Global Opium Politics in Mozambique and South Africa, c 1880–1930

ABSTRACT

The reach of European empires and of Indian Ocean trade networks drew southern Africa into the global politics of opium around the turn of the twentieth century, in the critical decades of its shift from economies of supply to regimes of control. This article outlines key processes and events concerning opium production, circulation and regulation within the colonies of Mozambique and South Africa. It aims both to situate southern Africa within the well-known accounts of the Asian opium trade and its suppression and, more directly, to demonstrate how opium figured in local colonial politics, conflict and social change. I highlight how official and subaltern actors shaped and responded to these developments and, in different ways, worked to benefit from them.

KEYWORDS:

• Opium
• cannabis
• drug control
• South Africa
• Mozambique
• Indian Ocean

Note on the contributor

Thembisa Waetjen is Associate Professor in History at the University of Johannesburg. Recent publications have focused on twentieth century social and political histories of pharmaceuticals and intoxicants. Her 2019 edited book, titled Opioids in South Africa: Towards a Policy of Harm Reduction, showcases multidisciplinary perspectives on drug policy reform in the current moment.

ORCID

Thembisa Waetjen http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8635-0949

Notes

1 J.F. Elton, Travels and Researches among the Lakes and Mountains of Eastern and Central Africa, ed. H.B. Cotterill (London: J. Murray, 1879), 246–247.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

4 ‘Opium Growing on the East Coast’, Natal Witness, 9 October 1877; ‘Central African Exploration: Captain Elton’s Expedition’, Cape Times, 12 March 1878; ‘Opium Production on the East Coast’, Natal Witness, 28 May 1878; ‘The Poppy in Africa’, Natal Witness, 31 August 1878. See also ‘Opium Culture’, British Medical Journal, 29 October 1877.

5 H. Livermore, ‘Consul Crawfurd and the Anglo-Portuguese Crisis of 1890’, Portuguese Studies, 8 (1992), 170–188; E. Axelson, Portugal and the Scramble for Africa, 1875–1891 (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1967), 137–156; R.J. Hammond, Portugal and Africa, 1815–1910 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1966), 77–132.

6 ‘Opium Production on the East Coast’, Natal Witness, 28 May 1878.

7 Ibid.

8 For a useful review of some of this scholarship, see P. Gootenberg ‘Talking about the Flow: Drugs, Borders and the Discourse of Drug Control’, Cultural Critique, 71 (2009), 13–46; also P. Gootenberg and I. Campos, ‘Towards a New Drug History of Latin America: A Research Frontier at the Center of Debates’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 95, 1 (2015), 1–35.

9 B. Breen, ‘Drugs and Early Modernity’, History Compass, 15, 4 (2017), DOI:10.1111/hic3.12376; D. Courtwright, Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); J. Goodman, ‘Excitantia: How Enlightenment Europe Took to Soft Drugs’, in P. Lovejoy, A. Sherratt and J. Goodman eds, Consuming Habits: Global and Historical Perspectives on how Cultures Define Drugs (Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge, 1995).

10 I. Campos, Home Grown: Marijuana and the Origin of Mexico’s War on Drugs (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); P. Gootenberg, ‘Between Coca and Cocaine: A Century or More of US–Peruvian Drug Paradoxes, 1860–1980’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 83, 1 (2003), 119–150; T. Hickman, ‘Drugs and Race in American Culture: Orientalism in the Turn-of-the-Century Discourse of Narcotic Addiction’, American Studies, 41, 1 (2000), 71–91.

11 Gootenberg, ‘Talking about the Flow’, 20–24.

12 M.D.D. Newitt, ‘The Portuguese on the Zambezi: A Historical Interpretation of the Prazo System’, Journal of African History, 10, 1 (1969), 67–85.

13 M.D.D Newitt, Portuguese Settlement on the Zambezi: Exploration, Land Tenure and Colonial Rule in East Africa (New York: Longman, 1973), 351–352.

