Settling ‘Dagga’? Shifting Frontiers of Cannabis Knowledge and Governance in South Africa

Abstract

After the South African War (1899–1902), state-makers’ efforts to control ‘dagga’ was controversial on several fronts. But ‘dagga’ also proved a moving target for official classification. Was it a species of Leonotis, common around the countryside? Was it ‘Indian hemp’, understood by some as a habit-forming drug that debilitated wage workers and caused insanity? This paper traces dagga as a multiple object and problematic of governance in South Africa during the years before the formation of the Union of South Africa and into the early decades of the Union period. A focus on three contested boundaries of top-down knowledge-making and policy – botanical taxonomies; colonial geographies; and political-economy – demonstrates dagga’s shifting ontologies across time and space. Together, these empirical snapshots combine as a case study, revealing how the legal reification of a substance as a ‘drug’ involved political processes that were local, dispersed and unresolved. We show how uncertainties and ambivalences about cannabis long remained productive for different brokers and gatekeepers who navigated the frontiers of competing interests. This history is important for understanding the changing politics of cannabis in South Africa, as it became legible for regulation as a ‘dangerous drug’ during the first half of the 20th century.

Keywords:

• cannabis
• South Africa
• drug ontologies
• colonial knowledge
• botanical science
• Bourhill
• migrant labour

Introduction

Dagga is a herb which the Lord gave us and which the white man came and interfered with, and gave it names, and condemned it.

Bergville Ward Councillor Davie Khumalo, 1977¹

At a 1907 parliamentary session in the Cape Colony, M.J. Pretorius exhibited two specimens of plant matter and challenged his peers to identify the ‘dagga’ they had recently restricted in pharmacy law.² Pretorius was an Afrikaner Bond delegate representing a North-Eastern Cape constituency and was speaking on behalf of commercial dagga farmers. He sought to reverse the economic losses occasioned two years earlier when ‘Cannabis Indica or Indian Hemp or Gunjah and African Dagga and the Cape Wild Dagga and their preparations’ were scheduled as a ‘poison’.³ The Cape Progressive Party, aligned with medical professionals, had confined exclusive right of sale (and control of prices and profits) to licensed pharmacists. In response to the regulation, 170 (mostly Afrikaans-speaking) landowners in the Middelburg district signed a petition to reverse the order and to protest their dramatic drop in ‘dagga’ earnings.⁴

There were ‘two kinds of dagga’, Pretorius declared, ‘the wild and the cultivated – and the Medical Council was not familiar with the cultivated species, the kind that was smoked by the natives’.⁵ The Medical Council chairman admitted he had not seen the cultivated variety before: ‘[i]t was found to be quite a new thing’. A sample had been analysed with the report confirming that ‘no poison had been found in it’. This, said Pretorius, ‘demonstrated that the [regulatory] proclamation had been issued … without any knowledge of the thing’.⁶

What was the ‘thing’ called dagga? Were Pretorius’s samples two different parts or products of the cannabis plant, or did they consist of two separate taxa – Leonotis and Cannabis – both commonly referred to as ‘dagga’? After the South African War, governmental efforts to make ‘dagga’ legible for control – as a problematic ‘native’ intoxicant – proved controversial on various social fronts.⁷ ‘Dagga’ (‘dakka’, ‘dakha’) was commonly written into the colonial government record in inverted commas because the ‘thing’ itself was recognised as vernacular, uncertain and multiple. As Utathya Chattopadhyaya demonstrates, its components and assemblages constituted a moving target for classification by state-makers.⁸ Linnaean schema and laboratory experimentation rationalised a diversity of cultural and commercial knowledge such that, towards the mid 20th century, ‘dagga’ became fixed in South African parlance as referring to cannabis (‘Indian hemp’), policed as an illicit ‘dangerous drug’. This did not, however, translate into civic acquiescence nor consensus over its social meanings.⁹

Cannabis circulated for centuries in Africa, with various uses and values – social, pharmacological, transactional and ceremonial.¹⁰ Ways of speaking about cannabis changed through colonial encounters, though earlier meanings of dagga in southern Africa were by no means historically static.¹¹ Dagga was first nationally prohibited in 1922 in a Union Customs and Excise Act, transferred into a Pharmacy Act in 1928.

In the later 20th century, the stakes of naming remained high. ‘Dagga is a herb which the Lord gave us and which the white man came and interfered with, and gave it names, and condemned it’, declared Davie Khumalo, Ward Councillor of the cannabis-growing Bergville region (of then Natal) in 1977. Khumalo was lamenting the infamous 1956 police raid on ‘the tobacco gardens of our people’ in which five policemen were killed, and 22 community members subsequently executed in retribution.¹²

This article explores dagga’s ‘ontological journeys’,¹³ largely coinciding with the Union period (1910–61) to demonstrate how botanical slippages, as well as shifting official knowledge about dagga practices and consumer identities, interacted with regulatory governance. As a method for revealing episodes in the political life of dagga as a ‘multiple object’, we draw inspiration from Maziyar Ghiabi’s thematic approach in his recent case study of opium in Iran ‘across different regulatory spaces and times’ and across various boundaries – territorial, temporal, ethical and cultural, each entailing ‘different gate-keepers and brokers’.¹⁴ Social histories and constructivist accounts of ‘drug’ substances across disciplines have amply demonstrated their situated, varied and changing meanings within the lifeworlds of users, traders and regulators.¹⁵ The material and symbolic mobilities of ‘drugs’, and their transformative effects on human minds and bodies, make them a powerful lens through which to ascertain broader historical processes and power relations.¹⁶ This is crucial for unmooring conceptual understandings of substances from normative and state-produced ‘drug talk’.¹⁷

Chattopadhyaya has shown how the South African state briefly worked to exercise legal flexibility towards its commercial ambitions in marketing South African-farmed cannabis, even as it began to enforce prohibition for local intoxicant uses.¹⁸ In complement to his account, we here present three quite different empirical ‘episodes’ that further demonstrate ambivalent and changing colonial public and official meanings – cultural, medical, moral and legal. These illustrate dagga’s ontological journeys on overlapping frontiers of South African politics. The first section examines dagga the ‘thing’ – the ‘what’ of dagga – and draws upon print media and parliamentary accounts to highlight how botanical slippages and uncertainties about dagga’s classification and use-value were transformed with the global and local emergence of drug control. The second section helps pose the question ‘where was dagga?’ by examining two medical and ethnographic ‘expert’ accounts. Each of these texts, in a distinct way, defined dagga’s moral and physiological chemistries as a feature of colonial subjecthood and political space-making during a period when segregation was being formalised in law. Lastly, we ask ‘when was dagga?’ by examining the temporal frameworks of the law and the labour contract. Following the prohibition of dagga in 1922, conflicting interests of the state and the mining sector were negotiated through an institutional sleight of hand that rested on the status and classification of the ‘tropical’ migrant worker. Here we show how the prohibited status of a substance was transferred, through bureaucratic agency, onto the status of immigrant labourers.

Together, these episodes demonstrate how dagga meanings were shaped by the exigencies of colonial rule, compelled in different ways to accommodate traditional authority and industrial capitalism. Ignorance and knowledge about dagga are here encountered not as oppositional states of mind, nor as a progression, but rather as productive (if provisional) strategies of ambivalence.¹⁹ This history is important for understanding the changing politics of cannabis in South Africa, across the 20th century and into the current moment.

What is Dagga? Botanical Matters

Sarah Brady Siff shows how, in early-20th-century California, ‘marijuana/marihuana’ was for a long time an unspecified term referring to a range of ‘weeds’ and plants, including cannabis.²⁰ As United States officials began asserting regulatory powers, claims about the physiological effects of marijuana consumption were entangled with observations about consumption of botanicals other than cannabis, for example, of Datura stramonium. In South Africa, as Pretorius demonstrated to his parliamentary colleagues, similar botanical slippages coalesced around the term ‘dagga’.

The Khoekhoe word dagga diffused into other language traditions, with multiple conceptual and material references. ‘Confusion’ generated through ‘colliding linguistic universes’, as David Gordon observes, was further confounded through textual replication by various European travel writers.²¹ Gordon’s etymological discussion about ‘dagga’ provides a nuanced reflection of available sources, triangulated with other Khoekhoe terms related to intoxicant substances, feelings and practices.²² ‘[E]arly travellers’, Gordon notes ‘described “dagga” as a root grown in the desert and chewed after careful preparation, challenging our assumptions of what “dagga” meant to the Khoikhoi before the VOC [the Dutch East India Company] arrived at the Cape’.²³ Interlocutors of San language record similar word relationships: Dorothy Bleek noted that dawha meant ‘drunk’ and taxa was ‘to make drunk’.²⁴ Such examples emphasise how a mosaic of cultural and linguistic meanings were long attached to ‘dagga’ as an idea. That idea lived on and was adapted in language as new intoxicants came into play during the latter half of the 20th century. Mark Hunter, for example, suggests that ‘[p]robably from around the 1970s, the isiZulu term izidakamizwa (“drugs”) became used to capture the sense of a group of dangerous substances’, deriving from daka, meaning ‘intoxicate’.²⁵

