Getting High - Marijuana Through The Ages by John Charles Chasteen

Author:John Charles Chasteen [Chasteen, John Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2015-04-06T22:00:00+00:00

Cannabis, south of the Congo River.

On Africa’s Swahili coast, bhang had the prestige of an exotic trade good, associated with fine cities like Kilwa, the impressive port admired by the world traveler Ibn Battuta in the 1300s. Bhang probably began its westward journey on caravans connecting the coast to gold-producing areas inland, the early states of Great Zimbabwe and Mutapa. Moving south under the name dagga, the drug’s use was extended across the current territory of South Africa some time before 1652, when the Dutch established Cape Town as a halfway provisioning station for Dutch ships on the way to Asia. The Khoisan people’s taste for dagga led the Dutch to offer it to their laborers as a fringe benefit. The nearby Zulus, renowned warriors, figure among the people known to have used marijuana for war, but that was not until the 1800s.

As bhang moved west from the Swahili coast across central Africa, adopting the modified name riamba, it entered a kind of war zone. A substantial Portuguese presence created the continent’s most invasive slave trade on the Atlantic coast south of the Congo River. The Portuguese introduced goods, including both guns and Brazilian cachaça, which were carried by caravan to slave fairs deep in the interior, fueling conflict. Armed conflict always disrupts food production, and ethanol is food. Cutting down raphia palms was a common act of war in Africa. A reduction of the food supply encouraged people to substitute riamba for beer. In addition, the slave traders and their associates spread various drugs around, sometimes including riamba, no doubt. As for alcohol and tobacco, they were basic to the trade. Luanda, the Portuguese import-export depot on the Atlantic coast, was full of cachaça and taverns in the 1600s and 1700s, so the big men with slaves to trade along the caravan routes were well supplied with spirits. Their followers, too, got at least a symbolic taste of cachaça. Overall, however, the toll taken by slaving probably reduced the supply of traditional fermented intoxicants among the less prosperous and encouraged the adoption of riamba.

The Beni Riamba, a short-lived “riamba brotherhood” that formed in central Africa in the 1850s (when the slave trade had finally ended) suggests further possibilities. According to a European traveler who happened to record this phenomenon, it occurred among a people known as the Bashilange, who had the sort of small-scale social organization more common in African history than large kingdoms. The numerous Bashilange clans and villages had traditionally feuded among themselves until a young leader arose proposing a new, more peaceful order against the resistance of change-averse elders. He did so, it would appear, by mobilizing an “age set,” a distinctive facet of African social organization that brings together generations across clan, tribal, or ethnic dividing lines. The vehicle of peace was to be riamba.

To bring about their brotherhood, the young men smoked together in the evenings and employed riamba to settle disputes and for ritual functions. The Beni Riamba stopped inter-village feuding, making the Bashilange more industrious and prosperous.

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