14 A.F. Isaacman and B.S. Isaacman, Slavery and Beyond: The Making of Men and Chikunda Ethnic Identities in the Unstable World of South-Central Africa 1750–1920 (Portsmouth: Heinmann, 2004).

15 Newitt, ‘The Portuguese on the Zambezi’, 80–83.

16 J.F. Richards, ‘The Indian Empire and Peasant Production of Opium in the Nineteenth Century’, Modern Asian Studies, 15, 1 (1981), 59–82.

17 A. Farooqui, ‘The Global Career of Indian Opium and local Destinies’, Almanack, 14 (2016), 52–73; C. Markovits, ‘The Political Economy of Opium Smuggling in Early Nineteenth Century India: Leakage or Resistance?’, Modern Asian Studies, 43, 1 (2009), 89–111.

18 A. Farooqui, ‘Colonialism and Competing Addictions: Morphine Content as a Historical Factor’, Social Scientist, 32, 5/6 (2004), 21–31; 24–25.

19 British Library, India Office Records and Private Papers (hereafter IOR) L/E/6/23, File 248, A. Crawford, Commr. S.D. Bombay and British Delegate, Portuguese Treaty, to the Secretary to Governor of Bombay, Revenue Department, 18 December 1879.

20 Ibid.

21 British Library, IOR/L/E/6/23, File 248, H.E. O’Neill, British Consul Mozambique to J. Kirk, Consul General, Zanzibar, 15 February 1880; Kirk, British Agent and Consul, Zanzibar, to Foreign Department, Government of India, 23 August 1880; Kirk to Foreign Department, 20 September 1880.

22 British Library, IOR/L/E/6/23, File 248, O’Neil to Kirk, 15 February 1880.

23 British Library, IOR/L/E/6/23, File 248, Private Note: British Agent Nunes (Mozambique) to Kirk, copied in Kirk to Foreign Department, 21 September 1880.

24 British Library, IOR/L/E/6/23, File 248, H.E. O’Neill to Kirk, 15 February 1880.

25 Ibid.

26 British Library, IOR/L/E/6/23, File 248, Kirk, Zanzibar, to Foreign Department, India, 19 October 1880.

27 British Library, IOR/L/E/6/23, File 248, O’Neill to Kirk, 15 February 1880.

28 British Library, IOR/L/E/6/23, File 248, Kirk, Zanzibar, to Foreign Department, India, 19 October 1880.

29 See L. Vail and L. White, Capitalism and Colonialism in Mozambique: A Study of Quelimane District (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), 76–78. Travelling through the region in the mid-1880s, explorer Henry Edward O’Neill recounted that land concessions by Portugal provided for annual tribute of 3 s. 4 d. from every resident ‘black or white’ to the lessee, a system open to abuse: See H.C. Palmer and M.D.D. Newitt, Northern Mozambique in the Nineteenth Century: The Travels and Explorations of H.E. O’Neill (Leiden: Brill: 2016): 279–280.

30 A.A. Caldas Xavier, Estudos Coloniais, Edicao official (Nova Goa, 1889), 331, in Newitt, Portuguese Settlement, 352. Caldas Xavier’s representations of labour relations before and after his reforms must be read against his desire to highlight their successes. See also Vail and White, Capitalism and Colonialism, 78.

31 Vail and White, Capitalism and Colonialism, 77.

32 British Library, IOR/L/E/6/23, File 248, Senhor Ignacio de Paiva Raposa [sic] to British Consul, Quilimane, 9 August 1880.

33 British Library, IOR/L/E/6/23, File 248, J.E. O’Conor, Department of Finance and Commerce to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bombay, 3 May 1880.

34 British Library, IOR/L/E/6/23, File 248, David Sassoon and Co., Bombay, to Acting Secretary, Revenue Department, Bombay, 24 May 1880.

35 British Library, IOR/L/E/6/23, File 248, Minute Paper, India Revenue Department, Opium Cultivation in Mozambique and Failure to Reintroduce Poppy Cultivation in Certain Purgunnahs of Allabhabad and Mirzapore Districts, 7 March 1881.

