Mpondoland

Mpondoland
Pondoland, Eastern Pondoland
ActiveRecorded as grown here since 2000
⛶
Hierarchy
Growing Region	Wild Coast
Geography
Country	South Africa
Province/State	Eastern Cape
Coordinates	-31.34, 29.55
Landscape
Area	3,700 km²
Terrain	Broken country of gorges, enclaves and ravines, with forest along the rivers; approximately Ingquza Hill and Port St Johns local municipalities
Climate
Climate Type	Summer rainfall; rain-fed cropping possible, though poor soils limit it
Rainfall	800–1,000 mm
Seasons	Grown all year; the ideal season runs from October to March, four to six months to harvest
Growing history
Documentation
Appellations	0
Accessions	1
Conservation
Populations	none documented yet

Mpondoland (also Pondoland) is a cannabis growing area on the Wild Coast of the Eastern Cape, South Africa, centred on Eastern Mpondoland round Lusikisiki and Port St Johns. Eastern Pondoland has produced the most cannabis of any part of the Wild Coast for many decades, and its broken country of gorges, enclaves and ravines makes the plantations hard for the police to reach.^: 607 GroundUp reported in 2024 that farmers had grown cannabis in the valleys of Eastern Mpondoland for over 100 years; growers there said that prices had fallen fast since private cultivation was decriminalised in 2018.

Geography

In Thembela Kepe's Pondoland study area of the late 1990s the inhabitants were the Xhosa-speaking amaMpondo, who lived by a mix of crops, livestock, gathering and off-farm income such as remittances and pensions. The climate allows rain-fed cropping, but poor soils limit crop production, especially of maize.^: 606 Mean annual rainfall in the OR Tambo district, which takes in Lusikisiki, is between 800 and 1,000 mm, falling in summer.^: 262

In Kepe's study area most of the forests where cannabis was grown stood on or near river banks, on alluvial soils that tended to be fertile and were rarely dry for long.^: 609 At Dikidikini, a village that can be reached only by crossing the Mzintlava River, steep rocky mountains tower over the village and hide its cannabis fields from the authorities.

Growers and plots

Kepe studied the cannabis growers of a village in the Lusikisiki area, given the name Mlanjeni in the study, over five years from 1996 to 2000, including nine months living there.^: 606 Kepe wrote that the Lusikisiki area had been known for many decades to produce the best dagga in the country. All the village's growers were men, in three groups:^: 608

• The ababhemi bentsangu (dagga smokers) grew only for their own use. A household head might plant patches of 2 to 10 m² round the homestead, among other crops; a boy whose family disapproved planted in the forest or by a stream, far from the settlement.
• A second group smoked and sold the surplus to other villagers; those who did not smoke grew cannabis to feed to their horses. Since the early 1990s this group had moved its plants from the forests and gorges into homestead gardens.
• The abadakisi bentsangu traded in cannabis full time. Thirteen lived in the village, most of them married men with large families.^: 608

In Kepe's study almost all the cannabis in the area was planted. It was grown all year, but the ideal season ran from October to March, and the crop took four to six months to be ready. Growers pruned the tops of the plants, which can reach several metres; local informants said this kept them lower and less visible.^: 609 The established traders kept their plantations deep in the forests, which are understood locally to be common property. Informants said that some 70 years earlier most people had lived in or near the forested gorges; by the time of the study almost everyone lived on the "topland", 2 to 5 km away, so that a forest plantation was a space apart from the homestead.^: 609–610 Craig Paterson, who travelled in the former Transkei for a thesis of 2009, observed that most cannabis in Pondoland was grown clandestinely outside village limits.^: 6

How many households grow is disputed. A doctoral thesis by Hajdu, quoted by Paterson, put the share in its study area at perhaps 2 to 3 per cent and called the popular view that rural people in Pondoland live mostly off cannabis "strongly exaggerated". Paterson judged the share to be much higher. The visits behind that judgement were to areas known for high concentrations of growing, and Paterson suggested that the habit of growing outside village limits may account for Hajdu's lower figure.^: 5–6

Trade and prices

Kepe reported that city dealers made about R1,000 a kilogram, while the village grower's share was about R40 (citing Smith, 1995) or as little as R16 (citing Schutze, 1998). Mlanjeni's traders sold small amounts in the village or sent them by bus to Durban, to lessen the chance of being targeted by the police, and few showed signs of wealth.^: 608 Growers far from tarred roads had smaller operations, because city buyers preferred places they could reach easily.^: 614

