023, since deleted, is not used.
- Payment instructions in the seller's forum posts are not used.
- Upstate's January 2022 remarks on the Shashamane seed (that a 20-week flowering time "does not sound purely Ethiopian") are not used; the article reports District_Flora's recollection instead, as the account of the seed's origin.
Title
East Africa Genes is the name on the site, in its adverts and on its YouTube channel. Forum posts also write East Africa Genetics, East African genetics and East Africa Strains. No redirect was made for these, as they are other people's slips rather than names the business uses.