36 British Library, IOR/L/E/6/23, File 248, Point 9 in Secretary of State (Marquess of Hartington), to the Governor General of India in Council, 16 June 1881.

37 Secretary of State Hartington’s June 1881 dispatch was referenced in 1884 by the Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade in the pamphlet it circulated to the British Parliament. Although that letter, in its final draft, did not contain information about the Zambezi case, earlier drafts mention it specifically and demonstrate that it indeed informed the concerns about revenue cited by anti-opium activists. See LSE Library, Select Pamphlets. Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade, ‘Our National Responsibility for the Opium Trade: a Sketch Prepared for the Use of Members of Parliament’ (London: Dyer Brothers, 1884), 8–9.

38 British Library, IOR/L/E/6/23, File 248, Minute Paper, India Revenue Department, Resubmitted in accordance with Instructions from the Undersecretary, to the Governor General of India in Council (U.D. one of several early drafts of letter sent 16 June 1881 by Hartington, see fn 37).

39 M.D.D. Newitt, ‘The Massingiri Rising of 1884’, Journal of African History, 11, 1 (1970), 87–105, 95.

40 Vail and White, Capitalism and Colonialism, 78-82.

41 ‘The War on the Zambezi’, Christian Express, 15 January 1885, 15.

42 Newitt, Portuguese Settlement, 353.

43 Newitt, ‘The Massingiri Rising’, 99–104.

44 Vail and White, Capitalism and Colonialism, 79–82.

45 H.E. O’Neill observed that the 1884 destruction merely accelerated the collapse of an enterprise that ‘[h]ad never paid a dividend’: Palmer and Newitt, Northern Mozambique, 280. Yet, in 1888, Raposo’s heir in this enterprise, John Peter Hornung, seemed to revive the operation with a ‘dazzling’ poppy crop of 120 hectares in Mopea but mass floods put another end to it: see Vail and White, Capitalism and Colonialism, 99–101.

46 The sugar enterprise was successful into the twentieth century, and notorious in its exploitative relations of labour. Paiva was remembered in a ribald song of protest, as documented by L. Vail and L. White, ‘Plantation Protest: The History of a Mozambiquan Song’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 5, 1 (1978), 1–25.

47 See T. Waetjen, ‘The Politics of Narcotic Medicines in Early Twentieth Century South Africa’, Social History of Medicine, 32, 3 (2019), 586–608 2019.

48 Eugéne Marais’s biographer, Leon Rousseau, considered that the poet (who wrote of morphine such lines as ‘Ek hoor jou stem as fluistering in ’n droom’) was under the ‘morbid influence’ of De Quincey and Edgar Allan Poe. At least one historian has argued that Olive Shreiner’s writing career was curtailed by several years of excessive use of opiated medicines, including chlorodyne, prescribed by lovers or friends who were also her physicians: L. Rousseau, The Dark Stream: The Story of Eugéne N Marais (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 1982), 122; Y. Draznin, ‘Did Victorian Medicine Crush Olive Schreiner’s Creativity? The Historian, 47, 2 (1985), 196–207; Newspaper journalists liked to cite De Quincey when reporting on local opium dens or opium law-making: see as examples, ‘Yen Yen’, Rand Daily Mail, 23 November 1908; ‘The Doctors’ Day’, Rand Daily Mail, 15 June 1909.

49 Over 152,000 migrants from India were indentured in South Africa between 1860 and 1911.

50 Y.S. Meer et al., eds, Documents of Indentured Labour: Natal 1851–1917 (Durban: Institute of Black Research, 1980), 514.

51 Ibid., 256, 511–518.

52 As in the case of M. Hoosan, ‘an opium eater’. National Archives of South Africa (hereafter NASA), Pietermaritzburg Archival Repository (hereafter NAB), Indian Immigration files (II), 1/151, Estcourt magistrate correspondence.

53 P. Richardson, Chinese Mine Labour in the Transvaal (London: MacMillan, 1982).

54 T. Waetjen, ‘Poppies and Gold: Opium and Law Making on the Witwatersrand, 1904–10’, Journal of African History, 57, 3 (2016), 391–416.