In the late 19th century, terminologies of ‘dagga’²⁶ among Cape colonial lay publics referred to two plant genera. One was Leonotis (‘wild dagga’, ‘rooi [red] dagga’, ‘klip [stone] dagga’ and others), its names reflecting diverse ways of recognising a plant which, in different parts of the country, grew and flowered in different soils or different times of year. Species of leonotis grew ‘to the height of 4 to 6 feet’, explained one report. ‘Its leaves are long, rather than lance shaped, and it may be easily recognized by the whorls on its stem of light red or orange-coloured flowers’.²⁷ ‘This plant’, wrote the German Cape botanist Karl Wilhelm Ludwig Pappe in 1857, ‘the Wild Dagga, is, on account of its beautiful flowers, a fine garden ornament’.²⁸ In the 1880s, Messrs Cannel advertised Leonotis leonurus as a ‘Remarkable Plant’ which ‘if treated exactly like a chrysanthemum produces abundance of orange-coloured flowers all the autumn’.²⁹ The other plant called ‘dagga’ was of the genus Cannabis (‘Indian Hemp’). It was certainly cannabis identified in an 1866 Transvaal agricultural report, in which ‘the native hemp called “dagga”’ – ‘smoked by [African people] instead of tobacco’ – was observed growing robustly along with other bountiful crops of rice, mealies, bamboo and coffee. The writer invited admiration for the region’s climate and soil by observing the production of dagga ‘trees’ reaching heights of 15 feet.³⁰

Descriptions in English and Afrikaans newspapers suggest that botanical distinctions between cannabis and leonotis were, in fact, widely understood. Until the 1890s, ‘dagga’ often appeared as an ingredient for livestock and human therapies, and writers generally tried to clarify which plant they meant. Thus, in 1875, A. Wilmot, promoting a ‘certain cure’ for redwater disease in cattle, described a concoction that included both ‘dagga’ and ‘wild dagga’ to be added to ‘blue gum leaves, and malt, and boiled in salt water’.³¹ Another redwater remedy used only ‘wild dagga, not what the [African people] call Buthlungu’.³² In 1896, colonial veterinary surgeon Mr Hutcheon recommended a solution incorporating ‘wild dagga’ for bovine bowel irritation, a complication of redwater.³³ By the 1890s, the use of ‘wild dagga’ for redwater had become standard, as evidenced when commercially prepared treatments (such as ‘Redwater Specific’) were marketed as ‘better than wild dagga’.³⁴

Yet the plural ways of naming dagga (and also of referencing different forms of cannabis plant matter) make other Cape colonial references difficult to decode. One writer described the ‘simple practice of strewing a few hemp (wild hemp) bushes, either green or dry, between bags of grain’ to prevent weevil infestation.³⁵ Another account of this same practice prescribed ‘a little common dagga’.³⁶ Meanwhile, ‘Red or Wild dagga (not the common dagga)’ was how a writer specified Leonotis, when promoting its uses for snakebite.³⁷ Again, in 1873, a farmer suggested that ‘dakka’, as ‘wild hemp’, might replace tobacco in sheep dip ‘as a cure for scab’.³⁸ ‘Dagga (wild hemp)’ was recommended for combating parasitic worms in baby goats.³⁹

Some writers attributed confusions between ‘dagga’ genera to their alleged structural similarities: ‘[t]he wild dagga or wild hemp is a totally different plant from the common dagga or hemp (cannabis) grown wild but is so-named because its leaves are something like those of the hemp plant’, explained a journalist, reporting on a 1885 medicinal plant exhibition sponsored by the Lovedale mission.⁴⁰ As late as 1936, and with the aid of new technologies, University of the Witwatersrand pharmacologists John Mitchell Watt and Maria Gerdina Breyer-Brandwijk felt obliged to illustrate the differences of leaf structure, of microscopic identifiers, and chemical differences, in order to distinguish Leonotis from what they called ‘true dagga’ (Cannabis).⁴¹ ‘The term dagga in South Africa has been a confusing one’, they explained. In their 1932 compendium The Medicinal and Poisonous Plants of Southern Africa and the expanded 1962 edition, Watt and Breyer-Brandwijk classed Leonotis as Labiatae – a mint – and Cannabis as Moraceae – in the mulberry and fig family.⁴²

Analogous ethnopharmacological assertions about the two ‘daggas’ further contributed to (and were a symptom of) ongoing botanical slippages. Lay accounts in Cape newspapers commonly cited indigenous knowledge: the phrase ‘coming from the natives’ was an endorsement of efficacy.⁴³ Snakebite was listed among common indications for leonotis tincture, an antidote prepared and used by all local cultural groupings, including by white settlers. ⁴⁴ Watt and Breyer-Brandwijk noted, for example, that Leonotis was a ‘Xosa’ snakebite treatment; yet they also referenced a study suggesting that ‘the Mfengu’ applied Cannabis for snakebite. ⁴⁵

The most significant overlapping claim about ‘dagga’ practices, however, related to their indigenous uses as intoxicants. In 1885, a Cape writer explained that, as with ‘hemp (cannabis)’, leonotis leaves ‘are smoked by the [Khoekhoe] and it is an extremely powerful smoke. They call it “Duyvel’s tabac” and very drunk and silly it makes them’.⁴⁶ A later article claimed that ‘wild dagga’ was ‘a favourite with the [Khoekhoe] when they are unable to obtain the coarse black Fingo or Pondo tobaccos of which they are fondest’.⁴⁷ David Gordon credits Pappe with popularising the idea that the Khoekhoe were ‘particularly fond of this plant, and smoke it instead of tobacco’.⁴⁸ In 1929, University of Cape Town pharmacologist J.W.C. Gunn, in ‘The Action of Leonotis Leonurus’, undertook a chemical analysis of this species. But it was his self-experimentation, ‘smoking several successive pipefuls of the dried leaf’, that convinced him it possessed only mild narcotic effects. His personal experience was merely of ‘unpleasantness’.⁴⁹

Dagga smoking served as a marker of ‘native’ cultural difference, bolstering ideological processes of political subject-making and labour exploitation.⁵⁰ But colonial attitudes over ‘dagga’ remained comparatively neutral into the 1890s. In 1876, for example, the committee charged with organising a Cape Colony display for the Philadelphia International Exhibition included a selection of ‘Native Tobacco or Dagga Pipes’ within the category ‘personal ornaments’ – along with books, maps, newspapers and walking sticks.⁵¹ In 1894, De Beers diamond mining propaganda illustrated their commitment to fair labour relations by explaining that African workers could ‘buy all that they require’, including ‘dagga … a luxury which some of them would not do without’.⁵² An 1884 article, ‘British and Boer Tobaccos’, described distinct products and ethnic preferences, each different again from various ‘native tobaccos’.⁵³

British imperial commissions of the 1890s investigated Indian hemp and opium, respectively, with regard to the intoxicant economies of British India. These inquiries demonstrated the growing, global influence of temperance campaigns and progressivist thought. In Natal, from 1860, imperial policy had regulated dagga smoking among Indian indentured migrants. Yet, during the lead-up to Union law-making, Cape progressives and their medical allies were the primary influencers. In 1894, a Cape labour commission ruled that ‘dagga’ impeded worker productivity and recommended it be ‘treated as a noxious weed, exterminated and its possession made penal’.⁵⁴

In 1891, the Port Elizabeth Telegraph complained that ‘one of our Transvaal contemporaries is advocating the smoking of dagga. Some idiot has pronounced it more wholesome than tobacco’.⁵⁵ A year later, a Colesberg writer worried that dagga smoking was increasing, and complained that ‘the best servants become hopeless when they take to dagga smoking … The smoker constantly slips away from his work to have a suck at his pipe in the ground’. In Colesberg itself, cannabis was grown in gardens and available all around the town ‘constantly sold by the muid sack and on the market dried and ready for smoking and there are several places in town where it is retailed all year round’.⁵⁶ In 1903, a sensational account of ‘Tobaccos that Cause Death’ contrasted ‘wholesome … European tobacco’ with a fantastically pathologising account of ‘Indian Hemp’, warned to be ‘inevitably’ fatal to habitual smokers.⁵⁷

Even if Cape parliamentarians in 1907 could have visually distinguished between the two ‘daggas’ exhibited before them, botany was not the only problem of classification facing colonial officials. In May 1901, a customs officer queried how ‘dagga’ (‘frequently consigned’ on freight and passenger trains) should be categorised on the waybill.⁵⁸ He himself believed it was ‘actually a kind of tobacco’, but responses to his question showed that revenue was at stake. Intoxicants were taxed more stringently than medicinal drugs. Various parties battled over the essence of ‘dagga’ and over the ‘purposes’ of its use. The meaning of the term ‘drug’ also required clarification since – as with opium – it implied both therapeutic and intoxicant values.

After the South African War, Cape doctors, politicians and Western Cape farmers initiated controls over dagga. Their rationales were those employed by imperial progressives more broadly: regulation of ‘dagga’ as a habit-forming drug would combat worker lethargy and social disorder, increasing labour productivity.⁵⁹ ‘One labourer who is not a dagga smoker usually does better work, or just as much, as two dagga smokers’, a Paarl landowner explained.⁶⁰ Yet this perspective deviated from the enduring wisdom of Eastern Cape farmers, who believed that dagga rendered workers ‘more energetic and wide awake’.⁶¹ Their continued tolerance of dagga smoking (as in the mining sector) was pragmatic as well as exploitative, reflecting situated cultures of production and improvised moral economies.

