Caput bonae Spei hodiernum (1719)

First page of the Caput bonae Spei hodiernum

First page of the Caput bonae Spei hodiernum

Caput bonae Spei hodiernum, das ist: Vollständige Beschreibung des africanischen Vorgebürges der Guten Hofnung

The Present State of the Cape of Good Hope

Caput bonae Spei hodiernum

Publication

Author	Peter Kolb(1675–1726)
Language	German
Composed	1705–1719
Written at	Neustadt an der Aisch
Published	1719 (folio); 1745 (abridged reprint)
Publisher	Peter Conrad Monath
Place	Nürnberg (1719); Frankfurt und Leipzig (1745)
Volumes	1 (folio); 2 parts in 1 volume (1745)

Cannabis Content

Pages	138–140 (1745 edition)
Chapter	XVI, sections IX–X (Nahrungs-Mittel); XVII, section III (Niederkunft)
Regions documented	Cape of Good Hope
Preparations	Smoked alone; smoked mixed with tobacco (Buspach)
Uses documented	Recreational, medicinal (obstetric), travel provision
Taxonomic significance	Earliest detailed European ethnography of cannabis use among the Khoikhoi; records pre-colonial use predating Dutch settlement

Access

Digital facsimile	View on the Internet Archive
Original held at	Wellcome Library, London
Modern translation	English: Medley (London, n.d.); Dutch: Amsterdam, 1727; French: Bertrand (Amsterdam, 1741)

The Caput bonae Spei hodiernum ("The Present State of the Cape of Good Hope") is a description of the Cape Colony and the Khoikhoi people by Peter Kolb (1675–1726), a German astronomer and naturalist who spent nearly a decade at the Cape of Good Hope from 1705 to 1713. First published as a folio in Nürnberg in 1719, the work was translated into Dutch, English and French, and reissued in an abridged German edition in 1745. It was for several decades the principal European source on the Cape and its indigenous inhabitants.

Chapter XVI of the first part, on food and drink (Nahrungs-Mittel), contains the earliest detailed European account of cannabis use among the Khoikhoi, including a description of the plant they call Dacha, its effects, its preparation mixed with tobacco and its role as a travel provision. Chapter XVII, on childbirth, records the use of Dacha in obstetric medicine and contains the statement that the Khoikhoi used Dacha before tobacco was known to them, placing cannabis use at the Cape before Dutch settlement in 1652.

Background

Kolb was sent to the Cape in 1705 by Baron von Krosigk, a Prussian privy councillor, to carry out astronomical observations. He remained for nine or ten years, during which time he learned the Khoikhoi language and built relationships with Khoikhoi leaders who visited him. The French translator's preface to the 1745 edition notes that Kolb not only collected reports from Dutch colonists and Khoikhoi informants but also read all available published accounts of the Cape's inhabitants, then undertook journeys among Khoikhoi communities further from the colonies, since he found that those living near the Dutch had become mistrustful through long contact with Europeans.

The original 1719 folio was published at Kolb's own expense by Peter Conrad Monath in Nürnberg and ran to several hundred pages with plates. It was translated into Dutch (Amsterdam, 1727, two volumes), English (by Medley, London) and French (by Jean Bertrand, Amsterdam, 1741; reprinted 1743). The 1745 edition is a German version of the French abridgement. In his foreword, the publisher writes that once the translation was compared with the German original it was found to depart from it in a great many places, so the faulty passages were corrected and much that the French version had left out was restored.

The work covers the geography, natural history, governance, religion, customs, warfare, medicine, trade, crafts, animal husbandry and burial practices of the Khoikhoi. Kolb died in 1726 as rector of the school at Neustadt an der Aisch without publishing any further work.

Cannabis content

Chapter XVI: Dacha as food, drink and provision

Section IX of Chapter XVI (Sechszehendes Capitel) opens with the observation that the Khoikhoi, men and women alike, are equally avid for tobacco and Dacha. When they have none of the former, tobacco, they will give everything they own for it and take on the heaviest work. Kolb writes that a Khoikhoi person would sooner lose a tooth than a piece of tobacco, and that by their own account tobacco strengthens and cheers them beyond description.

He then describes Dacha separately:

Der Dacha ist ein ander Kraut, das sie höchstens lieben. Sie sagen: er vertreibt den Kummer und die Unruhe, eben wie Wein und Brandtwein; erwecket auch zugleich die süssesten Gedanken.

— Kolb (1745), p. 139

("Dacha is another herb, which they love above all. They say: it drives away sorrow and unrest, just as wine and brandy do, and at the same time awakens the sweetest thoughts.")

Kolb states that he himself never tasted the Dacha and so cannot speak to its pleasures from experience. He reports that the Dacha intoxicates and can make users wild and frenzied. The excess of the strongest European drinks, he writes, can produce no more violent effect in the brain of a European than the excess of Dacha produces in the brain of a Khoikhoi. The tongue becomes loose; the user behaves strangely, leaping about, with the look of someone possessed, attempting absurd things that make no sense.

He records that the Khoikhoi often mix Dacha with tobacco, calling the mixture Buspach.

Section X notes that when the Khoikhoi travel or go hunting, they supply themselves with Dacha and tobacco, and if they can manage it, some brandy. As far as tobacco is concerned, they never go without it and never venture out without a pipe to smoke.

