Diamba
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Diamba is a vernacular name for cannabis documented in western Central Africa, in Sierra Leone and in Brazil. Closely related forms include riamba, liamba and chamba. Brian M. du Toit treated them as a western African naming complex, centred on the Congo basin and northern Angola, and Souza later associated the forms with Kimbundu and with their transfer into Brazilian usage.[1][2]
The form diamba appears as the headword for Cannabis sativa in J. Gillet and E. Pâque's 1910 flora of the Kisantu region. The same source records diamba di nseke, "savanna hemp", for a different plant that resembles cannabis.[3]
An 1851 notice from Sierra Leone describes the plant under this name among people brought there from the Congo. Dictionaries record forms of the name in Kikongo (1887) and in Kimbundu. Accounts of the name's origin differ. Du Toit's 1975 chapter derived the Congo forms from a term carried inland by Swahili traders,[1] while a 2015 history of cannabis in Brazil, citing a 1976 article by du Toit, attributes the forms to Kimbundu speakers.[2] Chris S. Duvall groups diamba, riamba, liamba and iamba as one cognate set, distinct from the names built on bhang and bangi.[4]
Name and variants
Du Toit's 1975 linguistic map separates three broad African cannabis-name complexes: dagga in the south, forms of bangi in the east and centre and forms of diamba in the west. In his text the usual forms in the area then called Zaire and in northern Angola are riamba and chamba. He called the origin and meanings of riamba a subject still under investigation. The map shows a regional family of names whose derivation du Toit left unsettled.[1]
Elsewhere in the same chapter du Toit proposed a route by which the plant and its name reached the Congo. He suggested that Swahili and Arab traders carried cannabis inland from the east coast. In his account Swahili traders from Zanzibar appear to have introduced it among the Bashilange of the Kasai after the 1850s, where the plant was called rhiamba. His summary treats the Congo forms as derivatives of "the Swahili trader's term riamba", although banghi was in common use among the Swahili of the coast.[1] Du Toit also held that cannabis was not present in West Africa before the Second World War.[1] In The African Roots of Marijuana Duvall disputes that claim as du Toit restated it in 1980, citing 19th-century primary sources for psychoactive cannabis in Gambia, Liberia, Niger, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Senegal.[4] Duvall's classification sets diamba, riamba, liamba and iamba apart from bhang, bang, bangue and bangi.[4]
In a later article du Toit listed diamba, riamba, liamba and chamba together for Angola and Zaire. He used the vocabulary to reconstruct routes by which cannabis practices moved.[5]
Souza's history of cannabis in Brazil, citing a 1976 article by du Toit, assigns riamba, diamba and liamba to Kimbundu-speaking peoples and notes that all three were also used in Brazil. He sees the words as part of a wider pattern in which names and smoking techniques changed as cannabis moved between communities.[2]
Early Atlantic records
Two accounts from before 1851 use these forms. A colonial surgeon's account of the Liberated African Establishment on St Helena reports that in 1843 freed slaves from Angola regarded diamba as "a sovereign remedy against all complaints". In an 1850 paper on Angolan cannabis the British botanist William Daniell described slavers giving liamba to captives shipped alongside commercial consignments of the drug.[4] Duvall treats such attributed statements as informative but filtered through their European authors.[4] During the last century of transatlantic shipping, approximately 1760 to 1860, captives from western Central Africa outnumbered those from any other region. Duvall adds that slavers there supplied mariamba in efforts to manage their captives' health.[4]
R. O. Clarke, surgeon and colonial apothecary at Sierra Leone, described the plant in Hooker's Journal of Botany in 1851 under the title "Short notice of the African Plant Diamba, commonly called Congo Tobacco".[6] He states that its seed was brought to the colony by people he calls Congoes, "captured by one of our cruisers". They and their descendants were its chief growers, though other liberated Africans, Maroons, Settlers and Creoles also grew it.[6] He records the drug sold in halfpenny packets under two names, maconie for the dried flowers mixed with seed and makiah for the leaves.[6]
