Talk:Afropips

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Discussion for: Afropips • View • Links • Related changes

Use this page for verification notes, disputes, and action items. Keep narrative content on the article.

Page scope

Afropips is about the seed business and its surviving catalogue. Seed lines held or reproduced by later companies belong on their own accession pages.

Sourcing

The surviving record consists chiefly of an archived Afropips website, breeder databases, later sellers' accounts and forum posts. The article attributes their claims. This page records conflicting accounts and material that cannot safely be stated as fact in the article.

Discussion

The surviving record

• The Afropips homepage survives in a Wayback Machine capture of 27 December 2010. It names a founder known as Afroman, gives 2000 as the business's start, describes African seed lines and F1 hybrids, and shows a shop catalogue.
• SeedFinder preserves a 25-name Afropips catalogue and a description closely resembling the site's promotional copy. Its individual Malawi Gold entry preserves more product claims.
• The Real Seed Company (RSC) describes its later Malawi Gold stock and ACE Seeds describes a Nigerian line now sold under Khalifa Genetics. They are participants in those seed chains, not independent witnesses to the original field collections.
• CannaWeed, ICMag and Overgrow preserve contemporary discussion and later recollections. Some posts reproduce text attributed to Afropips or quote private correspondence; the original message or correspondence cannot be checked from those reproductions. They document what the posters said, not independently established biography.

Breeder catalogues and forum posts are evidence of the claims their authors made, not of botanical, ethnographic or historical facts.

Names, dates and provenance

• Title. The archived site calls itself Afropips. SeedFinder and THCFarmer use Afropips Seeds for their breeder profiles.
• Founder and base. The archived homepage says the founder was known as Afroman and says the business began in 2000. It gives no legal name, registration or base. A biography in a 2005 ICMag compilation says its speaker moved to England in 2000, but the text was posted by the compiler zeppelindood, not by a verified Afropips account.
• Closure. A 2013 capture shows a parked domain, but neither that capture nor a seller's approximate shutdown date establishes when the business ceased.
• Seed provenance. What is said about the lines comes from Afropips, SeedFinder and later sellers. Names such as Malawi Gold or Nigerian are not verified collection locations. A seller's claim that a line was not outcrossed is not a genetic test.
• Identity. Afroman, Jim, James, Jimmy SNR and Jimmy JNR are the forms the sources use. No source settles how they are related. The conflicting death reports are below.

Source discrepancies

The accounts below are each attributed to their source.

When Afropips began and when its website opened

• The Afropips homepage captured in December 2010 says the business began in 2000 under Afroman.
• The 2005 ICMag compilation says the website began on 17 January 2004. The first-person biography in that post has no visible Afropips attribution; zeppelindood posted it amid biographies of several breeders.
• A Wayback capture dated 12 April 2004 shows that afropips.com was then a frame that loaded the business's site at afropips.moonfruit.com; the domain's registrar is named only in the page's fallback text. The earliest capture of the moonfruit site, of 15 June 2004, already offers the business's heritage strains, and its Malawi Gold page was captured on 12 August 2004. These captures establish the content at those dates, but do not establish when the seed business began.

Which person died in 2008

• On 2 August 2009, CannaWeed member Adiba reproduced a message attributed to Jimmy SNR on ICMag. It said "Jimmy JNR passed away last September" and that Afropips would continue. Adiba expressly said they might have misunderstood whether the breeder or his son had died.
• On 10 October 2009, member silvershiva wrote that the breeder's son had died in September and that Afropips would continue. That is another forum account, not a birth, death or company record.
• On 20 December 2010, member Celebrex quoted text attributed to a new Afropips site saying that Afroman, named there as James, had died on 1 September 2008 aged 43. The same post said the original breeder no longer ran the business and quoted a request for older Afropips genetics.
• On 7 May 2012, ICMag member Dave Coulier said he exchanged emails with Afroman (Jim) in 2010 and that it was the son who died in 2008. The emails are not available in the thread.
• On 29 March 2023, Overgrow member Roms wrote "RIP Jim" in a discussion of Swazi Red. This later recollection does not establish a death date or resolve which earlier account was correct.

