Talk:Namibia

Talk

Discussion for: Namibia • View • Links • Related changes

Use this page for verification notes, disputes, and action items. Keep narrative content on the article.

Page scope

Namibia is the Country page for Namibia, called South West Africa before independence in 1990. It covers the 19th-century accounts of cannabis among the Damara and Nama and the Ondonga herbarium sheet of 1889; the words for the plant and the origin of dagga; the laws from the South African administration to the present, with the Act of 1971 still in force; the court challenges and reform proposals of 2006 to 2026; the plots, plantation, smuggling routes and enforcement reported by police and the press; and the two herbarium sheets. The tables of growing regions, growing areas, accessions and news fill from pages that name Namibia 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 Abuse of Dependence-Producing Substances and Rehabilitation Centres Act 41 of 1971, the Namibian Constitution and the Medicines and Related Substances Control Act 13 of 2003 were read in the annotated statutes of the Legal Assistance Centre. The application of the Act to South West Africa (s 64), the Schedule, the definition of dealing (s 1), the penalties (s 2) and the presumption (s 10) are from the Act's text there. Its commencement on 6 December 1971 (Proclamation R.265 of 1971), the transfer of its administration in 1977, the statement that no later South African amendment applied, and the extension of the Medical, Dental and Pharmacy Act 13 of 1928 by Proclamation 3 of 1929 are the Centre's annotations, not the text of those proclamations. Government Notice 278 of 2018 and the Official Gazette of South West Africa No. 675 of 2 June 1936 were read in the Centre's scans.
Judgments. Neither High Court judgment of 2026 (the section 10 application, 30 January; the special plea in the case brought in 2021, 11 July) was found in NamibLII's index on 17 October 2026, and no case number is printed in the press reports. The article reports both from The Namibian and quotes Judge Claasen only as that paper quotes her.
Treaties. Accession dates are from the treaty status pages of the UN Treaty Collection (chapter VI, 16, 18 and 19).
Andersson (1856) was read in the Project Gutenberg text of the New York edition, which has no page markers; pages 89 and 90 are those of the book's own index. Du Toit cites a reprint of 1967 (p. 79) for the same passage.
Schinz (1891) was read in the scan of the University of California copy. The plant name on p. 94 was read from the page image, which prints Daχa (with a Greek chi); the scan's text layer reads it "Daya". Schinz attributes his footnote on the word to "Fenchel" and cites W. ten Rhyne for a Datura called by the same name.
Du Toit (1975) was read in the printed chapter. His statements on Damara gardens (citing Stow 1905) and on the Bergdama trade in dagga with the Ovambo (quoting Vedder 1938, pp. 175 and 53) are given as du Toit gives them; neither Stow nor Vedder was read. Paterson's thesis of 2009 repeats the Vedder passage from du Toit.
Haacke (2015) was read in the journal's PDF (pp. 59 and 72).
Kazembe and Neema (2016): only the abstract was read; the chapter is behind a paywall.
Maree (1998) is a conference paper held in the University of Namibia's repository. It is cited for current usage of the word dagga and, attributed, for its statement on smuggling, which cites a master plan of 1995 that was not identified.
Rautanen. His dates, his station at Olukonda and his work as a linguist, ethnographer and natural scientist are from Heininen (2019) on the University of Turku's site; Bionomia gives 10 November 1845 to 19 October 1926. The label of the Zurich sheet was read from the digitised image.
Kolberg (2026) was read in the PDF on the Environmental Information Service site; its Cannabis sativa entry gives no locality or specimen.
The minister's statement to the 64th session of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (April 2021) was read in the PDF on the UNODC site (p. 3).
News reports (The Namibian, Namibian Sun, New Era, Windhoek Observer, NBC, The Brief) are cited for court proceedings, statements by ministers, police and the parties, and the Hochfeld case. Claims by Ganja Users of Namibia and by the accused and witnesses in criminal cases are attributed to them.