Media panics began to attribute anti-social chemical agency to dagga, highlighting it as an element in urban crime, poverty and violence. Colonial, and later Union, governments unevenly pursued its control in pharmacy law and as a noxious weed.

Across the decades, botanical ambiguities long persisted and could be mobilised opportunistically, whether officially or by individuals accused of dagga crimes. After 1910, proposals by Cape provincial officials, that ‘dagga’ be eradicated as a noxious weed, were routinely rejected on the grounds that the plant’s range and flourishing abundance made the costs impractical and the outcomes doubtful. In 1916, a pharmacist defended himself against charges of selling dagga for ‘non-medicinal purposes’ by claiming that his merchandise was not the ‘dangerous dagga grandiflories … the kind of dagga that affects [smokers] very much’ but rather ‘lonatis [sic] ovata dagga’, which was ‘very mild and thus [does] not affect them’.⁶² A smoker apprehended on a dagga charge could plead botanical confusion.

In 1924, Britain’s League of Nations’ Opium Advisory representative, Sir Malcolm Delevingne, wondered whether convictions in South Africa represented a case of mistaken botanical identity.⁶³ In answer to his query, Mr A.E. Blanco in Geneva composed a brief compilation of citations about Leonotis from several issues of the Pharmaceutical Journal, distinguishing it from Indian hemp.⁶⁴ ‘It is difficult to understand’, he commented, ‘why these [Leonotis] plants should be classed with Indian hemp and their use in smoking prohibited, unless it is feared that the name might be employed to cover the use of Indian hemp’.⁶⁵

Gunn’s chemical analysis of leonotis convinced Union legislators to remove all species – which had been listed in the 1922 law as ‘habit-forming’ – from the 1928 Pharmacy Act. Cannabis was now, officially, the only prohibited ‘dagga’. ‘In many parts of the Union’, declared the Union’s Secretary of Public Health in 1924, ‘the eradication of Cape Wild Dagga would have been almost an impossible task’. Now, however, research indicated that farmers had only to target ‘genuine dagga or Indian Hemp’.⁶⁶

From 1931, when the Union rationalised annual seizure and arrest statistics for the League of Nations, the problem of taxonomical ‘confusion’ continued to arise. In 1932, Watt and Breyer-Brandwijk ‘urgently’ called for ‘investigation of these [two classes of] plants’.⁶⁷ Their own subsequent research left them ‘satisfied’ that no false convictions for dagga possession and sale had resulted from mistaking the legal Leonotis for the illegal Cannabis. Out of 1,123 samples of plant matter used as court evidence, tested through both visual and chemical means, all of it ‘without exception’ proved to be cannabis.⁶⁸

Colonial definitions of ‘dagga’ were rooted largely in ideas about indigenous African knowledge and practices, with ongoing references to two genera, Leonotis and Cannabis. In the public sphere, dagga circulated as a botanical, a medicine and as an intoxicant. After the mineral revolution, the mobility of ‘dagga’ increased across colonial and (later) Union territory, and officials began to condemn it as a morally problematic intoxicant. Yet, as we show in the next section, dagga’s ontological possibilities remained open adjacent to the colonial politics of segregation, and new gatekeepers grappled with cannabis smoking as a cultural practice across racially partitioned geographies. Casting dagga smoking as a medical and cultural conundrum deflected a core political contradiction that arose from the dynamic (modernising) nature of colonialism in the early 20th century.

Where (and for Whom) is Dagga? Spaces of Habit and Culture

In May 1860, a local Bloemfontein newspaper noted an official visit by Barolong Chief Moroka and his delegates from Thaba Nchu to Marthinus Pretorius, then the president of the Orange Free State. The news item did not cover diplomatic issues. It instead referred to individuals among ‘the worthy chief’s’ entourage, whose ‘violent, almost agonized coughing, and expectorant efforts’ interfered with town residents’ sleep: ‘[w]e are at all times happy to see the peaceful countenance of Moroko [sic]; nor do we care how many might be the number of his escort’, quipped the writer, ‘provided that the dagga-smokers are left behind’.⁶⁹

The complaint reads as a snarky remark about noisy neighbours, an event marking cultural differences between two semi-autonomous polities, unequal in power. The writer disparaged dagga smoking not moralistically but as a nuisance, a practice belonging elsewhere.

In the decade leading up to Union, and with diminishing African independence, dagga consumption took on new meanings across new political frontiers. As ideas about social space were reflected in colonial logics of race segregation, definitions of dagga and the dagga smoker were recast in behavioural and ethical terms. An implicit question arose: did the ‘evil’ of dagga smoking lie in the mobility of the substance or of the people consuming it?

Different, if evolving, schools of thought appear in two influential texts, published respectively in 1913 and 1924. Charles John George Bourhill wrote ‘The Smoking of Dagga (Indian Hemp) among the Native Races of South Africa and the Resultant Evils’ as an MD thesis for the University of Edinburgh.⁷⁰ James Alexander Mitchell authorised the publication of the pamphlet ‘Memorandum on Dagga Smoking and its Evils’ in his role as the Union’s Secretary of Public Health.⁷¹ Writing ten years apart, and from different positions, these figures both reflected and shaped colonial opinions about cannabis into the second half of the 20th century.

C.J.G. Bourhill on Dagga Smoking: Habit, Insanity and People Out of Place

C.J.G. Bourhill, born in 1885 in Kimberley, completed a Bachelor’s degree in Medicine and Surgery at Edinburgh in 1910.⁷² He was active on the student representative council, and was awarded a first-class pass for experimental physiology and a second in practical chemical physiology.⁷³ He did additional training in bacteriology and tropical medicine, in Edinburgh and Banbury, where mentors represented him as committed, affable and able.⁷⁴ In December 1911, the Union’s High Commissioner in London headhunted the 26-year-old for a junior post at the Pretoria Lunatic Asylum (later called Weskoppies Mental Health Hospital). Established in 1892 during the Kruger Republic to provide state-of-the-art treatment, it was directed under the early care of Scottish- and Dutch-born (and trained) specialists. In separate wards, the facility treated black as well as white patients, and both men and women.⁷⁵ British forces took over the asylum during the South African War. Reports of high mortality, escapes by Afrikaans-speaking residents and destruction of records prompted government intervention following Union.⁷⁶ Bourhill’s recruitment was part of an effort to restore the institution’s professional reputation.

The fit was an odd one, given Bourhill’s qualifications and express interest in bacteriology. The position involved caring for psychiatric patients. Bourhill was offered an annual salary of £360 plus ‘board, quarters, washing and attendance’, along with passage to Pretoria by sea and rail (which included a stop home in Kimberley) on condition that he complete a three-year contract and quickly learn ‘Dutch’.⁷⁷ Bourhill took up his duties at the end of May 1912. Yet, by mid September, less than four months later, he requested release from the post.⁷⁸ He had ‘no aptitude’, he explained, for the clinical work of an asylum, which did not ‘appeal to [his] tastes’.⁷⁹ He was compelled to remain four additional months, after which he found employment as a medical officer in the Witbank coal mining compounds, 100 kilometres east of Pretoria.⁸⁰

While at the Pretoria Lunatic Asylum, Bourhill occupied himself in MD thesis research on dagga smoking and the phenomenon of ‘dagga insanity’. The superintendent of the asylum provided him access to patient records and to patients as research subjects.⁸¹

Bourhill begins his dissertation with an ethnographic account situating dagga smoking in the traditions of ‘the native races’ of his title, that is, ‘not … any tribe in particular’.⁸² The racist tenor of Bourhill’s discourse and approaches is described in some detail by other scholars.⁸³ Here our focus pertains to a specific aspect of his arguments. However, a sense of how Bourhill established his own authority in relation to his subject matter is relevant to note. ‘[T]hese semi-savage tribes remain a vast unexplored region’, he declared, but ‘to know the natives one must live among them, work among them, see them in their natural surroundings’.⁸⁴ He represented himself as having ‘lived in contact with natives’ from childhood, becoming ‘familiar with their dagga-smoking propensities’.⁸⁵ Bourhill outlined dagga’s role in various traditional practices, illustrating various pipe technologies, outlining smoking lore and social conventions and regulations, and describing games of leisure as well as what he called ‘incantations’.

To exemplify the latter, Bourhill included the text of a ‘poem’, transcribed and also then translated by ‘an educated Basuto’. Its prolegomenon reads: ‘[w]e smoke it [cannabis] and it reminds us of different things. We remember the miracles of the world. We remember those far and near. We remember’. The 17 formal lines that follow praise the victorious stand in 1868 of Moshoeshoe against Boer forces and poke fun at the ‘enemies of his name’.⁸⁶ The words of the poem construct dagga as a medium of communal memory, with dagga smoking a practice evoking both historical knowledge and anti-colonial feeling. Bourhill, however, makes no comment on the situated meanings of dagga within the poem nor ascribes any political meaning to dagga or to the words expressed. Instead, he exhibits this ‘incantation’ as ‘a matter of interest’, to illustrate how rhyme schemes may accompany the ‘singing and clapping of hands’.⁸⁷

Bourhill’s apparent immunity to the historical and political consciousness of the people he describes allowed him to produce a normative picture of ‘native’ dagga smoking that appears as rote, static and benign. Against such a moral backdrop, he contrasts its pathological urban counterparts: ‘habitual’ dagga smoking and ‘dagga insanity’. For Bourhill, the ‘resultant evils’ of dagga smoking lay in the clash between ontologies of culture and history, a central problematic of South African colonial subjecthood.⁸⁸ This had a spatial dimension, as the frontier across which African men navigated as migrant workers, between the traditional rural homestead and modern urban workplace.

