Talk:Spread of cannabis to Africa

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Page scope

Spread of cannabis to Africa covers how cannabis came to Africa and the western Indian Ocean islands: the published accounts of its arrival and the debate between them, the early evidence region by region (Egypt and North Africa, the Horn and the East African coast, the interior and the south, West Africa and the Sahara), and the island sections on Madagascar and the Mascarenes. The history of each country after the plant arrived belongs to the country and Cannabis in … pages; the onward crossing of the Atlantic belongs to Spread of cannabis to the Americas.

Data verification

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

Discussion

Sources

Duvall (2019), EchoGéo 48, cited by paragraph number: arrival at least 1,000 years ago, in Madagascar and on the Mediterranean coast (para. 10); North African knowledge of the drug from the Levant (para. 12); dates of gardens and appetite-suppressant use in the south (paras. 13–14); West Africa a late arrival (paras. 15, 20). Its Illustration 1, "Historical dispersal of cannabis in Africa", labels each route with a period, several of them with a query.
Duvall, The African Roots of Marijuana (2019), chapter 1 and its notes (pp. 11–28, 233–239): the case against the Arab and Muslim diffusion narrative, the pipe argument, and the authors Duvall answers (Laufer 1930, Wulsin 1932, Emboden 1972, Keall 1993, Booth 2005, du Toit 1980).
Duvall (2017), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History: the plant dispersed widely within Africa "mostly after 1500".
Rubin (ed.), Cannabis and Culture (1975): the chapters of du Toit (pp. 81–116, the diffusion account), Benet (pp. 39–50), van der Merwe (pp. 77–80, the Lalibela residue), Khalifa (pp. 195–206, Egypt), Joseph (pp. 185–194, Morocco) and Benoist (pp. 227–234, Réunion and Mauritius), and Rubin's introduction (p. 5).
Philips (1983), Journal of African History 24: 303–319: the review of African smoking pipes.
Ndanyi (2021), Southern Journal for Contemporary History 46(2): 4–23: the dates and carriers proposed for the arrival in Kenya.
Rodríguez Frade (2022), Bulletin de l'Institut français d'archéologie orientale 122: hemp cloth at Dra' Abu el-Naga.
Bellakhdar (2013), Hespéris-Tamuda 48: fibre hemp and the resin plant in the Maghreb.
Merlin (2003), Economic Botany 57: the Sebanzi Hill pipes and the Drotsky's Cave pollen. Mitchell (2020) and Douglass and colleagues (2019): the Madagascar pollen and its dating.
Flacourt (1661), Richardson (1885), Burton (1872), Bouquet (1951): primary and early descriptions.
Ordinance No. 2 of 1840 (Mauritius), in A Collection of the Laws of Mauritius and Its Dependencies, vol. 4 (1867), p. 541.

Where the sources disagree on dates

Arrival in East Africa. Du Toit (1975) dates Arab trade with the coast to "the first centuries A.D." and makes it the likely route. Duvall's book (2019, p. 12) gives "perhaps one thousand years ago"; his EchoGéo paper gives "at least 1,000 years ago"; his map gives "before 1000 CE?". Ndanyi (2021) reports two further figures from Duvall: "as early as 2 000 years ago" (book, p. 53) and "by 700 CE" (Duvall's Cannabis, 2015, p. 46). He also reports Warf's 1100 AD.
The earliest smoking. Duvall calls the Lalibela residue the "earliest direct evidence of cannabis smoking anywhere". Burnt cannabis in wooden braziers at Jirzankal Cemetery in the Pamirs, about 2,500 years old, is older evidence of cannabis burned for its smoke, though not in pipes.
The Madagascar pollen. The Lake Tritrivakely date of about 2,200 calibrated years before present is interpolated between two radiocarbon dates; Mitchell (2020) questions both the date and the identification. Duvall's sentence giving "at least 1,000 years ago" for the island cites no source of its own.
Fibre in Madagascar. Flacourt (1661) wrote that the people did not make thread, cloth or rope from the stems. Duvall (2019) names Madagascar as the one place south of the Sahara where hemp fibre was harvested in quantity, for cloth, without a date.
The Mascarenes. A drug-monitoring report of the French observatory OFDT (2022) states that zamal is attested on Réunion "dès 1770 dans un herbier", without naming the herbarium or giving a source. Benoist (1975) calls the introduction "apparently quite ancient" with no precise documentation.

Points about the sources

Duvall's answers to Laufer, Wulsin, Keall and Booth are known here through his quotations and endnotes. Philips (1983) is cited for its abstract. The conclusion that water pipes passed from Ethiopia to Persia is Duvall's reading of Philips's p. 313.
Du Toit's book Cannabis in Africa (1980) and his paper "Man and cannabis in Africa: a study of diffusion" (African Economic History 1, 1976) carry the same diffusion account. Ndanyi (2021) quotes the 1976 paper: "during the first centuries A.D. Arab traders who had settled around the Horn and southwards from Mogadishu had introduced cannabis to the indigenous African population".
Benoist's statement on jamala in Drury's vocabulary comes through Chaudenson (1973). Drury's Journal (1729) describes a smoked plant, Jermaughler, with seeds "like Hempseed" (see Cannabis in Madagascar).
The Mauritius ordinance of 1840 calls the plant "Gandia (cannabis indiæ)". Its preamble's account of the "labouring class" is the colonial government's.

Images reserved in the article

Lead image (in the navbox, commented out): Cannabis-spread-to-Africa-routes-map.svg. An outline map of Africa and the western Indian Ocean, drawn new, with arrows for these routes, each labelled with its period as the sources give it, queries kept: South Asia to the East African coast ("before 1000 CE?"); the Levant into Egypt (1100s) and west along the North African coast (1200s–1400s?); the East African coast inland to the Great Lakes and the Congo basin, and south, mostly after 1500; Mozambique and Madagascar ("before 1400?"); Madagascar to Réunion and Mauritius (slave ships, 1700s); the Maghreb across the Sahara (1800s). Mark Lalibela Cave, Dra' Abu el-Naga, Sebanzi Hill and Drotsky's Cave. Do not copy Duvall's map; draw from the article's text.