Talk:Democratic Republic of the Congo

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Discussion for: Democratic Republic of the Congo • View • Links • Related changes

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

Page scope

Democratic Republic of the Congo is about cannabis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Its cannabis material is the diamba and bangi names, the colonial herbarium sheets held at Meise, the modern trade in the east and the medical-and-scientific licensing regime. Its accessions are listed on the page.

Data verification

Record source conflicts, dating problems and sources not used here. Keep narrative content on the article.

Discussion

Infobox fields

• Legal status. "Illegal (medical and scientific use licensed)" with 2021, on the Arrêté ministériel of 27 February 2021. Its Article 2, as amended in November 2022, authorises exploitation "uniquement et exclusivement" for medical and scientific purposes and leaves all other culture, production, possession, use and marketing "strictement interdites". The pairing has the same shape as Morocco's.
• Subregion. "Central Africa", not the United Nations' "Middle Africa". The infobox files the page in the category of its subregion, and the wiki's category is Central Africa; the UN form would have opened a second, empty category.

Naming the polity

Sheets gathered before the Belgian annexation of November 1908 come from the Congo Free State; later ones from the Belgian Congo. Five of the ten herbarium sheets predate the annexation: Gillet's two of 1901, the two Laurent sheets of November and December 1903, and Gillet's Wombali sheet of October 1908. The page names the polity by date.

Sources

• Herbarium sheets are cited to their Meise Botanic Garden records (IIIF manifests), with the label readings transcribed on the accession pages. The 1903 sheets name "Laurent É. & Laurent M." (Émile and Marcel Laurent).
• Gillet and Pâque 1910, p. 12, is quoted for the diamba entry: "Le chanvre n'est cultivé que pour l'usage qu'en font les fumeurs ; usage qui les rend de plus en plus hébétés et abrutis."
• Laudati 2016 (Review of African Political Economy 43(148)) is cited from its published abstract; the quotations on the page are the abstract's. The full article was not available, which is why the sentence in Agriculture describing the eastern crop as a smallholder one carries a verification tag.
• Legal texts are cited to LEGANET. The site serves a self-signed certificate, so its HTTPS links can fail; the same texts load over plain HTTP.
• The Bena Riamba is cited, not narrated. Duvall gives it a chapter and du Toit records the Bashilange of the Kasai calling the plant rhiamba after the 1850s. The detailed story (Kalamba Mukenge, Pogge and Wissmann, the founding of Luluabourg) circulates mostly in unsourced retellings, which were not used; it belongs on a page of its own, written from Duvall's chapter 6 and the German primary sources.

Statements removed and why

• That the country is "the ground on which two of Africa's three great cannabis name-families meet": the article's synthesis of du Toit's map with the labels, and "great" is evaluative.
• That the three collectors who recorded bangi worked "in three unrelated languages" and that the vocabulary "is spread across unrelated language families": no source says so, and Swahili, Kinande and Turumbu are all Bantu languages.
• "The three collectors did not know one another" and "Not every community welcomed the plant": no cited source says either.
• "Colonial botanists recorded cannabis as a cultivated plant grown for one purpose", and the sentence calling Gillet's judgement "evidence of the author's colonial framing": one botanist generalised to all, and commentary about the source. Gillet's own words are now quoted.
• That Laudati treats the eastern crop as "an established part of rural livelihoods rather than an adjunct of armed conflict": not in the cited abstract. Laudati's Cambridge seminar abstract of 2013 speaks of "the dual role that marijuana plays for local livelihoods as well as a source of violence".
• "Smoking is the use the sources record": the next section records medicinal use (Disengomoka and Delaveau 1983).
• That the colonial record "begins in 1901" and that the Laurent mission of 1903 belonged to the Belgian Congo: no source makes the first claim, and the second is wrong (see Naming the polity). "The Laurent brothers" is replaced by the names on the sheets.
• "The herbarium record documents a plant grown near settlements rather than a plantation crop": the labels record the sex of the plants, not their setting.

Identification of Louis 16015

The sheet is determined only as Cf. Cannabis sativa L., with the Determinavit line left blank and the specimen sterile, so its identification is less firm than the catalogue's Cannabis sativa L. suggests. The article gives the label's facts and leaves the comparison here.

Open questions

• Conservation status is a section stub. Nothing assessing Congolese landrace cannabis populations has been found: no cultivation survey, no genetic or chemotype characterisation and no seed-bank holding beyond one seed line. The herbarium sheets are a documentary record, not germplasm, and the seed accession gives no collection date. Laudati's work concerns the trade, not the plant.
• Agriculture. Whether Laudati's article supports the description of the eastern crop as a smallholder one grown among other crops.
• Geography. The physiographic first sentence carries a citation-needed tag.