Kif

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Kif is chopped cannabis smoked in Morocco and Algeria: the dried female flowering tops, cut fine, usually mixed with tobacco and smoked in a pipe, the sebsi.^: 417: 101 The word also names the plant. In the Rif of northern Morocco kif is the local cannabis, which farmers grew for the smoking mixture long before they turned to making hashish for export.^: 417 In nineteenth-century Algeria it was one of the two names, with tekrouri, of the cannabis cultivated for smoking, and the botanist Alphonse de Candolle used it in 1869 for a variety of Cannabis sativa.^: 401

The sale of kif was a monopoly in Morocco from the nineteenth century: first of the sultan's government, then from 1906 of a tobacco company. Under the French protectorate the company sold kif ready mixed with tobacco, in stamped packets, until sales stopped in 1953.^: 127–133 A dahir of 24 April 1954 banned the plant, its preparations and the utensils made for preparing and smoking it. Smoking kif declined in the Rif from the 1960s, when growers began to make hashish for Europe. By the 2010s little kif was produced, and the word had come to mean the old local plant, in contrast to imported hybrids.^{: 417–418: 111}

Name

Kif comes from the Arabic kayf, pleasure or well-being.^: 417 The Spanish dictionary of the Real Academia derives it from the Moroccan Arabic kif, Indian hemp, and that from kayf, good humour, itself from the classical kayfa, "how". Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy notes that the word is sometimes taken for a Berber one. Citing the linguists Khalid Mourigh and Evgeniya Gutova, he calls it an Arabic loanword, masculine in the Senhadja dialect and feminine in Ghomara.

In the older sense the word named the feeling, not the drug. The orientalist Edward William Lane, writing of Egypt in the 1830s, called tobacco the commonest means in Muslim countries of exciting what the Arabs term "keyf", which he could translate no more nearly than by the word "exhilaration". At a meeting of the Société botanique de France in 1866 Dr Reboud explained that tekrouri named the substance and kif the sense of well-being it produced.^: 405–406 J. Bouquet, writing on cannabis for the United Nations in 1951, still used kif for a stage of the intoxication, "blissful rest".

How the word came to name both the plant and the smoking mixture is, in Chouvy's view, unclear. He suggests metonymy, perhaps under Turkish influence, and notes the forms khaf in an English account of 1791, keff in 1805 and kif in an Algerian document of 1853. The ethnopharmacologist Jamal Bellakhdar finds the word used for the plant in an act of about 1721 from the oases of the Touat, concerning a theft of kif plants.^: 123

Neighbouring names overlap with it. In Tunisia cannabis prepared for smoking was takrouri; Bouquet listed kif for Algeria and Morocco and takrouri for Tunis.^: 111 The Spanish grifa is "cáñamo índico", Indian hemp, in the Academia's dictionary, which derives it from grifo, not from Arabic. English dictionaries have kef, also spelled kif, for a dreamy, tranquil state and for the smoking material that produces it. In the cannabis trade and the literature on extraction, kief names the resin powder sieved from dried cannabis, which is pressed into hashish or mixed with dried flowers; that is a different product from the Moroccan smoking mixture.

Growers in the Rif gave the kif plant new names once imported hybrids were planted beside it. Before the hybrids it was usually called naanaa, mint, or aachba, stalk. By 2013 it was beldiya, from bled, country; maghribiya, the Moroccan one; aadiya, the regular one; or kdima dyalna, our old one.^: 421

Definition and plant part

For Bellakhdar, kif is the dried female flowering tops with their bracts and a few of the upper leaves, chopped; a second quality has more leaf and stalk. He separates it from ḥashīsha, richer in tops or made of the resinous tops pressed together, from the sieved resin chira and from maajoun, an electuary eaten in pellets, cakes and sweets.^: 111–113 Kenza Afsahi's elderly informants gave the same parts: good kif was the female flowering tops and their bracts, dried and chopped.^: 101 The psychiatrist Tod Mikuriya, writing in 1967, stated that only the flowers of the mature female plant were used. Roger Joseph, an anthropologist whose fieldwork in the Rif dates from the mid-1960s, instead describes the harvested plant being stripped of its leaves, which were then chopped.^: 187 Joseph Dalton Hooker and John Ball, travelling in Morocco in 1871, wrote of kif "prepared from the chopped leaves of common hemp".^: 46

