Talk:Eswatini

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Discussion for: Eswatini • View • Links • Related changes

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Page scope

Eswatini is the Country page for Eswatini, called Swaziland until 2018. It covers where cannabis is grown (the northern mountains of Hhohho around Piggs Peak, with the central hills and the south); the Swazi names for the plant and the ethnography of smoking; the trade with South Africa and Europe; eradication and seizures; the legal position as reported, the licence claimed by a foreign company and the medical cannabis bill; and the seed lines and research material of Swazi origin. The tables of growing regions, growing areas, accessions and news fill from pages that name Eswatini as their country.

Data verification

Record source conflicts, dating problems and sources not used here. Keep narrative content on the article.

Discussion

Sources and how they were read

Statutes. The texts of the statute of 1922 and of the Pharmacy Act of 1929 could not be read: the legal-information sites that publish the laws of Eswatini could not be reached. The legal section therefore gives only what the press reports say: the court report in the Times of Eswatini of 3 December 2025 on the Pharmacy Act, and Semafor (May 2023) and Voice of America (March 2024) on the statute of 1922 and the bill of 2020. No section numbers or penalties are given.
Treaties. Accession dates and the United Kingdom's extension of the Single Convention to Swaziland on 26 January 1965 are from the treaty status pages of the UN Treaty Collection.
United Nations reports. The UNODC Bulletin on Narcotics of 2006 (pp. 72–73), the World Drug Report 2006 (vol. 1, p. 160), the World Drug Report 2012 (p. 43 and Table 18, p. 44), the report of the Secretariat to the meeting of heads of national drug law enforcement agencies in Africa (UNODC/HONLAF/26/2, 2016, p. 3), the regional-trends document of the World Drug Report 2020 and the report of the International Narcotics Control Board for 2009 (p. 56, paragraph 316) were read on the issuing bodies' sites.
Pillinger (2003), chapter 5 of ISS Monograph 86, was read in full in the Institute for Security Studies' file. The Commissioner of Police's statement of March 2000 is given there from a BBC Monitoring report of a Radio Swaziland broadcast of 18 March 2000. Gastrow (2003), "Mind-blowing", is a separate paper of the Institute, labelled an unpublished paper and dated October 2003; its paragraph on Swaziland closely follows Pillinger's.
Paterson (2009), an MA thesis in history at Rhodes University, was read in full. Its statements on hybridisation, the removal of male plants, harvests and prices rest on the author's interviews and his own observations in Swaziland in April 2009. Its report of Zulu trading expeditions to Swaziland is taken from du Toit's Cannabis in Africa (1980), which was not read.
Ethnography. Du Toit (1975) was read in the printed chapter. His account of Swazi smoking rests on O'Neil (1921) and on Marwick's The Swazi (1940); Marwick is quoted as du Toit quotes him. O'Neil was read in the scan of the New York edition (The Century Co., 1921), whose pages are cited; du Toit cites the London edition. Bourhill's thesis was read in the scan held by the Edinburgh Research Archive.
Research material. Hillig (2004) was read in full; the Indiana University voucher is known from its GBIF occurrence data. The Swazi Red line is described from the seller's catalogue text, as on its accession page.
News reports (IRIN, Reuters, Al Jazeera, Semafor, Voice of America, the Times of Eswatini and the Eswatini Observer) are cited for events and for what officials, farmers and members of parliament said. The Profile Solutions release of October 2018 is the company's own statement.