Clarke describes a crop sown in April or May and flowering in August, its growth checked from time to time by nipping off the tips of the main and side branches. A second crop was sown in September and watered through the dry season.[6] The flowers were the preferred part. The leaf preparation was used only when flowers could not be had, because it was apt to cause violent headache. The drug was smoked from a large wooden pipe or reed called a condo, from a small calabash or from clay pipes, with the pipe passed round the company.[6] Clarke reports it valued locally as a remedy for cough and for pains in the chest and stomach. He calls the gatherings "orgies" and a "debauch" ending in "temporary frenzy", often followed by severe headache and a stupor that generally lasted twelve hours. He also writes that one charged pipe gave four people "the most delightful exaltation without injury".[6]
C. Jeannest, who had spent four years on the lower Congo, asked in his 1883 book Quatre années au Congo "What is iamba?" He did not know. He wrote that, according to certain travellers, it was the leaves of hemp or flax.[4]
Dictionary record
W. Holman Bentley's Kongo dictionary of 1887 glosses diamba as Indian hemp in both directions of the dictionary.[7] Bentley compiled it for the Baptist mission on the Kongo River from the language as spoken at San Salvador. It was published in London by the Baptist Missionary Society and Trübner, with a dedication, by permission, to Leopold II as sovereign of the Congo Free State. The dictionary records three words for a pipe used to smoke hemp, nsaka, mbaya and ntimpu. It gives mbangi as a witness and, in a second entry, as a person who searches for medicinal roots and bark.[7]
A. de Assis Júnior's Kimbundu dictionary has the headword riámba, defined as hashish and as a textile plant of the Urticaceae with narcotic properties. It glosses kangónha as hemp, with a cross-reference to liamba. It defines rikanha as a leaf of tobacco.[8] Gillet and Pâque also file cannabis under Urticaceae.
The Kisantu record
Gillet and Pâque organised their flora as a "Congolese–Latin vocabulary" of local names, scientific identifications and uses. Their entry reads "Diamba — Cannabis sativa L." and places the plant in Urticaceae. It states that hemp was cultivated only for the use smokers made of it, then describes smokers in openly derogatory terms.[3]
The next entry distinguishes diamba di nseke. The flora glosses nseke as savanna and identifies the plant as Indigofera capitata, a legume that resembles cannabis and grows in savanna. The flora gives no use for the lookalike.[3] At Kisantu the form thus occurs both alone and inside a local compound plant name.
Gillet also collected three Congolese cannabis specimens. Gillet s.n., Banza-Boma (1901) came from the region covered by the flora. Gillet 2027 (1901) lacks a locality, while Gillet s.n., Wombali (1908) was gathered well north of Kisantu.
Later records of use
The Prelude ethnopharmacology database records lia:mba in the Republic of the Congo, smoked in ritual to overcome fear of the nkulu spirits, from a 1989 study by F. Hagenbucher-Sacripanti.[9][10] It also records diamba in Kikongo and nkaya diamba in Kiyanzi in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, from a 1983 survey of plants used against respiratory illness in children. For childhood asthma the smoke of burnt leaves is inhaled. Alternatively the leaves are steeped in boiling water, the steam inhaled and the liquid drunk with meals twice a day.[9][11]
In Brazil
Diamba entered the Brazilian vocabulary alongside liamba and riamba. Diamba and liamba are among the Brazilian synonyms derived from Angolan languages.[12] Souza sets these names in a narrower historical setting. Brazilian prohibitionists of the early 20th century used the African forms as evidence for an exclusively African origin of Brazilian cannabis, often within racialised accounts of the drug and its users. He accepts the African contribution to Brazilian cannabis culture while noting that Portuguese and African peoples both knew the plant before reaching the Americas and that direct evidence for its use in colonial Brazil is sparse before the 19th century.[2]
The name family survived and adapted across the Atlantic.