Bourhill hypothesised that dagga psychosis among wage-earning African men could be correlated with the site of their employment, controlling for either a town or a country location – with the former causing the mental mischief. This was because ‘[i]n country districts, a native pursues “the even tenor of his ways” without feeling much of the stress or strain of life’. By contrast, in the spaces of ‘civilisation’, the stresses of life were multiple: ‘the struggle for existence is keen, money is an object to be striven for, the vices of white men are an example to be followed, ambitions are fostered, work is hard and hours are long, and there are the police to be avoided’.⁸⁹

The ‘evils’ of dagga were not, for Bourhill, located in dagga as a substance, nor in its smoking by ‘native races’. A good portion of his thesis demonstrated that the physiological effects of dagga on consumers were shaped by social environment and by individual personality and physiology, an observation that proved consistent with later-20th-century clinical observations.⁹⁰ He wrote, for example:

After watching a party of natives smoking, a spectator is at once struck by two facts, firstly that the mental and physical results are not dependent upon the amount of fumes inhaled, but on the individual himself, his nervous organization, his disposition, his character and his temperament; secondly, that the effects of the drug vary greatly both in kind and in degree among different smokers.⁹¹

Bourhill’s earlier reifications of race and tribe did not preclude his observation of varying effects among individual dagga smokers. Indeed, although he did consider excessive and habitual smoking to undermine a person’s moral judgement, he did not view the substance dagga itself as a cause of ‘evil’ behaviours. Contrary to the white media panics that regularly arose, Bourhill was adamant that dagga could not be implicated in ‘black peril’ sexual crimes, nor was it linked in a straightforward way with crime more generally. He drew attention to alcohol as a drug which, even more than dagga (or in combination with dagga), provoked violence and social disorder.⁹² Bourhill drew attention to a lack of evidence for confirming some of the generalisations about dagga, pointing to problems of reasoning and research.

Although Bourhill cited police surveillance, low wages and racial inequality as among the stresses of urban, colonial space for African wage-seeking men, his analysis was never political or critical. Racial and cultural partitioning (and its policing) appears in his writing to be a natural feature of colonial society, and stress and ‘confusion’ appear to be the result of cultural border-crossing. Within Saul Dubow’s schema of different phases in segregationist thinking among colonial intellectuals, C.J.G. Bourhill may be situated in the same frame as writers such as J. Howard Pim, Maurice Evans, C.T. Loram and the early Edgar Brookes, whose arguments rested (in different registers of paternalism) on valorising African cultural distinctiveness against assimilation.⁹³ Bourhill’s perspective on intoxicating spaces promoted an ideal of colonial order that lamented ‘detribalisation’ as a chaotic social force. Bourhill argued:

Leave the raw savage in his primitive state, leading his own life, let him smoke dagga when and how he pleases, and it will be found that little or no harm will result. But take a young native, with his stunted mental powers, place him in abnormal surroundings, educate him beyond his intellectual capacity, give him hard and unnatural work to perform, let him become ambitious to copy the white man, and outshine his fellows … Now introduce the vices, Alcohol, Dagga, unnatural sex practices, etc. What is the result? The interaction of environment and vice proves too much for many; and the feebler brains drops out of the flight – shattered and broken.⁹⁴

For Bourhill, dagga’s moral distillate lay in the identity of the consumer, mobile across colonial geographies. Its ‘evils’ were named medically as habit and insanity, through an aetiology rooted in ‘people out of place’.

J. Alexander Mitchell on Dagga Smoking: Racial Mixing, Degeneracy and Matter Out of Place

A decade after Bourhill’s thesis, a government pamphlet represented research conducted through the office of the Secretary of Public Health, J. Alexander Mitchell. A Customs and Excise law had prohibited sale and possession of dagga nationally in 1922, and in 1923 the Natives Urban Areas Act formalised segregation. Ideas about space, culture and race in South Africa continued to be contested by a white intelligentsia but the conditions of the debate had shifted.⁹⁵

Born in Ireland in 1876, Mitchell’s medical training, like Bourhill’s, was Scottish, with a Medicine and Surgery Bachelor’s degree from the University of Glasgow in 1898 and a subsequent diploma in tropical medicine from Edinburgh.⁹⁶ Mitchell served as government bacteriologist for the Cape Colony, conducting leprosy research on Robben Island and organising quarantines during bubonic plague outbreaks in Cape Town. In 1910, Mitchell was appointed the Union’s assistant medical officer and, when a Public Health Department was created in 1919, Mitchell became its secretary, a position he held until just before his death in 1933.

‘Memorandum on Dagga Smoking and its Evils’ was published as a pamphlet in 1924, in English and Afrikaans.⁹⁷ A few years later, the League of Nations distributed the document internationally. Mitchell gave interviews, and portions of the memorandum were reprinted or quoted in newspapers based in Cairo, London, Cape Town and various cities in the United States.⁹⁸ For example, in October 1929, the London-based Referee newspaper published an article headlined ‘Drug Peril in Africa/Deadly Dagga/Weed that Leads to Insanity and Crime’, explaining that ‘it was as bad as opium’ and that ‘children’, African and European, were becoming addicted.⁹⁹

Mitchell’s intention had indeed been to raise the alarm about dagga smoking as a problem of mental and social hygiene in residential spaces, workplaces and educational institutions in the Union’s cities. The pamphlet described various social, economic and moral degradations among people, classified as Coloured and as European, through the agency of dagga. It highlighted concerns about ‘juveniles’ in particular. In urban spaces, and by people in these groupings, Mitchell characterised dagga smoking as a eugenics catastrophe, with effects of interracial mixing and race degeneration. The problem appeared rampant:

A very serious aspect of this question is the prevalence of the vice amongst European youths, and even schoolboys, in some of our very large towns. One official reports that in certain barracks practically every one of the European inmates, ranging from 18-30 years of age, is a dagga smoker, that in certain quarters of the town and in certain schools ‘gangs’ of lads between the ages of 10 and 16 years daily smoke three or more cigarettes containing dagga.¹⁰⁰

Mitchell portrayed cannabis smoking in the civic spaces of town/city as pathological for all, and as both cause and consequence of social levelling between black, white and brown. He painted a different picture of dagga, however, in the customary setting of the countryside.

Mitchell had three arguments to explain why ‘native’ uses of cannabis within rural, traditional communities did not lead to insanity, violence or debility. First, reverting to earlier botanical ambiguities, he claimed that the dagga smoked in these spaces was sometimes not cannabis, but rather the free-ranging leonotis, devoid of intoxicant alkaloids according to analyses by ‘Dr Marloth and Professor Gunn’.¹⁰¹ Second, the regulatory influence of tribal social relations – namely, its traditional, patriarchal forms of authority – mitigated damage by ‘preventing excessive use’. This, explained Mitchell, contrasted with the heavy consumption that was rife within the conditions encountered by migrant workers on farms and in towns. ‘[T]he monotony of work and the absence of domestic amenities’ combined to increase the ‘lure’ of dagga, a substance that offered sensations of ‘well-being, courage and even exaltation’ as well as ‘forgetfulness, of their drab [workplace] environment’.¹⁰² Finally, the specific manner of dagga smoking also shaped its chemical effects:

Formerly dagga smokers usually made deliberate preparations for indulging in the drug and inhaled the smoke through water contained either in a specially constructed pipe or in their mouths; or they made a little cavity in clayey soil to serve as a pipe-bowl, with a channel communicating with another hole a yard or so away, through which the smoke was sucked. Ordinary tobacco pipes and cigarettes are now often used for smoking the drug, either alone or mixed with tobacco.¹⁰³

As with Bourhill, Mitchell’s picture of urban social and economic alienation was devoid of political analysis, offering no critique of colonial capitalism – even as it inadvertently confirmed the allures of dagga smoking in alienating environments. Mitchell was worried by dagga’s mobility across colonial geographies. Dagga’s dangers could be contained through tradition in the country spaces of the tribal reserves but became a polluting evil in the spaces of town, as ‘matter out of place’. Into the cities, dagga traditions did not travel intact but crossed social boundaries to be adopted and adapted, creating new practices and consumer cultures.

Dagga’s dual construction, which enabled a de facto dual policy, served to accommodate African traditional authority. Elite African interlocuters informed Native Affairs Department officials of their views informally and, from 1903, in formal discussions about and surveys on dagga.¹⁰⁴ Dagga smoking proved a resilient tradition. Colonial pragmatists, working to preserve the stabilities of indirect rule, sought to preserve dagga smoking as a patriarchal entitlement. As Brian du Toit observed, ‘[t]he old Xhosa or Zulu with his horn-pipe’ was long a stalwart in ethnographic research prior to dagga’s prohibition.¹⁰⁵ But long after prohibition, too, and indeed well into the 1970s, critics of punitive cannabis controls invoked the figure of ‘the old Zulu who all his life has been smoking a pipe of dagga daily’ to denounce strict government legislation.¹⁰⁶ In 1979, Chief Moses Zulu expressed the view of many KwaZulu traditional leaders when he declared: ‘we do not wish to stop and finish altogether with dagga’.¹⁰⁷ Like his predecessors, he also invoked the water-pipe as the ‘proper’ way to smoke dagga, in contrast with the modern ‘zol’ which represented an abuse of dagga tradition by the wayward ‘youth’ of his own time. Across colonial divisions, in changing times, political actors with varying interests helped to broker dagga’s moral and social meanings.