The plant itself is the second sense. Chouvy and Afsahi call kif "the Moroccan name for the cannabis plant, a local variety that is adapted to the dryness of the Rif region", and many regard it as a landrace.^: 417 It was grown mostly on unirrigated land and sown in February or March.^: 421 Citing the botanist Robert Clarke, Chouvy writes that the plants grown for smoking kif until the middle of the twentieth century were large and branched, set far apart on manured soil and watered when the rain failed, and looked very different from the later plant grown for hashish. Several kinds were named after their districts. Bellakhdar names ktami, zerwali and gnawi the three main grades of kif on the market, from Ketama, the Beni Zeroual and the south.^: 112 Ahmed Benabud listed for 1956 the ktami of the Tetouan region and the Rif and, further south, the zerouali, soussi, gnaoui, haouzi and makhlif. The plant's form and chemistry are treated at Cannabis in Morocco.

The botanical name Cannabis sativa var. kif rests on Algeria. In 1866 Isidore Dukerley described the variety "cultivated in Algeria under the names of kif and tekrouri", whose flowering tops the Arabs smoked in pipes made for the purpose.^: 401 De Candolle took the name from him in the Prodromus of 1869, "cultivated in Algeria under the name kif or tekrouri, for its strongly inebriating inflorescences".

Statutory definition

The protectorate's first laws named kif beside tobacco. A dahir of 4 May 1915 made the purchase, manufacture and sale of tobacco and kif (spelled kiff) a monopoly of the Société internationale de régie cointéressée des tabacs au Maroc, and allowed no one but an authorised planter to hold raw kif. The dahir of 3 November 1919 regulated the growing of chanvre à kif, "kif hemp", in the French zone: no one could plant it without a permit from the company, which fixed the area to be sown in each district and took the whole crop at a price set in advance.

The tobacco dahir of 12 November 1932 kept the monopoly of tobacco and kif. Its third title, "Culture du kif", banned the growing of kif hemp throughout the French zone but let the company have it grown for its own needs under special permits. Retailers could sell kif only in packets bearing the company's stamps, and raw kif could not be moved.^{: 1334, 1338–1340} In the dahir of 24 April 1954, chanvre indien or chanvre à kif means the flowering and fruiting tops of the female plant of the variety called "Indian". The dahir banned every operation with it, its preparations and "the utensils and objects intended specially for its preparation and consumption".

Later law speaks of cannabis. The drug law of 21 May 1974 punishes the production, holding and use of "substances or plants classified as narcotics", and amended the 1954 dahir.^: 1172 Under Law 13-21 of 2021 on the licit uses of cannabis, cannabis means any plant of the genus and its flowering or fruiting tops, "whatever their name". The Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961 had defined cannabis by the same parts, "by whatever name they may be designated".^: 1172 The law requires growers to use seed and plants certified by the national cannabis agency, ANRAC, and a decree of 2022 limits licit cultivation to the provinces of Al Hoceima, Chefchaouen and Taounate.^: 1173 In March 2024 the news site Le360 reported that the agency had approved the local variety, which it called "Beldia", for licit cultivation in the Al Hoceima region; on 11 March a press piece published by Morocco's national agricultural research institute noted that the agency had not yet confirmed it.

Making kif

Joseph describes the work in the central Rif in 1965–66. The harvested female plant was stripped of its leaves by hand. The stems were thrown away or retted for fibre to make hats, baskets and shoes. The leaves were cleaned of seed, cut very fine with a small hand sickle and mixed with uncured tobacco.^: 187

Afsahi's elderly informants, who had known kif when smokers still prepared it themselves, described each step. The dried branches were rubbed between the hands to part the flowering tops from twigs, small leaves and seeds. The seeds were rolled off a tilted sheet of paper and set aside, and the tops were chopped fine with a knife on a board. The chopped kif was passed through a sieve, and pieces that did not pass went back on the board with the next batch. Pressed under a weight, it looked like "a warm, flat cake"; it was then mixed with a smaller quantity of tobacco and sieved again. The finished mixture was sometimes kept in a goat's bladder.^: 101 Bouquet, describing North Africa in 1950, wrote that a smoker who made his own simply removed the seeds, large leaves and stalks and crushed the rest in the palm, while the Tunisian monopoly ground the tops in a mortar and sifted them.

