Tag: COLONIALISM

On cannabis in colonial Africa

On By Jah BillahIn Dub Culture Department, Dub Hemp1 Comment

#cannabis

Jah Billah says:
This article delineates pre-colonial and colonial use of cannabis in Africa. Starting with prehistoric cultivation 1300 BC in Ancient Egypt, and 2000 years ago in Madagascar. Going over North African and Sub-Saharan cannabis cultures, we learn that cannabis use was associated with coffee and that in Ethiopian language plant was once called esha tenbit “prophecy plant”. But what we choose to highlight here is documented use of tobacco as a colonial weapon against African cannabis cultures:

Cannabis Commerce and Legality

African cannabis markets were earliest documented in 13th-century Egypt, and 17th-century Southern Africa. Europeans widely observed commercial and exchange markets in all continental regions during the 1800s and early 1900s. In the Maghreb, 19th-century markets were highly formalized. By 1870, governments in precolonial Morocco and Ottoman Tunisia both began selling annual monopolies to their cannabis (and tobacco) trades. These monopolies continued under French rule until 1954.

European-controlled trades arose within colonial contexts and mostly supplied hard laborers. Three major trade regions existed, including the Maghreb. In South Africa, European merchants and settlers farmed and traded in cannabis from the late 1600s into the 1900s. Portuguese Mozambique also supplied South African laborers via exports to British Transvaal between 1908 and 1913. Miners were prominent consumers in colonial Southern and Central Africa. Finally, cannabis trades in western Central Africa included local traders stocking locally grown cannabis, as well as formal exports from Portuguese Angola to São Tome and Gabon during the 1870s to 1900s.

Even as these trades developed, colonial regimes increasingly suppressed cannabis. Rarely, colonial laws
rose upon indigenous prohibitions, as in Madagascar, where Merina royalty forbade cannabis by 1870,
decades before the French. Colonialists considered African cannabis an Eastern hindrance to Europe’s
civilizing mission. “The tobacco introduced by the Portuguese has contended successfully against the stupefying or maddening hemp […] from the far Muhammadan north-east,” told a British administrator in Belgian Congo in 1908.




Cannabis-control laws were enacted in Africa generally earlier than elsewhere worldwide, and were stricter too. Initial laws mostly aimed to improve public health, primarily by prohibiting behaviors considered detrimental to “native” health. Many laws clearly served ulterior motives, particularly labor control and religious proselytizing. British Natal’s 1870 law aimed to control Indian laborers, while Portuguese Angola’s 1913 law targeted colonial troops while also pushing farmers toward tobacco production. Cannabis was banned in most colonies by 1920. The plant drug first appeared in an international drug-control convention in 1925, based on the request of South Africa’s white minority government supported by newly independent Egypt, whose conservative authorities had suppressed cannabis since 1868 to control laborers.
Colonial authorities accepted and encouraged some drug crops—particularly tobacco, tea, and coffee—but cannabis was excluded, despite the existence (around 1840–1940) of an international market for Western pharmaceutical preparations of cannabis, supplied primarily from British India.


From:

Cannabis and Tobacco in Precolonial and Colonial Africa
Chris S. Duvall, 2017.
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.44

KEY CONCEPTS OF COLONIALISM & GLOBALISM

On By Jah BillahIn Dub Culture DepartmentLeave a comment

GLOBALISM

Despite the balance between its good and bad effects,
identified by critical globalists, globalization has not been a
politically neutral activity. While access to global forms of
communication, markets and culture may indeed be worldwide
today, it has been argued by some critics that if one asks how
that access is enabled and by what ideological machinery it is
advanced, it can be seen that the operation of globalization
cannot be separated from the structures of power perpetuated
by European imperialism. Global culture is a continuation of an
imperial dynamic of influence, control, dissemination and
hegemony that operates according to an already initiated
structure of power that emerged in the sixteenth century in the
great confluence of imperialism, capitalism and modernity. This
explains why the forces of globalization are still, in some senses,
centred in the West (in terms of power and institutional
organization), despite their global dissemination.
(p. 113.)

COLONIALISM

Although slavery existed in many periods and in many
societies (e.g. many African societies had ‘slaves’), they were
not commercial slaves in this modern sense. Slavery was often
associated with exogamous groups, captives or members of other
groups outside the community, but the post-Renaissance
development of an intense ideology of racism produced the
peculiarly destructive modern form of commercial, chattel slavery
slave/ slavery in which all rights and all human values were set aside and from
which only a few could ever hope to achieve full manumission
(legal freedom). Many of the pseudo-objective, ‘scientific’
discourses by which colonialism justified its practices flowed
from the need to rationalize such an indefensible commercial
exploitation and oppression, on a mass scale, of millions of human
beings. It has been suggested by some commentators that
slavery gave birth to racism, at least in its modern form, just as
racism became the excuse for slavery’s excesses (Davidson 1994).
Race and racial prejudice in their modern forms have thus been
intimately bound up with the colonial form of the institution of
slavery, to the degree that it seems almost impossible to
disentangle them.
(p. 213.-214.)

Key concepts in post-colonial studies / Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin.
1998.