Bourhill asserted that the ‘evils’ of dagga-smoking lay in their escalation into habit and insanity, activated through the movement of African dagga-smokers into areas that were remote from the spaces of custom. For Mitchell, the ‘evil’ lay in the mobility of the substance itself, its capacity to blur the colonial frontiers of cultural practice, space and subjecthood. Dagga’s dual ontologies, in these two texts, were resolved by naturalising distinctions between the spaces of custom and the spaces of habit, and between the racial subjects consuming dagga within each.

When is ‘Dagga’? The Politics of Green and Gold after 1922

Dagga’s prohibition from 1922 represented a temporal frontier across which it was redefined as a ‘dangerous drug’. In this transformation, gatekeeping over dagga’s legal ontology acceded to the central authority of the Union state and its police, customs officials, magistrates and gaols. This created dilemmas for the gold mining sector and prompted ongoing negotiations with the state. In this section, we outline how dagga ontologies were mediated through a sleight of hand which shifted political-economic contradictions onto the figure of the foreign migrant labourer. This is demonstrated in two ways: first, through deferment of certain state offices to the company-run mining compounds; and, second, in the extension of ‘prohibited’ status from drug substance to human being.

The closed mining compounds of the Rand were long regarded as zones of exception, which deferred worker control to private or traditional structures of authority and fostered ethnic identifications.¹⁰⁸ Within such moral economy, many mine officials and Native Affairs Department personnel viewed dagga smoking as a sociable and palliative practice, a conciliatory aspect of ground-level labour relations and control.¹⁰⁹ Meanwhile, with the establishment of Union, the state pursued a uniform sovereignty across demarcated territory. In part, this involved shoring up its borders and ports against things – and people – classified as ‘undesirable’ or ‘dangerous’. Dagga, transported by mining recruits, became one such object.

The gold economy had become dependent upon African migrants from across the Union’s northern border.¹¹⁰ The Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (WNLA), a wing of the Employment Bureau of Africa (TEBA) targeted ‘tropical natives’ from South-Central Africa, up through Tanganyika. From 1922, dagga control became a problem for recruiters, with arrests of would-be workers entering from Mozambique at the border station of Komatipoort. As Andrew MacDonald demonstrates, in the 1920s Komatipoort remained weak in its gatekeeping role and state officials continually denounced ‘leakages’ of ‘undesirable’ migrants, as well as illegal lottery tickets and drug substances.¹¹¹

In 1926, a number of WNLA recruits found in possession of, or smoking, dagga were convicted and sentenced by the magistrate to incarceration for 14 days or fines ranging from 10 shillings to £2.¹¹² Others were allowed to pass with a caution. Records coalesce around recruits unable to pay the fines imposed. WNLA sent an agent to approach the courts and pay fines on behalf of these dagga offenders so that they could assume mining duties.¹¹³ The amount involved in each case was endorsed on the workers’ transport permits.¹¹⁴ In each case, the amounts were then debited to the specific mine company concerned, which in turn took it out of the wages of the worker. Payments of fines were regarded as advances on the payroll, and a recruit then worked off the debt as a loss of personal earnings.

Advance of dagga fines, however, depended upon two factors: the site of arrest (whether at the border, in the mines, or in civilian space outside the mines); and the employment status of the offender (whether an incoming recruit, labouring miner, or repatriate). It was also the case that WNLA’s payment of a fine did not guarantee that a recruit would be handed over to the mining industry. On 7 September 1927, for example, the district manager of WNLA informed the general manager that his request to the Union agent based at Lourenço Marques – to intervene in the case of some dagga arrests at Komatipoort – had been unsuccessful.¹¹⁵ The Union agent had countered that ‘indigenous custom’ could not be considered a defence and that it was a police matter. What mattered to the Union agent, representing the interests of the state, was the rigid provision of the 1922 Act.

In the late 1920s, WNLA paid fines for incoming recruits at the Komatipoort border almost without fail. On the 8 March 1926, four Portuguese subjects – Sikise, Teszula, Mafambazana and Kuvene – were arrested there for smoking dagga. In December, a letter informed WNLA’s chief accountant that an ‘East-Coast native’ was incarcerated in Komatipoort for dagga possession.¹¹⁶ These individuals had not yet commenced work in the goldmines. Fined 10 shillings, or alternatively compelled to serve 14 days’ imprisonment, the WNLA’s Ressano-Gracia compound office in Lourenço Marques paid the fines and moved the men onward.¹¹⁷

Dagga offenders already residing and working in the mines were handled differently. As international pressures grew in 1931 to uphold cannabis prohibition, a circular headed ‘Deduction of wages from fines imposed on native labourers charged with a petty offence’ explained the agreement between the Union government and the Chamber of Mines.¹¹⁸ Point four stated that where a convicted person was unable to pay a fine, the employer’s written consent was required ‘by 3.30 pm’ to ensure an offender could avoid gaol and rather be detained at the court until the fine was paid.¹¹⁹ Discretion in such cases – whether to pay a fine or not – rested with mine administrators. In this matter of dagga, as with other issues, the Union government largely deferred control to the mining sector.

The exception proved the rule. Joao Tangalimine, identified as a ‘Shangaan native’ from Portuguese East Africa, was convicted in 1933 for dagga possession after two years of employment at the Rose Deep Ltd mine. Deal-making between the state and the Chamber of Mines did not appear to hold in his case. Tangalimine was sentenced to a fine of £10 or two months’ imprisonment – to be followed by deportation.¹²⁰ Rose Deep administrators appealed, since deportation meant a lost investment for the company in capitation fees, including overhead transportation and mining kit. They complained to Union officials that the Native Affairs Department and the Commissioner of the Police had ‘not followed the agreed-upon process’. The files do not indicate the circumstances that prompted deportation, but it is clear that Tangalimine’s employers were prepared to retain him if he was allowed to stay on. As this proved non-negotiable, Rose Deep did not pay the fine and Tangalimine was left to serve his prison time before being deported.

The mining companies had even less incentive to involve themselves with repatriating miners who were arrested on a dagga charge. This, in part, represented a denial by the mining industry of some measure of institutional culpability. An individual named Chimangeni, for example, was arrested for smoking dagga in 1956 after completing his contract at the Stein mine in the Orange Free State.¹²¹ When caught, he claimed not to have been a dagga smoker prior to his work in the mining compounds. It was his mine supervisor, he testified, who introduced him to the practice as a way of overcoming his fear of going underground. He had subsequently become ‘addicted’. His story indicated how dagga practices, rendered acceptable within the dangerous and exploitative climate of the mines, were not afforded weight in civilian spaces. His scenario draws attention to an enduring moral economy around dagga smoking in the mines, despite its criminalised status at the borders and outside the compounds.¹²² Still, no gold mine was willing to formalise such a reality, especially by paying a fine for a repatriating worker.¹²³

In the early 1930s, the Union introduced more rigorous measures to handle African labourers who used and possessed dagga. Recruits and miners began to be deported in larger numbers. Moreover, a dagga deportee was now declared a ‘prohibited immigrant’ – permitted neither to enter the Union to fulfil their mining contract nor to re-enter for a new contract.¹²⁴ The government told WNLA that the ‘law stands’: they would purge ‘tropical workers’ convicted of a dagga offence.¹²⁵ The amounts of dagga fines, the length of gaol terms and deportation sentences increased. The gold mine industry now showed a reluctance to pay fines, despite its ability to retrieve that money through the deduction of wages.¹²⁶

These rising stakes had much to do with the changing nature of the dagga supply chain in the wake of legal prohibition. In the 1920s, migrants at the border were apprehended with small quantities of the substance, suggesting their conveyance of a supply meant for personal use. Yet as the value of cannabis grew through its criminalisation, migrants were caught at the border with larger amounts, clearly meant for sale in an underground market. The district manager of WNLA at Ressano-Gracia noted that ‘it appears that the culprits are deliberate smugglers who show considerable ingenuity in defeating the personal search they undergo in the hands on the authorities’.¹²⁷ In relation to the South African state, this development redefined the dagga-carrying ‘tropical recruit’ as a transnational smuggler or ‘trafficker’. The mining industry, in turn, wished to avoid facilitating an illicit market for dagga which yielded them no profit.