55 T. Waetjen, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Opium Trade on the Transvaal, 1904–1910’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 43, 4 (2017), 733–751.

56 NASA, National Archives Repository (hereafter SAB), GG 1911 62/59, Gladstone to Harcourt, encl. Prime Minister’s Office, Minute no. 1052, 1 September 1911.

57 NASA, SAB GG 102 3/728 Secretary of State for the Colonies Lewis Harcourt to Gladstone, 2 November 2011; SAB GG 103 3/741, Louis Botha, Prime Minister, to Gladstone, 15 Nov 2011.

58 See e.g. NASA, Transvaal Province Repository (hereafter TAB), LD 1413 AG 813/47, Edwin Mundy to Secretary of the Law Department, 15 July 1907; Cape Town Archives Repository (hereafter KAB), MOH 322 Copy, ‘Opium on the Mines of the Witwatersrand’, Report/Letter from G. Baldwin to Baines, 1 May 1907; TAB, LD 1413 AG/813/07, Commissioner of Police to Law Department, 13 May 1907; TAB, DCU 101 630/07, H.R. Eaton, Director of Customs, to Collector of Customs, 11 July 1907; TAB, DCU 89 1849/06, Director of Customs Minute, ‘Gluckman and Kowarsky’s illegal importation of 838 lbs of Opium’.

59 See e.g. NASA, SAB, JUS 955 1/840/26/1, CI Officer to Police Commissioner, Witwatersrand division, 31 January 1927; CI Officer, Sub-Inspector A. Cilliers, Transvaal Division to Deputy Commissioner, Transvaal Division, Report: Illicit Smuggling into the Transvaal Province, 26 March 1926. In Lourenço Marques, opium transacted at ‘£19 per kilo Portuguese Sterling’, and sold on in Johannesburg at ‘£28 Portuguese Sterling’; Acting Deputy Commissioner E.S. Fall to Commissioner of SAP, 31 December 1928; Police Commissioner Geddes to Minister for Justice, 23 July 1929.

60 NASA, KAB, T Part 1 986, Draft Copy: Bill to Prohibit the Smoking of Opium.

61 NASA, KAB, T Part 1 986, Department of Public Health, A.J. Gregory to Advocate Morgan Evans, Attorney General’s Office, 20 July 1908.

62 NASA, KAB, JUS 130 24894/10, Report on opium dens in Cape Town by Detective E Evans, CID, 13 October 1910. A ‘pill’ referred to a small bit of opium heated in an opium pipe.

63 Ibid.

64 NASA, KAB, CSC 1/1/1/68 13, Rex v Burch and Adams, Cape Supreme Court, 26 March 1909.

65 In this period, the Cape Town production of finished articles of clothing and footwear was ‘the city’s most important industrial activity’, employing 1500 workers: V. Bickford-Smith, Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2001), 18.

66 NASA, KAB, MOOC 6/9/668 1471, Death notice, William Birch, 12 June 1911; ‘Passion Tragedy in a City Bar: Suicide follows Murder’, Cape Times, 12 June 1911; ‘Motive for Murder: the Plea of Birch’, Cape Times, 19 June 1911; ‘Cape Town’s Seamy Side: Barmaid Shot, a Pierrot’s Love Affair’, Eastern Province Herald, 12 June 1911.

67 NASA, KAB, MOH 322, Affidavit of William Burch [sic], as taken by A.J. Gregory, 26 September 1907.

68 See T. Waetjen, ‘Drug Dealing Doctors and Unstable Subjects: Opium, Medicine and Authority in the Cape Colony, 1907-1910’, South African Historical Journal, 68, 3 (2016), 342–365.

69 NASA, KAB, MOH 321, Affidavit of Hamat Rajap, as taken by Medical Officer of Health, Dr A.J. Gregory, 19 September 1907,

70 Ibid. In his testimony to Gregory, Rajap claimed to cook opium for his personal use and for a few workplace friends. His description of his personally prepared opium being ‘plenty times weighed’ and favourably assessed by ‘the Chinamen’ suggests this to be a regular transaction.