The proportion of tobacco varied. Afsahi's informants gave nine parts of kif to one of tobacco, or two to one.^: 101 Mikuriya wrote that the flowers were always mixed with an equal amount of tobacco. Joseph found about seven parts of kif to three of tobacco and judged Mikuriya's equal parts wrong. His informants said that kif without tobacco "doesn't have salt"; they bought the tobacco separately, and it cost more than the kif.^: 187 The manufactured kif of the protectorate held more tobacco than the home-made: a third pure kif at first, cut to a fifth at the request of the director of public health.^: 106

The pipe

Kif was smoked in the sebsi, a wooden stem with a small bowl of fired clay.^: 187: 102 Afsahi, who writes sebti, notes that smokers ordered their pipes from potters. The stem was of olive or apricot wood, and the bowl had to be of good refractory clay. The pipes were at first about 80 centimetres long and were later shortened for convenience and discretion.^: 102 The stem woods Bellakhdar names are oleander, Jasminum fruticans and laurustinus.^: 113 The pipe Joseph saw in the Rif had a walnut stem that came apart in two pieces and sold for three dirhams in the markets.^: 187 Smokers carried kif in a leather pouch, the metoui, and passed it round so that others could taste it.^: 102 Chouvy suggests that the word sebsi is Turkish and probably came to Morocco after Fez was taken by a Turkish and Wattasid force in 1554.

The tobacco and kif monopoly

Main article: Régie des Tabacs et du Kif

Bellakhdar traces the monopoly to 1860. To pay the indemnity of the Treaty of Wad Ras, imposed in 1860 after Spain took Tetouan, the sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Abderrahmane gave the makhzen, the central government, the sole right to sell cannabis and tobacco. The monopoly could not be enforced, since the crops and markets lay largely outside the government's control. From 1886 Hassan I entrusted the sale of tobacco and cannabis to a state agency, the saka.^: 127–129 In 1894 the government closed the kif cafés and smoking rooms of Fez.^: 103–104 The Conference of Algeciras of 1906 passed the monopoly of the tobacco and kif trade to an international company with mainly French capital, based at Tangier, which displaced the saka.^: 132

Under the protectorate the company bought the crop from licensed growers and sold the product. Benabud wrote that the dahirs regulating kif served mainly to protect the monopoly against growers and sellers outside it. In 1926 a zone of tolerance north of Fez let tribes that had recently submitted keep growing it; the zone was abolished in theory in 1929, though production there went on.^: 133 The company's first product, made at Tangier, was replaced in 1932 by a kif and tobacco mixture called jyed, made at Port-Lyautey, now Kenitra. Smokers did not all take to it. A physician at Marrakesh reported in 1919 that the company's kif needed thirty or forty pipes for the effect and that some called it kif teben, straw kif; smuggled kif sold there for a third of the price.^: 107–108 The company sold kif in tobacco shops in packets of five grams. Bouquet gives sales of 3,181,782 packets in 1941 and more than 2,500,000 in 1947, and writes that its raw kif was bought from growers in the Spanish zone.

Spain dealt with kif in its own zone of the north. A Spanish-zone dahir of 1916, in a transcription published in El Faro de Ceuta in 2013, let the tobacco company sell cut kif in ten-gram packets. Benabud wrote that the monopoly lost its rights in the Spanish and Tangier zones in 1940 and that the Spaniards then allowed kif to be grown, a source of revenue for them; Joseph and Bellakhdar both write that Spain did not try to suppress it.^: 191: 134 Abdelkrim el-Khattabi, leading the Rif's war against Spain in the 1920s, forbade his fighters kif and hashish.^: 132