Where the sources differ

The origin of dagga. Du Toit derives it from the Khoekhoe daXab, which also meant tobacco, and reports Nienaber's !amaXa-b, "green tobacco"; he also reports that Lichtenstein and Nienaber doubted that the word was originally Khoekhoe and that Meinhof derived it from the Arabic duXan ("tobacco"). Haacke (2015) derives it from the Cape Khoe dāxa.b, which he analyses as dā ("win, outdo") with a suffix. Schinz's footnote of 1891 suggests da ("to be overcome by something"). Pettman's glossary of 1913 glosses the Khoekhoe dachab as "wild hemp".
The 2021 filing. The Namibian reported the suit on 6 September 2021; its later reports date the filing to August 2021.
Penalties. Statements that cannabis offences carry 20 to 40 years' imprisonment, in a trade-press report of 2025 and elsewhere, describe the minimum sentences of the Combating of the Abuse of Drugs Bill of 2006, which did not become law. The Act of 1971 sets maximums of 15 years for a first conviction for dealing and ten for possession or use.
1922. The petition of 2020 by Ganja Users of Namibia and the Rastafari United Front to the Speaker says that cannabis was banned in Namibia in 1922. No instrument of that year was found.
The Hochfeld discovery. The Namibia Press Agency report of 29 May 2025 says the plantation was found "on Wednesday morning" (28 May); later reports in The Namibian give 29 May. The same report gives over 512 kilograms of dried cannabis and packed bags of "nearly 11 000kg"; neither figure was checked against a court record.
Checklists. Kolberg's checklist of 2026 lists Cannabis sativa as a naturalised alien; the national checklist of 2013 (Klaassen and Kwembeya) has no entry for it, and the genus index of Craven's checklist of 1999 has none.

Not used, and why

Monthly police seizure figures reported by the press: the units are doubtful. December 2024 was reported as 308,004.7 kilograms worth N$3,080,047 "calculated at N$10 per gram", which fits grams, not kilograms; March 2025 as 312,560 kilograms worth N$3,125,600; December 2025 as more than a million kilograms, which the reporting paper itself questioned. The 843,892 kilograms for 2020 in the minister's statement to the Commission on Narcotic Drugs comes with a combined value of about N$11 million for all the drugs seized. No weight from these is given in the article.
The petition of 2020 for its history and statistics (the petitioners' own claims). Its list of names for the plant includes epangwe; no source or language is given for it.
A trade-press report of June 2025 on a reform coalition's statement on hemp: an advocacy statement; the report's own summary of the penalties is wrong (see above).
An undated legal-news summary saying that the Medicines Act of 2003 provides for licences to cultivate cannabis: no date could be fixed. The article gives the Act's permit provision and the 2018 schedule entry for dronabinol separately.
Maree (1998) on discussion of the historical medical use of dagga: no source, group or period is named.
Tobacco. Andersson on the Ovaherero, Schinz on the Herero (p. 161: they mixed their tobacco with no hemp and bought their pipes from the Ovambo), the Ndonga tobacco of the Finnish mission reports (Groop and Haufiku 2024) and two pipe bowls in the Linden-Museum, Stuttgart (023252, Ambo, about 1900; 110317 b, Herero, 1923), which the museum catalogues as tobacco pipes. Du Toit's line on Herero horn pipes, in his survey of pipe forms, gives no source.
Reviews of South African traditional medicine (Stafford et al. 2008; Balogun and Ashafa 2019) and a review in Pula (Kaya 2017), whose one cannabis sentence concerns Uganda.
Reports on individual cases that concern policing generally rather than the law on cannabis.
The Wikipedia article on cannabis in Namibia: a tertiary source; facts it shares with the sources above are cited to those sources.

Open questions

The judgments of 2026: their case numbers and full reasons, and whether the plaintiffs of 2021 appealed.
Reform. The fate of the Combating of the Abuse of Drugs Bill after 2017, and the findings of the Law Reform and Development Commission's review.
Earlier controls. Any German colonial ordinance on hemp or narcotics (1884–1915), any control of dagga in the territory between 1915 and 1929, and whether the Medical, Dental and Pharmacy Act of 1928 itself named dagga.
Names. Whether Epangua appears in Ndonga or Kwanyama dictionaries, and the cannabis words of Otjiherero, Rukwangali, Silozi and the San languages. Vedder's South West Africa in Early Times (1938), the Deutsches Kolonial-Lexikon (1920), Krönlein's Nama dictionary (1889) and du Toit's Cannabis in Africa (1980) were not read.
Herbarium and germplasm. A GBIF search found two Namibian sheets of Cannabis. The National Herbarium of Namibia (WIND), JSTOR Global Plants, the Munich and Zurich catalogues, the Prodromus einer Flora von Südwestafrika and the Cannabaceae of Flora Zambesiaca were not searched. Whether Rautanen sent the Ondonga sheet to Schinz in Zurich is not established. No accession of Namibian origin was found in the GRIN-Global list of Cannabis.
Cultivation. No scholarly, institutional or police source was found on cannabis fields in the northern regions bordering Angola and Zambia; the ENACT Organised Crime Index for Namibia could not be reached.