71 This affair ended tragically in a public murder-suicide that also shed a more complicated and interesting light on the ancestry of Harris. Police racially profiled patrons of the opium dens they visited in order to determine the dangers, especially, to white women, explicit objects of anti-opium campaigns in Anglophone societies more broadly, such as documented by M.T.Y. Lui, ‘Saving Young Girls from Chinatown: White Slavery and Women’s Suffrage, 1910–1920’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 18, 3, (2009), 393–417.

72 Waetjen, ‘Drug Dealing Doctors’.

73 NASA, KAB JUS Part II 130 Cape Acting Under Secretary for Justice to Attorney General, 24 October 1910.

74 See Waetjen, ‘Opium Trade in the Transvaal’.

75 ‘Alleged Opium Den Raided: 27 Arrests/Forced Entry through Roof’, Rand Daily Mail, 23 October 1920.

76 NASA, SAB, GES 1654 10/27B, Criminal Investigations Department to Deputy Commissioner SAP, re: Habit Forming Drugs: prosecution SAP, 2 June 1926.

77 NASA, SAB, JUS 955 1/840/26/1, Report: Police Commissioner Geddes to Minister for Justice, 23 July 1929.

78 NASA, SAB, GES 1654 10/27B, A.E. Trigger CID to Deputy Police Commissioner, Johannesburg, 19 February 1926.

79 NASA, SAB, GES 1656/27F, Secretary of Public Health to Secretary of External Affairs, Pretoria, 9 February 1933.

80 NASA, SAB, JUS 955 1/840/26/1, Divisional Officer, Witwatersrand Division to Deputy Police Commissioner, Transvaal Division, 24 September 1928.

81 NASA, SAB, JUS 955 1/840/26/1, Acting Deputy Commissioner E.S. Fall to Commissioner of SAP, 31 December 1928.

82 NASA, SAB, JUS 955 1/840/26/1, CI Officer, Sub-Inspector A. Celliers, Transvaal Division to Deputy Commissioner, Transvaal Division, Report: Illicit Smuggling into the Transvaal Province, 26 March 1926.

83 NASA, SAB, GG 1495, CI Officer to Police Commissioner, Witwatersrand division, 31 January 1927.

84 NASA, SAB, JUS 955 1/840/26/1, CI Officer to Police Commissioner, Witwatersrand division, 31 January 1927.

85 NASA, SAB, GG 1495, Confidential report, CID, Johannesburg Re: Opium Traffic: Joseph Daniel du Preez, 31 January 1927; Copy: Tommie Beckley to Daniel du Preez, Zanzibar, 24 August 1926; Copy, Report by the Superintendent, Zanzibar Police, 25 November 1926.

86 NASA, SAB, GG 1495, Copy, unsigned note found on Du Preez, Bombay, 12 October 1926.

87 NASA, SAB, GG 1495, Copy, undated, unsigned note found on Du Preez.

88 NASA, SAB, GG 1495, Copy, Report by the Superintendent, Zanzibar Police, 25 November 1926.

89 NASA, SAB, GG 1495, Confidential: S. Amery to Hertzog, External Affairs, 11 July 1928.

90 NASA, SAB, JUS 955 1/840/26/1, Sir Malcom Delevingne to Augusto Vasconcellos, 27 November 1929.

91 NASA, SAB, JUS 955 1/840/26/1, Provisional Minutes – 17th Meeting of the 12th Session of the Opium Advisory Committee, League of Nations.

92 NASA, SAB, GG 1495, L.S. Amery [Sec of State for Dominion Affairs] to Minister of External Affairs, Union of South Africa, 27 May 1927.

93 NASA, SAB, JUS 955 1/840/26/1, Detective Sergeant Coetzee to Pretoria: ‘Illicit Immigration and Smuggling of Habit-Forming Drugs and other Contraband into the T’vaal’, 24 September 1926; SAB GG 1495 Resume of Report on Illicit Traffic in Opium and Cocaine, 8 December 1928–4 March 1929.