Chapter XVII: Dacha in obstetric medicine

Chapter XVII (Siebenzehendes Capitel) treats Khoikhoi childbirth practices. Section III describes what happens when labour is difficult. The midwife gives the woman a cold decoction of tobacco and milk to drink, which takes immediate effect. Kolb then adds:

Ehe der Taback bey den Hottentotten bekannt war, gebrauchten sie den Dacha.

— Kolb (1745), p. 140

("Before tobacco was known among the Hottentots, they used Dacha.")

This statement places cannabis use among the Khoikhoi before the introduction of European tobacco, which arrived at the Cape with Dutch settlement from 1652 onward. Kolb adds that the Khoikhoi now find that tobacco helps faster and more easily.

The same chapter, section XII, is titled "Wie man es zum Taback-Rauchen angewöhnet" ("How they accustom [the child] to tobacco smoking"), recording that the smoking habit was introduced to children early.

The word Dacha

The word Dacha (also spelled daccha, dagga, dachab, daxa and at least ten other ways in the historical literature) has long been traced to the Khoekhoe word daxab. The earliest use of the word that Brian du Toit knew of is in Jan van Riebeeck's journal of 1658, spelled daccha.^: 88

Du Toit judged it almost certain that van Riebeeck's entry and the early references after it describe Leonotis leonurus, a native South African plant, and not cannabis.^: 88 That plant is known as "wild dagga" or "wild cannabis" in the ethnobotanical literature. On this reading the cannabis plant, on its arrival by whatever route, was given an existing name for an intoxicating herb. Following Nienaber, du Toit regards Khoekhoe daXa-b, a term that among other things refers to tobacco, as the root, and adding the Khoekhoe word for green (!am) gives !amaXa-b ("green tobacco"). He adds that Lichtenstein and Nienaber doubt it is an original Khoekhoe word, and that Meinhof derived it from Arabic duXan.^: 89

The Bantu-language terms for cannabis across southern and eastern Africa are unrelated: Zulu insangu/nsangu, Xhosa umya, Sotho matakwane, Swati isangu, and variants of bhang/bangi further north, the latter tracing to Sanskrit via Arab trade. The separation of the Khoisan and Bantu terminologies has been noted but its implications for dispersal history remain debated.

Significance for landrace documentation

Kolb's account is the earliest detailed European ethnography of cannabis use at the Cape and among the Khoikhoi. Several points are relevant to landrace research:

• The statement that Dacha predates tobacco at the Cape places cannabis use among the Khoikhoi before Dutch settlement in 1652. Since the Khoikhoi are a pre-Bantu population at the southern tip of Africa, this raises questions about the route by which cannabis reached the Cape, whether via Bantu-speaking neighbours (who had been present in the eastern parts of southern Africa since roughly 300–500 CE) or by an independent pathway.
• The Khoisan etymology proposed for the word (daXa-b) is distinct from all Bantu-language terms for cannabis, though du Toit's reading of the earliest references as Leonotis leonurus would make it an older name transferred to the newly arrived plant rather than evidence of a separate introduction. Other scholars he cites doubt that the word is Khoekhoe at all.
• Kolb's note that Dacha was used in difficult births before tobacco was known records a medicinal use that, by his account, tobacco later took over.
• The preparation Buspach (Dacha mixed with tobacco) records the blending of indigenous and introduced smoking materials in the early eighteenth century.
• Kolb's observation that the effects of Dacha on the Khoikhoi brain exceed those of the strongest European drinks on a European brain is an early comparative note on cannabis potency, though filtered through his own cultural framing.

The question of whether cannabis reached the Khoikhoi via Bantu contact, Arab coastal trade or an earlier maritime route remains open. Archaeological pipe residue analysis and palynological evidence from southern African sites predating Bantu arrival in specific regions would be needed to resolve the question.

See also

• Herbarium Amboinense, Rumphius's botanical catalogue documenting cannabis in the eastern Indonesian archipelago (composed c. 1690)
• Pharmakologisch-medicinische Studien über den Hanf (1856), Martius's dissertation citing Kolb on the Khoikhoi use of Dacha
• Garcia ab Orta, Portuguese physician whose Colóquios (1563) is among the earliest European accounts of cannabis in Asia

References

Further reading

• Kolb, P. (1719). Caput bonae Spei hodiernum. Nürnberg: Peter Conrad Monath. (Original folio edition.)
• Du Toit, B.M. (1975). "Dagga: The History and Ethnographic Setting of Cannabis sativa in Southern Africa," in Rubin, V. (ed.), Cannabis and Culture. The Hague: Mouton.
• Walton, R.P. (1938). Marihuana: America's New Drug Problem. Philadelphia: Lippincott.
• Sparrman, A. (1784). Reise nach dem Vorgebirge der guten Hoffnung. Berlin: Haude und Spener. Internet Archive.

External links

• 1745 abridged edition (Internet Archive, Wellcome Library digitisation)

Peter Kolb 1719 German Peter Conrad Monath Nürnberg 138–140 Cape of Good Hope Smoked alone Buspach (mixed with tobacco) Recreational Medicinal Travel provision Earliest detailed European ethnography of cannabis use among the Khoikhoi; records pre-colonial use predating Dutch settlement https://archive.org/details/b30501428 Wellcome Library, London Travel account Ethnographic description