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After arriving from South Asia approximately a thousand years ago, cannabis quickly spread throughout the African continent. European accounts of cannabis in Africa-often fictionalized and reliant upon racial stereotypes-shaped widespread myths about the plant and were used to depict the continent as a cultural backwater and Africans as predisposed to drug use. These myths continue to influence contemporary thinking about cannabis. In The African Roots of Marijuana, Chris S. Duvall corrects common misconceptions while providing an authoritative history of cannabis as it flowed into, throughout, and out of Africa. Duvall shows how preexisting smoking cultures in Africa transformed the plant into a fast-acting and easily dosed drug and how it later became linked with global capitalism and the slave trade. People often used cannabis to cope with oppressive working conditions under colonialism, as a recreational drug, and in religious and political movements. This expansive look at Africa's importance to the development of human knowledge about marijuana will challenge everything readers thought they knew about one of the world's most ubiquitous plants.
List of contents
Part I. Introduction: Pay Attention to African Cannabis
1. Cannabis and Africa 3
2. Race and Plant Evolution 33
Part II. Evidence: How Cannabis Came to Africa, What Happened to it There, and How It Crossed the Atlantic
3. Roots of African Cannabis Cultures 53
4. Cannabis Colonizes the Continent 72
5. A Convenient Crop 95
6. Society Overturned: The Bena Riamba 112
7. Cannabis Crosses the Atlantic 125
Part III. Discussion and Conclusions: What Carried Cannabis?
8. Working under the Influence 159
9. Buying and Banning 184
10. Rethinking Marijuana 216
Acknowledgments 231
Notes 233
Index 341
About the author
Chris S. Duvall is Associate Professor of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of New Mexico and author of Cannabis.
Summary
In this authoritative history of cannabis in Africa, Chris S. Duvall challenges what readers thought they knew about cannabis by correcting widespread myths, outlining its relationship to slavery and colonialism, and highlighting Africa's centrality to knowledge about and the consumption of one of the world's most ubiquitous plants.