Where the sources differ

Area eradicated. IRIN reported 2,500 hectares destroyed in raids early in 2002; the World Drug Report 2006 gives 400 to 500 hectares a year from 2001 to 2003; Reuters reported about 197 hectares by June 2005; the United States report of 2007 gives 437.5 hectares for January to September 2006; the HONLAF report gives 1,069 hectares for 2014. The figures come from different bodies for different periods, and none measures the area under cultivation.
The HONLAF figures. The report's sentence lists Nigeria, Swaziland and Egypt with three figures "respectively"; the page reads the second figure, with its note on 2015, as Swaziland's. The country report it draws on was not read.
The "70 per cent" figure. Reuters (2005) gives about 70 per cent of small farmers in the Hhohho region, from the Council Against Drug and Alcohol Abuse. Paterson (2009) gives 70 per cent of Hhohho's agricultural income, citing a press article of 2003. A review of 2024 in Plants restates the figure for the whole country by way of a 2019 article that cites Reuters. The page uses the Reuters figure, with its scope.
The harvest. The United States report of 2007 says Swaziland has no specific harvest season; Paterson (2009) found the winter harvest the only one for most growers; IRIN (2013) writes that several harvests a year are possible.
The licence. Profile Solutions announced "preliminary approval" for a "proposed agreement" in October 2018. An opinion piece in the Daily Maverick (July 2019) says that a licence was granted; Voice of America (2024) calls the company "the only authorized cannabis grower". The licence itself and any government statement on it were not found.
Bourhill's thesis is dated 1913 by the Edinburgh Research Archive; Paterson cites it as a PhD thesis of 1912. The title page reads "Thesis submitted to the University of Edinburgh for the Degree of Doctor of Medicine".
The siSwati word. Du Toit writes ntsangu for the "Swazi-Zulu complex"; the press reports write insangu.

Not used, and why

The estimate of US$1.63 billion a year that Swazi legislators were reported in 2017 to expect from cannabis: it survives only in an aggregator that names no speaker; the original reports of 2017 could not be found.
THC and THCV figures for "Swazi Gold" in the review of 2024 (Plants 13: 2695): the review cites an opinion-survey dispatch and a web page for them, not a chemical analysis, and states that no cannabinoid profiling of southern African cannabis had been published.
Section numbers and penalties for the Acts found in web summaries: not checked against the texts.
Kidd (1904) on the Swazi: known only through Paterson.
Three rivers named in the United States report of 2007 (spelt Nkomaza, Mozne and Mkaomevo): not matched to gazetteer names.
A single iNaturalist observation of cannabis in Hhohho (2023): a photograph, not a specimen.
The Wikipedia article on cannabis in Eswatini: a tertiary source; facts it shares with the sources above are cited to those sources.

Open questions

The statutes. How the statute of 1922 and the Pharmacy Act of 1929 define cannabis, which sections govern possession, cultivation and supply, the penalties, and the amendments since independence are not established from the texts.
The bill of 2020. Its fate after March 2024 is not known.
Hemp. Whether the small-scale hemp production announced in 2006 took place is not known.
Herbarium specimens. No herbarium specimen of cannabis collected in Eswatini was found in GBIF or in the South African National Biodiversity Institute's database; the national checklist of 2004, which lists only taxa backed by a specimen, has no entry for Cannabis. Compton's Flora of Swaziland (1976) was not read.
Germplasm. Hillig (2004) analysed one accession from Swaziland; whether it is the HortaPharm lot 91-198.1 behind the Indiana University voucher is not established. No accession of Swazi origin was found in GRIN or the FAO's GLIS.
Ethnography and archaeology. Kuper's ethnographies of the Swazi and the colonial annual reports for Swaziland were not read. No archaeological study of cannabis in Eswatini was found.

Images reserved in the article

One image has a place in the article but is not yet uploaded. Its file link is kept hidden in the page source and can be restored once the file exists:

File:Cannabis-Swaziland-horn-pipe-Wellcome-M0005729.jpg (Preparations and consumption): the Wellcome Collection's glass-plate negative M0005729 (reference WT/D/1/20/1/47/40), "Two men seated, one of them smoking hemp (cannabis) through a pipe, Swaziland", showing one man smoking through a pipe made with a horn. The museum gives the digital image under CC BY 4.0 and names no photographer. The negative is dated 23 September 1938 in the catalogue, which also says it was accessioned in 1937; the print it was made from (663205i) is dated "[1900?]".