Sales of the company's kif stopped in 1953, and the dahir of 24 April 1954 forbade its production, sale and consumption. Benabud reports that the fight against smuggling, which had been waged mainly in the monopoly's interest, then stopped short and contraband grew. The 1954 dahir applied to the whole country after independence in 1956.^: 134

Consumption

Nineteenth-century travellers found kif smoked widely. Hooker and Ball wrote in 1878 that tobacco smoking seemed unknown in Morocco and that kief "is almost universally employed for that purpose both by Moors and Berebers".^: 46 Abderrahmane Ben Tayeb, who crossed the Rif between 1872 and 1893, found the Senhaja of Ketama already famous for their kif and tobacco.^: 126

Some Sufi brotherhoods made kif part of their life. Sidi Heddi, who died in 1805 and founded the Heddawa, left among his relics a pipe nearly two metres long whose bowl held a pound of kif and which went round the assembled brothers.^: 125 Khalid Mouna, drawing on the ethnographer Brunel, writes that the Heddawa held that cannabis helped the recitation of the dhikr and preferred the kif of Ketama; a saying of Ketama runs that the Heddawa can bear hunger but not the lack of cannabis.^: 188–189 Afsahi and Mouna add that the Aissawa and the Hamadsha smoked kif freely during the dhikr, and that the Heddawa obliged their disciples to. Joseph, in the Rif of the 1960s, found the opposite: kif smoking was not tied to ritual and was not encouraged by the local brotherhoods, most of which frowned on it.^: 190

Afsahi writes that kif was smoked daily above all by craftsmen and labourers (tailors, bakers, cabinet-makers, day labourers) and by former soldiers, as a quick stimulant for work.^: 102 Bouquet, writing of North Africa in 1951 and calling the habit a vice, describes moderate smokers who took a few pipes in the evening with coffee or tea, and groups of five or six who met in cafés or a hired room. He quotes a Moroccan proverb: "Kif is like fire; a little warms, a great deal burns". Benabud, a physician, estimated in 1957 that nearly a million Moroccans smoked kif occasionally or regularly, and saw it spreading among the better-off and among women.

Joseph found kif in the Rif of 1965–66 to be a habit of men of middle age or older. Unlike drinking it carried no religious stigma: a man caught smoking might be ignored or held overnight, while a Muslim caught drinking could be jailed for months. Cafés bought the plant, ground it and sold it in used matchboxes, and he counted at least ten cafés serving kif smokers in the town of Al Hoceima. Townspeople with a Western education, he wrote, held the kif smoker to be poor, illiterate and backward.^: 189–190

The turn to hashish ended kif's place in the Rif economy. European demand in the 1960s and above all the 1970s and 1980s moved growers from the kif mixture to hashish for export, and the larger hybrid plants introduced from the early 2000s displaced the kif plant itself; in the summer of 2013 Chouvy and Afsahi saw very little of it in the fields.^{: 418, 420} Chouvy writes that smoking kif is now made in small quantities for a limited home market. Afsahi found its traditional use rare by 2017; the word is still used, but now for the local variety, to tell it from the newer imported plants.^: 111

Outside Morocco

In Algeria kif and tekrouri were field crops. Dukerley's note of 1866 came out of a fraud case at Bône in 1865: a merchant had sold growers what he called tekrouri seed, which came up ordinary hemp, and was sentenced to fifteen days in prison. Kif seed, he reported, cost much more than hemp seed.^: 401 In the discussion of his note Reboud said that tekrouri was smoked with tobacco in small pipes made for it, and that 300 to 400 quintals a year went from Bône to the Sahara.^: 405–406 By 1951 Algeria prohibited cannabis, while Tunisia and French Morocco sold it under control.

In Tunisia the state sold takrouri like tobacco, salt, gunpowder and matches. Its tobacco factory at Tunis cleaned, chopped and sifted the plant and sold it in five-gram packets in every tobacco shop of the Regency: 6,387 kilograms, or 1,277,400 packets, in 1937. Bouquet met smokers in the Nefzaoua who carried their kif pipes in the folds of their turbans.

See also

• Bhang
• Cannabis in Morocco
• Charas
• Ganja
• Hashish
• Kief
• Rif Mountains
• Sebsi