By the mid 1930s, it became difficult to recontract experienced foreign miners with a dagga offence on their record. The mining administration now shifted its focus from identifying cost-saving mechanisms (such as advancing monies to pay fines) to a strategy of assuming the state’s powers of incarceration for those recruits convicted on a dagga charge. The Chamber of Mines and the Union government were in alignment on the principle of treating migrant workers arriving at the border with large quantities of dagga as ‘prohibited immigrant non-Union natives’.¹²⁸ However, the Chamber of Mines demanded that a fixed amount be established to more clearly denote what ‘large quantity’ meant. This remained unfixed, and slippage on this issue was one factor that the Chambers of the Mines could exploit over a period. Its officials continued to argue for a specific figure below which amount a recruit possessing dagga would not be deported as ‘undesirable’ or handed over to police authorities but instead would be sent onward to the mines.¹²⁹

The Police Commissioner agreed to create a special type of work permit for the ‘petty’ dagga offender.¹³⁰ This enabled a majority of gaol sentences to be carried out in the closed compounds of the gold mine, integrated into an offender’s work contract. With this process in place, the state adopted a more sympathetic posture. In one case it changed a ruling of deportation after the Chamber of Mines appealed that the offence was ‘petty’, committed out of ignorance.¹³¹ In another instance, it merely decreed the release of several ‘Portuguese natives’ convicted of dagga possession to complete their contract of service.¹³² The compound, in effect, assumed the role of private prison with hard labour, the offending migrant working off a segment of time rather than a fine.

Compromises worked out between the state and the mining sector effected shifts in dagga’s political ontology and agency. Legally constituted as a ‘dangerous drug’, cannabis had the power to transform the terms of an individual’s relationship to wage work: from free labour to debt peonage, to convict labour. These processes extended the ‘prohibited’ status of dagga as a substance on to the person of the dagga-offending migrant. Upon completion of their contracts, mine workers with a dagga offence on their record were removed from the Union as ‘prohibited immigrants’, to be denied future re-entry into the Union.

Within this new agreement, the mining sector also returned to advancing payment for dagga fines. While an African worker with an arrest record for dagga could yet be productive in the workplace – the mine – he was classed as a worker while serving out the terms of his contract. The moment his contract ended, he assumed the status of a criminal. It was the temporary suspension of criminality that secured a ‘tropical’ migrant’s legitimate status within South African territory – and it was the termination of his contracted productivity as a worker that reintroduced his criminal status. The boundaries of dagga’s legal reach were temporal, shifting with TEBA’s recruitment and work calendars – that is, the time of the labour contract. Through negotiations between state and mine industry, dagga-possessing African men from north of the border could be repositioned from the status of foreign recruit to criminal, to worker, to ‘prohibited immigrant’.

Conclusion

In this article, we have traced three thematic episodes that reveal the ontological journeys of ‘dagga’ in South Africa, during the period leading up to Union and the first few decades under Union governments. We show how dagga moved as a multiple object across classifications of science, culture, geography and time. Mobile across the frontiers and lifeworlds of colonial space, dagga’s changing and ambivalent meanings opened up new horizons for defining its ethical and political nature in different contexts, related to colonial governance, professionalising medicine and capitalist development. This is shown in the decades of dagga’s unsettled taxonomies (and revenue status); in the cultural (and spatial) contingency of its observed physiological, health and criminological effects; and in its legal–temporal appropriations within the management regimes of the gold industry.

Botanical classification of dagga furnished turn-of-the-century legislators and doctors with a cultural and medical conundrum. Yet, as this evolved into a legal matter – and a subject of expert inquiry – officials raised a more fundamental political issue. In the early 20th century, as colonialism entered its industrialised phase, the national state aimed to build its capacities of regulatory control. This required consensus on dagga’s status as a dangerous, habit-forming ‘drug’. However, ongoing ambivalence also continued to be a productive resource for holders of power, enabling them to navigate core tensions – as with African traditional authorities and the Chamber of Mines – and to improvise policy.

Ambivalence meant, too, that the effects of dagga’s new classifications on indigenous knowledge and practices were uneven. While new cultures of dagga consumption and cultivation reflected new social conditions, earlier meanings and traditions carried on outside, or despite, colonial reconfigurations. Yet, in each of the episodes outlined here, we witness evidence of weakened or defeated African dagga ontologies, and of colonial subjects rendered vulnerable to waves of media panics, contradictory medical diagnostics and ambiguous policy.

Against this empirical historical picture, ‘dagga’ reveals itself, in a theoretical sense – and as Ghiabi and others have shown in relation to other drug substances – as a pharmakon. Jacques Derrida’s conception of pharmakon builds on the Greek duality of its meanings and effects: a neurochemical substance that is at once a remedy and a poison. In an unequal society, the dual nature of the pharmakon acts on the world, with an agency to define the foreigner, the scapegoat, and the hemlock drinker, who is otherwise to be exiled beyond the walls of the polis.¹³³ While powerful as metaphor, pharmakon has value for thinking about the social and material history of a ‘drug’ substance.

This is evident in the case of South Africa in the episodes we have recounted here. As a ‘thing’, dagga endured in colonial imagination as an indigenous medicine and intoxicant, its effects on individual and social bodies remaining difficult to pin down as they lay open to claim-making by various brokers and gatekeepers. ‘Dagga’ carried symbolic power to mark or erase social boundaries; to bolster or undermine authority in designated territories; and to render colonial subjects at once legible or unknowable. Dagga could be appropriated as value (for example, in labour time or wages), later to be purged – in the body of a foreign migrant labourer – as a polluting or criminal force.

With the rise of the National Party, and its interdepartmental government research into ‘dagga abuse’ (1949–52) and the 1971 anti-drug law that attached extraordinary punishments to even minor dagga offences, the legal status of dagga became more rigid.¹³⁴ A moral understanding of cannabis as an addictive ‘drug’ gained ground across wider swathes of society. This did not, however, end dagga’s ontological journey in South Africa. Recently, the Constitutional Court’s 2018 ruling to decriminalise private consumption and cultivation of cannabis has created new meanings and ambiguities, shifting the local ‘dagga’ story once again in ways still to be determined.

Thembisa Waetjen
Department of History, University of Johannesburg, A Ring 242, Auckland Park, 2006, South Africa. Email: [email protected]

Perside Ndandu
Department of History, University of Johannesburg, A Ring 242, Auckland Park, 2006, South Africa. Email: [email protected]

Acknowledgements

Sections of this paper have their origins in earlier respective work by the authors: see T. Waetjen, ‘Dagga Smoking in Colonial Geographies: C.J.G. Bourhill, J.A. Mitchell and South Africa’ (unpublished paper presented at ‘Intoxicating Spaces’ online conference, University of Sheffield, July 2021); and P. Ndandu, ‘Dagga in the Witwatersrand Gold Mines: Tensions of Economy and State, 1925–1956’ (unpublished Honours research essay, History, University of Johannesburg, 2018). We are grateful for a J. Donald Hughes travel grant, awarded to Ndandu, and to South Africa’s National Research Foundation for funding to Waetjen (grant no. 129301), enabling us to co-present an earlier version of the paper at the American Society for Environmental History conference in Boston in March 2023. Warmest thanks to our Boston co-panellists Sarah Brady Siff, Utathya Chattopadhyaya, Chris Duvall and Nandini Bhattacharya; to botanist Dr Sue Milton-Dean; and to two anonymous reviewers for feedback and suggestions.

Notes

1 Alan Paton Centre, Pietermaritzburg, Maré Collection, Transcripts of the KwaZulu Legislative Assembly Debates, volume 10, 1977, p. 102.

2 ‘Parliament Legislative Council’, Cape Times, Cape Town, 28 August 1907.

3 Through Government Notice no. 318 of 1905, dagga was declared a poison under Division II of Schedule B of Act 34 of 1891 (Cape) and amended by Act 7 of 1899 (Cape). Also, Cape Archival Repository (hereafter KAB), List in the Final Government Notice, May 1907, AG 1885 310/11.

4 Whereas dagga had earlier sold for 4s 1d (4 shillings and 1 penny) per pound, cultivators had been compelled in 1906 to sell at 1d per pound.

5 ‘Parliament Legislative Council’, Cape Times, 28 August 1907.

6 Ibid.

7 T. Waetjen, ‘Dagga: How South Africa Made a Dangerous Drug,1902–1928’, in L. Richert and J.H. Mills (eds), Cannabis: Global Histories (Cambridge, MIT Press, 2021), pp. 83–108.

8 U. Chattopadhyaya, ‘Dagga and Prohibition: Markets, Animals, and Imperial Contexts of Knowledge, 1893–1925’, South African Historical Journal, 71, 4 (2019), pp. 587–613.

9 Ibid., p. 590.

10 C.S. Duvall, The African Roots of Marijuana (Durham, Duke University Press, 2019); G. Klantschnig, ‘Histories of Cannabis Use and Control in Nigeria 1927–67’, in G. Klantschnig, N. Carrier and C. Ambler (eds), Drugs in Africa: Histories and Ethnographies of Use, Trade, and Control (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 69–88; B.M. Du Toit, ‘Man and Cannabis: A Study of Diffusion’, African Economic History, 1 (1976), pp. 17–35; J. Walton, ‘The Dagga Pipes of Southern Africa’, Navorsinge van die Nationale Museum, 1, Part 4 (Bloemfontein, 1953), pp. 85–113.

11 D. Gordon, ‘From Rituals of Rapture to Dependence: The Political Economy of Khoikhoi Narcotic Consumption, c.1487–1870’, South African Historical Journal, 35, 1 (1996), pp. 62–88; B.M. Du Toit, ‘Dagga: The History and Ethnographic Setting of Cannabis Sativa in South Africa’, in V. Rubin (ed.), Cannabis and Culture (The Hague and Paris, De Gruyter Mouton, 1975), pp. 81–116.