94 See U. Chattopadhyaya, ‘Dagga and Prohibition: Markets, Animals, and Imperial Contexts of Knowledge, 1893–1925’ this journal issue. Leonotus, like Indian Hemp, was included in the Cape Pharmacy poison schedules from early in the century. In the 1930s, there was concern that police were confusing the endemic species of Leonotus with those of Cannabis. See J.M. Watt and M. Breyer-Brandwijk, ‘The Forensic and Sociological Aspects of the Dagga Problem in South Africa’, South African Medical Journal (22 August 1936). Current and historical botanical debates are summarised in C.S. Duvall ‘Drug Laws, Bioprospecting and the Agricultural Heritage of Cannabis in Africa’, Space and Polity, 20 (2016), 10–25.

95 NASA, SAB, SAS 1323 RG23, Griffiths, Potchefstroom Imperial Military Railways, to Johannesburg Railway Traffic Manager, 6 May 1901.

96 NASA, SAB, SAS 1323 RG23, Traffic Manager, Kimberley, Cape Government Railways, to Chief Traffic Manager, Johannesburg, 28 September 1905; Acting General Manager, Cape Government Railways, 20 December 1905; ‘Rate for Dagga’.

97 NASA, SAB, SAS 1323 RG23, Chief Traffic Manager’s Office, South African Railways, Pretoria, 8 November 1904; Traffic Manager, Natal Spruit to Chief Traffic Officer, Johannesburg, 17 September 1905; also to Cape Town Manager, 9 September 1905; General Traffic Manager, Johannesburg to Director, Caminho de Ferro, Lourenço Marques, 6 November 1906; Director, Caminho de Ferro, 30 January 1907.

98 NASA, SAB, SAS 1323 RG23, Traffic Manager, Johannesburg to Natal Spruit, 19 September 1905.

99 NASA, SAB, SAS 1323 RG23, Traffic Manager, Kimberley, Cape Government Railways, to Chief Traffic Manager, Johannesburg, 28 September 1905; Acting General Manager, Cape Government Railways, 20 December 1905.

100 NASA, SAB, SAS 1323 RG23, ‘Rate for Dagga’. Declares that dagga falls under the tariff classification on page 144 of the tariff book at the normal (i.e. not tobacco) rate. R740/23; etc.

101 NASA, KAB, JUS 141 25726/11, Dr J. Waterston to the Cape Parliament, 4 September 1904 and 11 September 1904; Legislative Council Report, ‘The Smoking of Dagga’, Cape Times, 27 March 1906; Copy of Proclamation, government notice 1363, 18 December 1905.

102 ‘Parliament Legislative Council’, Cape Times, 28 August 1907. Whereas before the law dagga had regularly sold for 4s 1d per lb, farmers had been compelled to sell in 1906 at 1½d per lb.

103 NASA, KAB, JUS 141 25726/11, James Gribble, Paarl Farmer’s Association to Minister of Justice, Pretoria, 3 August 1912 and 7 August 1912; Attorney General’s Office ‘Bill to Prohibit the Sale and Use of Dagga’, 13 July 1907.

104 For example, NASA, KAB, AG 1885 310/11, Report, Office of Deputy Police Commissioner, to Cape Provincial Secretary, 9 July 1914; Cape Provincial Secretary to the Secretary of the Cape Agricultural Association, Port Elizabeth, 22 November 1915; Attorney-General to Secretary for Justice, Cape Town, 24 March 1916; Sergeant M Kenny for the Deputy Commissioner, Cape Town, to the Attorney General, Cape Town. Report on Sale of Dagga. 3 August 1916; KAB, JUS 141 25726/11, Chief Commissioner SAP, Pretoria to Secretary for Justice, 6 September 1912.

