Tugela Valley
More actions
| Tugela Valley | |
|---|---|
| Thukela Valley | |
| ActiveGrown here in 2000 or later | |
| |
| Drakensberg farmland in the upper Tugela basin | |
| Geography | |
| Country | South Africa |
| Province/State | KwaZulu-Natal |
| Coordinates | -28.80, 29.78 |
| Landscape | |
| Area | 9,900 km² |
| Terrain | River valleys, kloofs and hills of the upper and middle Tugela, from the foot of the Drakensberg to Tugela Ferry; approximately the Okhahlamba, Inkosi Langalibalele and Msinga local municipalities |
| Growing history | |
| Documentation | |
| Appellations | 0 |
| Accessions | 0 |
| Conservation | |
| Populations | none documented yet |
Tugela Valley is a cannabis growing area in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, along the upper and middle course of the Tugela River, from the foot of the Drakensberg to the Msinga district. It is mapped on the Okhahlamba, Inkosi Langalibalele and Msinga local municipalities. In 1929 the magistrate of Weenen described his district as a "chief supply centre" of cannabis, called dagga in South Africa, for the Union.[1] In 1997 the Mail & Guardian toured what it called the "dagga-producing regions of the Tugela Valley".[2] Police sprayed fields in the hills of the Tugela River basin near Winterton in 2006,[3] and found plantations around Bergville in 2014 and 2017.[4][5]
Geography
In 2014 the Farmer's Weekly wrote that the mountainous areas along the border with Lesotho were "notorious for dagga cultivation and smuggling", in a report on a field found in the Emmaus area of Bergville by the Upper Tugela Borderline Control unit of the police.[4] In 2006 the police spraying reported by The Star was on the hills of the Tugela River basin near Winterton.[3] Downstream, the Mail & Guardian described fields "as big as the Weenen rugby ground" and placed growing in what it called the "dry and arid upper reaches of the river not far from Tugela Ferry in the Msinga district", where police had reported fields a kilometre long and 500 metres wide. Growers, the paper wrote, went "into the kloofs and valleys at night" to work fields hidden from the police.[2]
The same report also describes growing in the lower reaches of the valley, near where the river runs into the Indian Ocean, where each homestead was said to cultivate up to six small fields.[2] The area as mapped here covers the upper and middle valley only.
History
Weenen's place in the trade was recorded in 1929. That year its magistrate wrote to the Chief Native Commissioner in Pietermaritzburg that his district had become a "chief supply centre" for the Union, and a report of the same year named Weenen among the railway depots that had become nodes of a national dagga-trading network. In the 1950s Natal accounted for 58.3 per cent of all the cannabis seized in the Union.[1]
In 1956 growers near Bergville attacked a police patrol on a raid against the crop and killed five policemen, three of them white. Twenty-three men were convicted of murder, and all but one were sentenced to death by hanging.[1]
The Mail & Guardian report of 1997 quotes a police figure from March 1989: a yield of 14,000 kilograms per square kilometre over 150 square kilometres on the Tugela River.[2]
The crop and its growers
According to the Mail & Guardian, women did most of the field work and men most of the selling. The crop was hidden under madumbis (taro) in bags or plastic containers and reached Durban by private van and taxi, landing first in the townships of Inanda and KwaMashu, from which it was sold on in the city. Mama Xhulu, a general dealer whose store stood on the riverbank not far from the sea, told the paper that "almost every single child in this area has been educated, clothed and fed from this crop".[2]
In 2006 The Star reported dagga planted in strips between maize, cabbages and other crops.[3]
Operations against the fields
In 1997 a man working on an education project in the Msinga district told the Mail & Guardian that the police "either spray the illegal crop with herbicides or uproot tons of cannabis and burn it". The burning was usually done in public at the rugby fields of Weenen.[2]
In September 2006 The Star visited a police helicopter operation that sprayed more than 260 hectares of cannabis on the hills of the Tugela River basin near Winterton; two earlier operations had sprayed about 150 hectares. The spray was a commercially available chemical called Kilo. The paper wrote that KwaZulu-Natal, with the Eastern Cape, was at the centre of the country's cannabis industry, and that police helicopters came down on the valleys every year to spray them.[3]
In January 2014 the Upper Tugela Borderline Control unit found a field in the Emmaus area of Bergville that it estimated would yield about two tonnes of dagga, and arrested a woman at her homestead in Thunzini.[4] In March 2017 Bergville police, acting on a tip-off, arrested a 53-year-old man in the Potsheni area as he was harvesting a plantation, and recovered plants weighing about 32 kilograms.[5]
Accessions
No accessions documented yet.
Recent news
No recent news items.
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Nkosi, P.I.; Devey, R.; Waetjen, T. (2020). "Cannabis policing in mid-twentieth century South Africa". Historia. 65 (1). doi:10.17159/2309-8392/2020/v65n1a4.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 Koch, E.; Mthembu, E. (25 July 1997). "The crop that clothes, feeds and educates … is illegal". Mail & Guardian. Retrieved 21 October 2026.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 Eliseev, A. (18 September 2006). "Aerial assault destroys R200m dagga fields". IOL. Retrieved 21 October 2026.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Caxton Magazines (27 January 2014). "Illegal dagga farming business busted". Farmer's Weekly. Retrieved 29 October 2026.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Sarjoo, Nameera (24 March 2017). "53-year-old caught in the act of harvesting dagga". The Citizen. Retrieved 29 October 2026.