12 Transcripts of the KwaZulu Legislative Assembly (KLA) Debates, 10 (1977), pp. 102–3. The KLA transcript mistakenly gives the year as 1966 rather than 1956. On this raid, see A. Morris, ‘“Weeding Out” the Nature of the Ngoba Dagga Raid Killings of 1956’ (Honours thesis, University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2011).

13 M. Ghiabi, ‘Ontological Journeys: The Lifeworld of Opium across the Afghan-Iranian Border in/out of the Pharmacy’, International Journal of Drug Policy, 89, (2021), no. 103116, pp. 1–9.

14 Ibid., p. 2.

15 Pioneering histories include D.T. Courtwright, Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1982); V. Berridge, Opium and the People: Opiate Use and Drug Control Policy in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century England (London, Free Association Books, 1999); J.H. Mills, Cannabis Britannica: Empire, Trade, and Prohibition, 1800-1928 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003).

16 B. Neilson and M. Bamyeh, ‘Drugs in Motion: Towards a Materialist Tracking of Global Mobilities’, Cultural Critique, 71 (2009), p. 1.

17 P. Gootenberg, ‘Talking about the Flow: Drugs, Borders and the Discourse of Drug Control’, Cultural Critique, 71 (2009), pp. 13–46.

18 Chattopadhyaya, ‘Dagga and Prohibition’.

19 On the productive potential of legal ambiguities of drugs in Africa, see N. Carrier and G. Klantschnig, ‘Quasilegality: Khat, Cannabis and Africa’s Drug Laws’, Third World Quarterly, 39, 2 (2018), pp. 350–65.

20 S.B. Siff, ‘Targeted Marijuana Law Enforcement in Los Angeles, 1914–1959’, Fordham Urban Law Journal, 49, 3 (2022), pp. 643–74. As in South Africa, definitions of ‘marijuana’ in Los Angeles were embroiled with ethno-racial ideas about consuming subjects, affecting whom law enforcers targeted.

21 Gordon, ‘Rituals’, pp. 65–6.

22 Ibid., pp. 65–72.

23 Ibid., p. 65.

24 As cited in Gordon, ‘Rituals’, p. 66; Duvall, African Roots, pp. 86–9.

25 M. Hunter, ‘The Labour Question in Colonial Worlds: Mandrax, Heroin, and Xanax in South Africa’s Era of Unemployment’, The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, 36, 2 (2022), pp. 284–310.

26 With a guttural ‘g’. ‘Dagha’, sometimes spelled ‘dagga’ (pronounced with a hard g), refers to mortars used in local house building.

27 ‘South African Exhibition’, The Port Elizabeth Telegraph and Eastern Province Standard, Port Elizabeth, 17 December 1885.

28 L. Pappe, Florae Capensis Medicae Prodromus; An Enumeration of the South African Plants Used as Remedies, second edn (Cape Town, W. Brittain, 1857, via Google Books), p. 33, original emphasis.

29 ‘South African Exhibition’, The Port Elizabeth Telegraph and Eastern Province Standard, 17 December 1885.

30 Transvaal Argus, 15 May 1866.

31 Letter to the Editor, The Journal, Grahamstown, 10 May 1875.

32 ‘Cure for Red-Water’, The Journal, 29 January 1887. Buthlungu means pain, perhaps here referring to the characteristic burn experienced in the throat when smoking cannabis.

33 ‘The Red-Water Disease in Cattle’, The Port Elizabeth Telegraph and Eastern Province Standard, 3 June 1886.

34 Advertisement, ‘Redwater Specific’, The Journal, 15 March 1894.

35 Letter to the Editor, The Journal, 22 August 1881; Letter to the Editor, The Journal, 8 April 1990.

36 Letter to the Editor, The Journal, 19 April 1887.

37 ‘The Red-Water Disease in Cattle’, The Port Elizabeth Telegraph and Eastern Province Standard, 3 March 1891. Leonotis was said to ‘constitute’ the main ingredient for ‘celebrated preparations’ for snakebite.

38 ‘Dakka for Sheep Dipping’, The Journal, 11 July 1873.

39 Letter to the Editor, The Journal, 11 August 1888.

40 ‘South African Exhibition’, The Port Elizabeth Telegraph and Eastern Province Standard, 17 December 1885.

41 J.M. Watt and M.G. Breyer-Brandwijk, ‘The Forensic and Sociological Aspects of the Dagga Problem in South Africa’, South African Medical Journal, 22 August 1936, pp. 573–9.

42 J.M. Watt and M.G. Breyer-Brandwijk, The Medicinal and Poisonous Plants of Southern and Eastern Africa: Being an Account of Their Medicinal and Other Uses, Chemical Composition, Pharmacological Effects and Toxicology in Man and Animals (Edinburgh, E&S Livingston, 1962 [University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Microfilm Reprint], 1986), see pp. 516–17 and p. 759. Cannabis has since been relocated to Cannabaceae.

43 For example, in Letter to the Editor, The Journal, 10 May 1875. On bioprospecting in South Africa, see for example, W. Beinart and R. Beinart, ‘From Elephant’s Foot … to Cortisone: Boots Pure Drug Company and Dioscorea Sylvatica in South Africa, c. 1950–1963’, South African Historical Journal, 71, 4 (2019), pp. 644–75 and L. Foster, Reinventing Hoodia: Peoples, Plants and Patents (Seattle, University of Washington Press, 2017).

44 ‘South African Exhibition’, The Port Elizabeth Telegraph and Eastern Province Standard, 17 December 1885.

45 Watt and Breyer-Brandwijk, The Medicinal and Poisonous Plants of Southern Africa, pp. 157 and 35, respectively. These notes remained in the expanded 1962 edition: see pp. 517–20 and p. 762. A recent popular plant guide cites Watt and Breyer-Brandwijk on both leonotis and cannabis for snakebite. B.-E. van Wyk, B. van Oudtshoorn and N. Gericke, Medicinal Plants of South Africa (Pretoria, Briza, 2009), pp. 188 and 74.

46 ‘South African Exhibition’, The Port Elizabeth Telegraph and Eastern Province Standard, 17 December 1885.

47 ‘Tobaccos that Cause Death: Varieties of the Weed that Prove Fatal to Smokers’, The Cape Daily Telegraph, Port Elizabeth, 17 December 1903.

48 Gordon, ‘Rituals’, fn. 8. Quotation from L. Pappe, Florae Capensis Medicae; or, An Enumeration of South African Plants Used as Remedies by the Colonists of the Cape of Good Hope (Cape Town, 1857), p. 33, accessed via Biodiversity Heritage Library, available at https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/103699, retrieved 25 April 2024. Thanks to Sarah Siff for alerting us to this resource.

49 J.W.C. Gunn, ‘The Action of Leonotis Leonurus’, Archives Internationales de Pharmacodynamie, 35 (1929), pp. 266–8, cited in Watt and Breyer-Brandwijk, Medicinal and Poisonous Plants, p. 35.

50 Similar to what T.J. Tallie describes in ‘Sobriety and Settlement: The Politics of Alcohol’, Chapter Two, in Queering Colonial Natal: Indigeneity and the Violence of Belonging in Southern Africa (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2019).

51 R. Trimen and H.E.R. Bright (Committee Secretaries), ‘Philadelphia International Exhibition for 1876’, Zuid-Afrikaan Vereenigd Met ons Land, 30 October 1875.

52 ‘The De Beers Natives: Life in the Compound’, The Port Elizabeth Telegraph, 27 October 1894.

53 ‘British and Boer Tobacco’, Natal Witness, Pietermaritzburg, 16 October 1884.

54 ‘Labour Commission: What the Members Recommend’, Cape Times, 19 May 1894.

55 The Port Elizabeth Telegraph, 1 October 1891.

56 ‘Dagga Smoking’, The Port Elizabeth Telegraph and Eastern Province Standard, 19 January 1892. Wikipedia explains that ‘muid’ is a South African measurement equalling about 24 gallons or 3 bushels, a term probably based on a mediaeval French term for a dry measure of seeds sufficient to sow a specific area of land, available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_units_of_measurement, retrieved 15 February 2023.

57 ‘Tobaccos that Cause Death: Varieties of the Weed that Prove Fatal to Smokers’, The Cape Daily Telegraph, Port Elizabeth, 17 December 1903. The article offered an ethno-inventory of various plant substances smoked, with often wildly fantastical claims as to relative harms or ‘wholesomeness’.

58 T. Waetjen, ‘Global Opium Politics in Mozambique and South Africa, c 1880–1930’, South African Historical Journal, 71, 4 (2019), pp. 560–86, especially 577–8.

59 R. Room, ‘Dependence and Society’, British Journal of Addiction, 80, 2 (1985), pp. 133–9.

60 In the original, ‘Eén arbeider, die geen dagga roker is, deed gewoonlik beter werk, of net zo veel, als twee dagga rokers’, Paarl Post, Paarl, 8 August 1912.

61 KAB JUS 141 25726/11, Cape Times, Legislative Council Report, ‘The Smoking of Dagga’, 27 March 1906.

62 KAB AG 1885 310/11, Charles Teitje to Thackray, 19 January 1916: original emphasis.

63 Geneva, League of Nations Archive, R787/12A/36162/36162 Opium Traffic ‘Various correspondence concerning the dagga plant’, 1924: M. Delevingne to A. E. Blanco, 14 May 1924.