105 NASA, SAB, NTS 8194 3/345, Correspondences around the survey, various, from 1908 and 1911.

106 NASA, SAB, NTS 8194 3/345, Hlabisa Magistrate to Zululand Native Commissioner, 2 July 1909; Government minute paper, 2 July 1909. Though a survey by Zululand magistrates of chiefly attitudes towards such a restrictive law indicated support for outlawing the use of dagga by youth and women.

107 NASA, SAB, NTS 8194 3/345, Chief Native Commissioner, Natal, to Natal Provincial Secretary, 13 June 1923.

108 NASA, SAB, GG 113 3/1027, Louis Botha to Gladstone, 10 August 1912.

109 NASA, SAB, GG 114 3/1072, Harcourt to Gladstone, 25 September 1912.

110 NASA, SAB, GG 129 3/1483, Harcourt to Gladstone, 6 March 1913.

111 NASA, SAB, GG 126 3/1428, Harcourt to Governor General, 25 October 1913.

112 NASA, SAB, GG 127 3/1453, Smuts to GG, 19 December 1913.

113 NASA, SAB, GG 130 3/1543, High Commissioner to General Governor, 23 March 1914; SAB, GG 131 3/1556 Smuts to General Governor, 6 April 1914; GG 137 3/1804 From Imperial Secretary to Governor General, 10 March 1915; SAB, GG 138 3/1820 Smuts to Imperial Secretary, 7 April 1915.

114 NASA, KAB, AG 1885 310/11, Cape Provincial Secretary to Secretary for the Interior, Pretoria, 30 June 1916.

115 NASA, SAB, GG 140 3/1938, Louis Botha to Governor General, 29 October 1915.

116 NASA, SAB, GG 140 3/1938, Draft copy of ‘Opium and other Habit-forming Drug Regulation Bill’; SAB, GG 141 3/19/1965, Louis Botha to Governor General, 16 January 1916.

117 NASA, SAB, GG 140 3/1938, Draft copy of ‘Opium and other Habit-forming Drug Regulation Bill’.

118 NASA, SAB, GG 151 3/2496, A.J. Balfour, London to the Governor General, 23 August 1918.

119 The House of Petersen Souvenir Brochure, Petersens Limited, 1918. National Library of South Africa, Cape Town.

120 Ibid.

121 NASA, SAB, GG 159 3/2869, Smuts to Governor General Buxton, 29 January 1920.

122 NASA, SAB, GG 161 3/3005, Milner to Governor General Buxton, 30 March 1920.

123 NASA, SAB, GG 161 3/3005, Minute Paper, 26 April 1920.

124 NASA, SAB, GG 170 3/3354, Prime Minister’s Office, Pretoria to Governor General, 23 December 1920. See also SAB, GG 155 3/2676 Dispatch from HM Minister at Peking, requesting South Africa to furnish copies of all laws, by-laws, orders in Council governing opium and cocaine. Buxton sent this to Union Ministers on 13 September 1919 and a reminder on 20 November 1919.

125 M. Ryan, A History of Organised Pharmacy in South Africa, 1885–1950 (Cape Town: The Society for the History of Pharmacy in South Africa, 1986), 65–73.

126 NASA, SAB, GG 170 3/3354, Governor General to Imperial Secretary, Cape Town, 17 June 1922; GG 184 3/4021 Governor General to Colonial Office, London, 19 June 1922.

127 NASA, SAB, GG 170 3/3354, Draft proclamation in respect of Swaziland; SAB GG 186 3/4149 Imperial Secretary and High Commissioner, correspondences and copies of proclamations for Bechuanaland and Basutoland, 5 October 1922.

128 NASA, SAB, BTS 2/1/104 LN 15/1, J.C. Smuts to Secretary, League of Nations, 28 November 1923.

129 J.H. Mills, ‘Colonial Africa and the International Politics of Cannabis: Egypt, South Africa, and the Origins of Global Control’, in Patricia Barton and James Mills, eds, Drugs and Empires: Essays in Modern Imperialism and Intoxication 1500–1930 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 165–184; Chattopadhyaya, ‘Dagga and Prohibition’.