Sources differ on the origin of the Brazilian name maconha. Duvall lists it separately from the diamba set.[4] Alvaro Rubim de Pinho wrote in 1975 that nearly all the traditional Brazilian synonyms, among them maconha, diamba, liamba and moconha, had their origin in "the Angolan language".[13] Souza, drawing on Assis Júnior's dictionary, notes two Kimbundu words that resemble maconha: kangonha for the herb itself and makanha for things relating to tobacco and smoking.[2] Carlini suggests instead that the Portuguese word may be an anagram of cânhamo, hemp.[14]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 du Toit, Brian M. (1975). "Dagga: The History and Ethnographic Setting of Cannabis sativa in Southern Africa". In Rubin, Vera (ed.). Cannabis and Culture. The Hague: Mouton. pp. 81, 86, 99–101. doi:10.1515/9783110812060.81.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 Souza, Jorge Emanuel Luz de (2015). Sonhos da diamba, controles do cotidiano: uma história da criminalização da maconha no Brasil republicano (in português). Salvador: EDUFBA and CETAD/UFBA. pp. 175–183. doi:10.7476/9788523220235. ISBN 978-85-232-2023-5.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Gillet, J.; Pâque, E. (1910). Plantes principales de la région de Kisantu: leur nom indigène, leur nom scientifique, leurs usages (PDF). Annales du Musée du Congo Belge, Botanique, Série V, Notes botaniques sur la région du Bas- et Moyen-Congo, fascicule I (in français). Brussels: Spineux. p. 12. Retrieved 16 September 2026.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 Duvall, Chris S. (2019). The African Roots of Marijuana. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. pp. 13, 25, 27–28, 31. doi:10.1215/9781478004530. ISBN 978-1-4780-0394-6.
- ↑ du Toit, Brian M. (1996). "Pot by Any Other Name is Still...: A Study of the Diffusion of Cannabis". South African Journal of Ethnology. 19 (4): 127–135. doi:10.10520/AJA02580144_686.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 Clarke, R. O. (1851). "Short notice of the African Plant Diamba, commonly called Congo Tobacco". Hooker's Journal of Botany and Kew Garden Miscellany. 3: 9–11.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 Bentley, W. Holman (1887). Dictionary and Grammar of the Kongo Language, as Spoken at San Salvador, the Ancient Capital of the Old Kongo Empire, West Africa. London: Baptist Missionary Society and Trübner. s.v. Diamba, Hemp, Mbangi, Mbaya, Nsaka and Ntimpu.
- ↑ Assis Júnior, A. de (n.d.). Dicionário kimbundu-português, linguístico, botânico, histórico e corográfico (in português). Luanda: Argente, Santos. s.v. Riámba, Kangónha and Rikanha.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 "Cannabis sativa L., Cannabaceae". Prelude (in français). Société Française d'Ethnopharmacologie. Retrieved 16 September 2026.
- ↑ Hagenbucher-Sacripanti, F. (1989). Santé et rédemption par les génies au Congo (in français). Paris: Publisud.
- ↑ Disengomoka, I.; Delaveau, P. (1983). "Medicinal plants used for child's respiratory diseases in Zaire. Part I". Journal of Ethnopharmacology. 8 (3): 257–263. doi:10.1016/0378-8741(83)90063-6.
- ↑ Zuardi, Antonio Waldo (2006). "History of cannabis as a medicine: a review". Brazilian Journal of Psychiatry. 28 (2): 153–157. doi:10.1590/S1516-44462006000200015. PMID 16810401.
- ↑ Rubim de Pinho, Alvaro (1975). "Social and Medical Aspects of the Use of Cannabis in Brazil". In Rubin, Vera (ed.). Cannabis and Culture. The Hague: Mouton. pp. 293–294. doi:10.1515/9783110812060.293.
- ↑ Carlini, Elisaldo Araújo (2006). "A história da maconha no Brasil". Jornal Brasileiro de Psiquiatria (in português). 55 (4): 314–317. doi:10.1590/S0047-20852006000400008.