Whether the business or website had ceased

• On 10 August 2010, an anonymous CannaWeed poster said a Seedsman email reported that Afropips no longer supplied Malawi Gold, and said the Afropips website was down.
• The 27 December 2010 archived homepage contains an Afropips catalogue with purchasable seed packs. CannaWeed members on 20 December also described a new site and continuing stock. The capture confirms what the site displayed on that date, not who operated it or whether orders were fulfilled.
• CannaWeed posts in March and August 2011 describe Seedsman promotions and purchased Afropips packs. They document reported third-party availability after the August 2010 interruption.
• ACE Seeds says the Afropips seedbank shut down "around 2010". This is a later seller's approximate account.
• The homepage capture of 18 January 2013 is a parked search-links page. A domain change is not a dated company closure.

Catalogue size, classification and seed type

• The archived site placed products under African Pure, African Hybrid and Medical Seeds. Its December 2010 homepage offered Blue Cheese (five seeds, £25), Malawi (10 seeds, £20) and Nigerian (10 seeds, £35). The site claimed organic production, selection and pressure testing; no source reports an independent inspection. SeedFinder's generic description says 10 seeds per pack, whereas the captured homepage offered a five-seed Blue Cheese pack.
• SeedFinder lists 25 named Afropips varieties: Blue Cheese, Durban Poison, Fast Blast, Grenadella, Mabombe, MalSP, Malaki, Malawi Gold, Malawi Mini, Malberino, Malberry, Mr Majestyk, Nigerian, Nigerian 99, Nigerian x Afghan, Platinum, Power Malawi, Sangoma, Senegal Haze, Southern Ice, Swazi Red, Sweet Malawi, Sweet White Malawi, Tribal Vision and Triple Treat. It does not establish that all were offered at once.
• THCFarmer's community-listed profile counts 26 releases and labels all 26 feminized. Its own catalogue heading says 25, so even the profile's two counts differ. SeedFinder's Malawi Gold entry says that line was never available as feminised seed. CannaWeed users in December 2010 described feminised offerings on the new Afropips site. These records may refer to different periods or reflect database errors; no source establishes a catalogue-wide seed type.
• The site's broad African heritage description explicitly included F1 hybrids with non-African parents. Not every release in the catalogue can be described as a landrace.

Malawi Gold provenance and claims

• SeedFinder reproduces an Afropips-style product description classing Malawi Gold as a "pure-bred, traditional landrace", saying it was selected after 10 years' experience with Malawi growers. The description gives a 14–16 week flowering period and claims its effect can be attributed to THCV. SeedFinder's summary gives about 105 days, a figure within that range. None is an independent field or chemical measurement.
• RSC says Jim of Afropips maintained Malawi Gold outside Malawi for decades, describes it as an inbred line that, to RSC's knowledge, was never outcrossed, and says RSC received a selected line through a collector. The listing calls it a Nkhotakota landrace but does not identify a collection site, date, farmer or collector for the original seed.
• The wiki's Malawi Gold 2019 IBL is an RSC-held reproduction record. Its accession title must not be read as the original Afropips collection date.

Nigerian line in later circulation

• ACE Seeds says its Nigerian cultivar had belonged to the Afropips collection, was kept by a collector community after Afropips shut down, and reached Khalifa Genetics in 2020. ACE reports that the first reproduction produced many hermaphrodites and that Khalifa made two more controlled open pollinations. Its current listing labels the line P4. These are ACE and Khalifa's lineage and selection claims; no original Afropips collection location or date is established by that page.

Accessions

Five accessions name Afropips as their seed storage location: Malawi Gold 2004, its shorter selection 2004 AFP Malawi Mini IBL, Nigerian 2009, Swazi Red 2009 and Durban Poison 2009. Each is dated by the earliest archived page of the business's website that lists the line; no source gives a collection date. RSC-MWI-CEN-0120190001, held by The Real Seed Company, names Malawi Gold 2004 as its parent. ACE Seeds says that the Nigerian line it sells under the Khalifa Genetics name was once part of Afropips' collection. The business's F1 hybrids and mixed packs have no accessions, and neither have the two 2004 pages named Royal Swazi and Pondo Power, which offered no seed.

Promotional claims, later lines and personal material

• Descriptions of effect, potency, medical use and genetic purity, beyond the attributed Malawi Gold example, are promotional claims; no source gives independent measurements, and they are not used.
• SeedFinder's descendant genealogy for Malawi Gold, including Malberry, MalSP, Power Malawi, Malawi Mini and crosses credited to other breeders, is not used: each later line needs its own source.
• Contact addresses, personal correspondence and forum speculation about the person behind the brand are not used.