130 NASA, SAB, JUS 955 1/840/26/1, Confidential, Deputy Commissioner, Witwatersrand Division to Police Commissioner, Pretoria, 6 November 1928.

131 P.G. Eidelberg, ‘The Breakdown of the 1922 Lourenço Marques Port and Railways Negotiations’, South African Historical Journal, 8, 1 (1976), 104–118; W.G. Martin ‘Region Formation under Crisis Conditions: South vs Southern Africa in the Interwar Period’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 16, 1 (1990), 112–126.

132 Eidelberg, ‘The Breakdown’; Martin, ‘Region Formation’. Also R. Hyam and P. Henshaw, The Lion and the Springbok: Britain and South Africa since the Boer War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 102–117. Both Martin and Eidelberg contend that the Union drive for territorial expansion in the 1920s was felt by the Portuguese as a threat, but manifested materially more in the movement of capital which did not require political annexation. Hyam and Henshaw document that Smuts’s aspirations to annex southeastern Africa up to Kenya continued into the 1930s.

133 See a map of Smuts’s subcontinental plan in Hyam and Henshaw’s, The Lion and the Springbok, 104.

134 A. McKeown. Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 185–197; J.C. Martens, Empire and Asian Migration: Sovereignty, Immigration Restriction and Protest in the British Settler Colonies, 1888–1907 (Crawley: University of Western Australia, 2018).

135 A. MacDonald, ‘Forging the Frontiers: Travellers and Documents on the South Africa–Mozambique Border, 1890s–1940s’, Kronos, 40 (2014), 154–177; A. MacDonald, ‘Colonial Trespassers in the Making of South Africa’s International Border: 1900 to c 1950’ (PhD thesis, St John’s College, Cambridge University, 2012).

136 ‘Said to be a “Clearing House” for Distribution’, Cape Argus, 19 August 1929.

137 Produced through surveillance in Lourenço Marques and at the Komatiespoort border station, some of these reports also contained information about cross-border migration, lotteries, and South African women working in brothels in Lourenço Marques: NASA, SAB, GG 1945, Commissioner of Police to Secretary of Justice, 11 October 1928. Forwarding four reports. See also NASA, SAB JUS 955 1/840/26/1, CI Officer, Sub-Inspector A. Cilliers, Transvaal Division to Deputy Commissioner, Transvaal Division, Report: Illicit Smuggling into the Transvaal Province, 26 March 1926; S Gibbs, Acting Agent of the Union of SA, LM, to Assistant Commissioner, Stegi, Swaziland, U.D.; Acting Deputy Commissioner E.S. Fall to Commissioner of SAP, 31 December 1928; D. Oates to Head Constable, Johannesburg, 17 January 1929.

138 NASA, SAB, JUS 955 1/840/26/1, Delevingne to Vasconcellos, 27 November 1929. Delevingne expressed concern also that Mozambique had not declared its import from France of 200kg of morphine, as amount recorded in the French government’s annual report.

139 NASA, SAB, JUS 955 1/840/26/1, Passfield to External Affairs, 19 May 1930.

140 NASA, SAB, JUS 955 1/840/26/1, Provisional Minutes of the 32nd Meeting of the 13th Session of the Opium Advisory Committee; Ministerio Dos Negocios Estradades: Secretaria Gebal dos Servicos Portugeses da Socierdad das Nacoes.

141 ‘£15,500 Drug Haul at Border’, Rand Daily Mail, 23 February 1931; ‘Blow at Drug Traffic: Dramatic Police Raid’, The Star, 23 February 1931.

142 Ibid.

143 NASA, SAB JUS 955 1/840/26/1, Union Consulate-General, Lourenço Marques, to Secretary of External Affairs, CT, 27 February 1931.

144 See T. Waetjen, ‘Dagga: How South Africa Made a “Dangerous Drug”, 1905–1928’, forthcoming chapter in L. Richert and J.H. Mills, eds, Cannabis: Global Histories (forthcoming Cambridge: MIT Press, 2020).