This portal covers the nineteen countries filed here under Africa, in five subregions: Algeria, Egypt, Morocco and Sudan in North Africa; Ghana, Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Senegal in West Africa; Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Central Africa; Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Tanzania and Uganda in East Africa; and Eswatini, Lesotho and South Africa in Southern Africa. Accessions from Mauritius, Mozambique, Réunion and Zimbabwe, which have no country page yet, are listed with them.
On the account of the geographer Chris S. Duvall, cannabis came to Africa from southern Asia at least a thousand years ago, reaching Madagascar and the Mediterranean coast first. Water-pipe bowls of the fourteenth century from Ethiopia held cannabis residue, so the plant was smoked there before tobacco reached the continent. Its names fall into broad zones, which Brian du Toit mapped in 1975: dagga in the south, forms of bangi in the east and centre, and forms of diamba in the west.
Two African states helped bring the plant under international control. A letter from South Africa to the League of Nations' opium committee in November 1923 put cannabis on its agenda, and at Geneva in 1924–25 Egypt's delegate, Mohamed El Guindy, moved to bring it within the opium convention, calling hashish "at least as harmful as opium, if not more so". In the French zone of Morocco a dahir of 12 November 1932 banned the growing of kif, except where the Régie des Tabacs et du Kif had it grown under permit.
Most of the accessions documented here come from two countries. Nearly all of Morocco's are from the Rif, the country's traditional kif-growing zone. Most of South Africa's are herbarium sheets; the oldest found, received from Natal in 1857, gives the isiZulu name Insango. Sheets gathered in the Belgian Congo in the 1930s and held at Meise Botanic Garden give forms of the name bangi.
285 accessions · 81 news items · 11 growing regions · 27 growing areas
