The African Roots of Marijuana!

[Sir X]

More important to me are the people whose names I don’t know— the slaves, porters, prostitutes, soldiers, sailors, and laborers whom travelers saw smoking cannabis. Unfortunately, I can learn of these people only through past writers, who recorded scant information about them. I can name very few of the people this book is about, such as Nimo and Musulu. Nimo (Congo Basin, lived in the 1920s) was a teenage servant of an American traveler who smoked cannabis while working (see chapter 8). Musulu (Congo Basin, lived in the 1890s) was a young man abandoned into slavery by his fellow travelers after he suffered a foot injury (see chapters 6 and 9). Musulu was a subject of the cannabis-smoking Bena Riamba movement, which Wissmann found useful. He thus recorded much about the movement’s leaders, particularly Mukenge, Chingenge, and Sangula (who were active from 1870 to 1890). Again, though, I am more concerned with those who were unnamed, including the people who emerged from slave ships in Sierra Leone in the 1840s “so deplorably emaciated that the skin appeared tensely stretched over, and tied down to the skeleton.”78 Forgotten people such as these carried cannabis seeds across Africa and the Atlantic, helping it become one of the world’s most widespread drug plants. Many European travelers led fascinating lives, but their stories are not those to learn to understand cannabis, despite my repetition of their names in this book.


https://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/Pu...0394-6_601.pdf

[Sir X]

Cannabis came to Africa at least 1,000 years ago, to Madagascar and to the Mediterranean coast. Archaeological evidence is scant, and the continent-wide documentary record principally dates to the nineteenth century. Language geography suggests broad regions in which shared understandings of the plant developed (Illustration 2), although there is insufficient information to characterize historical cannabis cultures for these putative regions. Available evidence can illustrate only a range of historical people-plant interactions (Duvall, 2019, chapters 3-5; Duvall, 2015).

https://journals.openedition.org/echogeo/17599