A trader told Paterson that growers round Lusikisiki would sometimes walk two days over the mountains with their cannabis, families with babies and children among them, carrying 5, 10 or 20 kg each for the trader to inspect and buy.^: 88 Paterson wrote that street prices in Port St Johns would be substantially lower than in Johannesburg.^: 4

Names and plants

Xhosa speakers in the Eastern Cape call cannabis umya or intsangu.^: 607 In three villages near Lusikisiki, people told Azile Dumani and colleagues that they preferred the names Umthunzi wenkukhu and Icuba elikhulu, because Intsangu carries a social stigma. The villagers grade the plant by its flowers: Usincanga, the mainly female plant, is the first grade; uHlakatha, the hermaphrodite, is the second; and iGeza or Idyadya, the male, has little or no value. The authors added that the strain is known informally as "Transkei Gold".^: 264–265 GroundUp reported in 2024 that the plant is known locally as Ntsangu.

GroundUp wrote that the farmers of Mpondoland mostly grow a landrace strain, generally low in THC and full of seed. A study by the Dutch researcher Tijmen Grooten put its THC at 2.5 to 8 per cent, against about 20 to 28 per cent in more popular strains, often grown overseas.

The vouchers of 2023

On 10 August 2023 A. Dumani, B. Mpambani and M. W. Keswa collected eight specimens of cannabis in the indigenous valley forest of three villages near Lusikisiki, in Ingquza Hill Local Municipality. The authors withheld the villages' names because of the legal position of cannabis, and described the plants as growing naturally there, in abundance.^{: 259, 262–263} Tony Dold, curator of the Selmar Schonland Herbarium at Rhodes University, identified all eight from their morphology as Cannabis sativa. The sheets are housed in the herbarium of the Döhne Agricultural Development Institute.^: 264–265

Eradication

In rural South Africa the police had for many years destroyed cannabis plantations by burning or spraying them, partly because convicting growers was hard; police complained that villagers left their fields and homes for the mountains when police vehicles approached.^: 611–612 Kepe wrote that bribing corrupt police officers was common in many cannabis-producing areas of Pondoland.^: 612 A pilot project to grow hemp for industrial use left out Eastern Pondoland, on the grounds that hemp could not be told apart there from cannabis grown for the drug trade.^: 607

Landiwe Msolongile, a grower at Dikidikini, told GroundUp that police squads once came down the valleys with machetes, and that helicopters later sprayed the fields with chemicals. GroundUp reported that the helicopters, donated by the United States government, sprayed glyphosate twice a year and that the spraying stopped in 2016. In October 2018 the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights recorded its concern at the use of glyphosate in the aerial spraying of cannabis in the Pondoland region. It recommended that South Africa suspend the spraying and offer the communities alternative development programmes to encourage them to give up the illicit crop, including a way into the medical cannabis market through licences for small-scale community farmers.

After 2018

The Constitutional Court's judgment of 2018 decriminalised growing cannabis for private use. Growers in the area told GroundUp in 2024 that prices had fallen fast since then. Lungisani Khumbafathi, who once got R1,500 or R2,000 for a 20-litre bucket, was getting R500, and had cleared more land and grown more to make up the difference. With fewer buyers, his household had burnt part of a harvest it could not sell. Msolongile said that a drought of several years had killed the maize, beans and squashes she had tried to grow at home. Most of the village relied on cannabis for a living, though very few smoked it.

Grooten named three causes of the fall: the growth of private home growing after the judgment, the arrival of more potent foreign strains, and what Grooten called the "cowboy" cannabis sector, whose potent strains often end up in unregulated "dispensaries". The Eastern Cape Rural Development Agency planned a cannabis project at the Magwa Tea Estate, between Lusikisiki and the coast; it had yet to gain real momentum in July 2024.

Accessions

Accession ID	Name	Collected	Locality
VIB-ZAF-EAS-0100000001	Lusikisiki Poison General Population		Lusikisiki

The Vibes Collective listed a Lusikisiki Poison in the landrace section of its strain guide, placed on its map at Lusikisiki.

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See also

• Cannabis in South Africa
• South Africa
• Wild Coast