An African history of cannabis offers fascinating and heartbreaking insights – an expert explains
I’ve studied plants from perspectives ranging between ecology and cultural history, including obscure plants and more widely known ones, such as the African baobab.
- I’ve studied plants from perspectives ranging between ecology and cultural history, including obscure plants and more widely known ones, such as the African baobab.
- Cannabis has a truly global history associated with a wide range of uses and meanings.
- Cannabis has been under global prohibition for most of the last century, which has stunted understanding of the people-plant relationship.
- Africa, Africans and people of the African diaspora have had crucial roles in the plant’s history that are mostly forgotten.
Medicinal potential
- The African history of cannabis highlights its medicinal potential, a topic of growing interest.
- The African past is absent from this medical literature, even though historical observers reported how Africans used cannabis in contexts that justify current interest in its medicinal potential.
- Their experience justifies exploring cannabis as a potential treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and other conditions.
Exploitative labour
- Africans have valued cannabis for centuries, though it’s difficult to know all the uses it had, because most weren’t documented.
- Despite its limits, the historical record clearly shows that people used cannabis as a stimulant and painkiller in association with hard labour.
- affirm that it wakes them up and warms their bodies, so that they are ready to start up with alacrity.
Africa’s place in global culture
- I also study cannabis to understand how African knowledge has shaped global culture.
- Oral histories from Brazil, Jamaica, Liberia and Sierra Leone tell that enslaved central Africans carried cannabis.
- Around the Atlantic, many terms for cannabis trace to central Africa, including the global word marijuana, derived from Kimbundu mariamba.
Drug policy reforms
- Drug policy reforms worldwide have opened lucrative, legal markets for cannabis.
- Most African countries that have enacted drug-policy reforms – notable exceptions being South Africa and Morocco – did so only after foreign businesses paid for cannabis farming licences.
- These drug-policy reforms don’t meaningfully extend to citizens of African countries.
- Cannabis-policy reforms in Africa have mostly benefited investors and consumers in wealthy countries, not Africans, a textbook example of neocolonialism.
Way forward
- In any case, the plant’s African past provides insight into both long-term and emerging issues in humanity’s interactions with cannabis.
- This is why I study African cannabis.
Chris S. Duvall does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.