64 Geneva, League of Nations Archive, R787/12A/36162/36162 Opium Traffic ‘Various correspondence concerning the dagga plant’, 1924: A.E. Blanco to M. Delevingne, 16 May 1924.

65 Geneva, League of Nations Archive, R787/12A/36162/36162 Opium Traffic ‘Various correspondence concerning the dagga plant’, 1924: ‘Dagga’ (copy), p. 3.

66 J.A. Mitchell, ‘Memorandum on Dagga Smoking and its Evils’ (Pretoria, Government Printer, 1924), p. 7.

67 Watt and Breyer-Brandwijk, original 1932 edition of Medicinal and Poisonous Plants, p. 156.

68 Watt and Breyer-Brandwijk, ‘Forensic and Sociological Aspects of the Dagga Problem’, pp. 574. They repeated these data in 1962 in Medicinal Plants, p. 766.

69 ‘The Chief Moroko’ [sic], Friend of the Free State and Bloemfontein Gazette, 4 May 1860.

70 C.J.G. Bourhill, ‘The Smoking of Dagga (Indian Hemp) among the Native Races of South Africa and the Resultant Evils’ (MD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1913).

71 Mitchell, ‘Memorandum on Dagga Smoking and its Evils’.

72 ‘Obituary, C.J.G. Bourhill’, British Medical Journal, 2 (6 June 1970), p. 609.

73 The Edinburgh University Calendar, 1908–1909, Edinburgh Collection, 1908–1909, pp. 119, 615, 618, 620. Available at https://archive.org/details/edcalendar19081909univuoft/mode/2up, retrieved 1 May 2024.

74 National Archives Repository (Public Records of Central Government since 1910) (hereafter SAB) SAB GES 3040 408/34 CJG Bourhill to Secretary, High Commissioner, Union of South Africa, London, 8 December 1911; Copies of Letters of Reference: Arthur H. Biossier and others, Horton Infirmary, Banbury, December 1910; G Lovell Gulland, Royal Infirmary, Edinburgh, 29 July 1910; J.W. Dowden, Royal Infirmary, Edinburgh, 27 July 1910; J.M. Cotterill, Royal Infirmary, Edinburgh, 27 July 1910.

75 C. Plug and J.L. Roos, ‘Weskoppies Hospital, founded 1892 - The Early Years’, South African Medical Journal, 81, 4 (15 February 1992), pp. 218–21.

76 Ibid.

77 SAB GES 3040 408/34 ‘Articles of Agreement’ (of terms of employment, signed but undated).

78 Within his thesis, perhaps to bolster his credibility, Bourhill claims to have worked ‘a year’ at the Pretoria Asylum, an institution treating around 500 patients. His personnel file confirms eight months. His observations for the thesis are also from ‘seven Native mining compounds at Witbank’.

79 SAB GES 3040 408/34 CJG Bourhill to Dr J Dunston, Medical Superintendent, 12 September 1912; Dr J. Dunston, Medical Superintendent to Acting Minister of the Interior, 9 November 1912.

80 In 1916, Bourhill signed up for service in the war, serving as a medic, after which he emigrated to England, settling into a practice in Warrington. He died there in 1970.

81 Bourhill, ‘Smoking of Dagga’, p. 3.

82 Ibid.

83 See N. Carrier and G. Klantschnig, Cannabis Africana: The Age of Prohibition, 1922–2020 (forthcoming), pp. 73–8.

84 Bourhill, ‘Smoking of Dagga’, pp. 5 and 4.

85 Ibid., pp. 5–6.

86 Ibid., pp. 27–8.

87 Ibid., p. 26.

88 M. Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1996).

89 Bourhill, ‘Dagga Smoking’, p. 86.

90 For example, F. Ames, ‘A Clinical and Metabolic Study of Acute Intoxication with Cannabis Sativa and its Role in Model Psychosis’, Journal of Mental Science, 104, 437 (1958), pp. 972–99; A.T. Weil, N.E Zinberg and J.M. Nelson, ‘Clinical and Psychological Effects of Marijuana in Man’, Science, 162, 3859 (13 December 1968), pp. 1234–42.

91 Bourhill, ‘Dagga Smoking’, p. 45.

92 Ibid., p. 59.

93 S. Dubow, Racial Segregation and the Origins of Apartheid in South Africa, 1919-36 (New York, St. Martins Press, 1989), pp. 21–9.

94 Bourhill, ‘Dagga Smoking’, pp. 89–90.

95 Dubow, Racial Segregation, pp. 39–50.

96 ‘Obituary, Dr. J.A. Mitchell’, South African Medical Journal (24 June 1933), pp. 411–12.

97 Mitchell, ‘Memorandum on Dagga Smoking and its Evils’.

98 Geneva, League of Nations Archive, Opium File 12/15529 ‘Various Correspondences regarding dagga, a drug used in South Africa’. Clippings included ‘Drug that leads to Insanity’ Evening Standard, 7 October 1929, and similar write-ups in La Bourse Egyptienne, South African Review and Cape Argus.

99 ‘Drug Peril in Africa’, The Referee, London, 6 October 1929.

100 Mitchell, ‘Memorandum on Dagga Smoking and its Evils’, p. 5.

101 Ibid., p. 3.

102 Mitchell, ‘Memorandum on Dagga Smoking and its Evils’, p. 4.

103 Ibid.

104 As elaborated in C. Paterson, ‘Prohibition and Resistance: A Socio-Political Exploration of the Changing Dynamics of the Southern African Cannabis Trade, c. 1850–The Present’ (MA thesis, Rhodes University, 2009), pp. 31 and 50; and in Waetjen, ‘Dagga’, pp. 87–8. SAB NTS 8194 3/345: see various survey responses of traditional authorities on the question of dagga legislation, July 1909.

105 Du Toit, ‘History and Ethnographic Setting’, p. 105.

106 L. Simon, ‘Dependence-Producing Substances’, De Rebus Procuratoriis (June 1977), pp. 311–14.

107 Quoted in T. Waetjen, ‘Apartheid’s 1971 Drug Law: Between Cannabis and Control in South Africa’, Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, 36, 2 (2022), p. 193.

108 D.T. Moodie, ‘Mine Culture and Miners’ Identity on the South African Gold Mines’, in B. Bozzoli (ed.), Identity on the South African Gold Mines in Towns and Countryside in the Transvaal: Capitalist Penetration and Popular Response (Johannesburg, Ravan Press, 1983), pp. 176–97, see pp. 180; D.T. Moodie, ‘The Moral Economy of the Black Miners’ Strike of 1946’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 13, 1 (1986): p. 2; P. Harries, Work, Culture, and Identity: Migrant Laborers in Mozambique and South Africa, c. 1860–1910 (Johannesburg, Wits University Press, 1994).

109 Waetjen, ‘Dagga’, pp. 89–93.

110 A.H. Jeeves, Migrant Labour in South Africa’s Mining Economy: The Struggle for the Gold Mines’ Labour Supply (Johannesburg, Wits University Press, 1985).

111 A. MacDonald, ‘Forging the Frontiers: Travellers and Documents on the South Africa–Mozambique Border, 1890s–1940s’, Kronos, 40, 1 (2014), pp. 154–77; see also Waetjen, ‘Global Opium Politics’, pp. 583–5.

112 According to the Employment Bureau of Africa (TEBA) archives, fines ranged from 10 or 20 shillings to £2, or before 1931 some were just cautioned.

113 The Employment Bureau of Africa archives (hereafter TEBA), WNLA 53 Pad 1 Transvaal Chambers of Mines (Secretaries) to WNLA District Manager in Lourenço Marques, ‘A further native was arrested at Komatipoort re dagga’, 14 September 1926; and WNLA District Manager to WNLA General Manager ‘Eight natives arrested at Komatipoort for being in possession of dagga’, 16 September 1926.

114 TEBA WNLA 53 Pad 1 WNLA Assistant Secretary to WNLA Chief Accountant, ‘Dagga fines paid by Mr. J.Y. Robinson’, 17 September 1926; WNLA Divisional Agent to WNLA General Manager ‘Four natives brought before the Magistrate for smoking dagga’, 5 March 1926; WNLA Divisional Agent to WNLA General Manager ‘Natives fined by the Magistrate for smoking dagga’, 8 March, 1926.

115 TEBA WNLA 53 Pad 1 the WNLA District Manager to WNLA General Manager, ‘Inquiry to the Union Agent on Dagga Arrests’, 7 September 1927.

116 TEBA WNLA 53 Pad 1 Memorandum, WNLA Chief Accountant to the Assistant Secretary, ‘East-Coast Native, # 6394 Portuguese Pass’, 7 December 1926; The Transvaal Chamber of Mines Secretaries to WNLA District Manager, ‘Natives in Unlawful Possession of Dagga (Komatipoort)’, 5 September 1927.

117 TEBA WNLA 53 Pad 1 WNLA Divisional Agent to WNLA General Manager ‘Natives fined by the Magistrate for smoking dagga’, 8 March 1926.

118 TEBA WNLA 53 Pad 1 Circular – no. 36/31 ‘Deductions from Wages of Fines imposed on Native labourers charged with petty offence’, 16 May 1931, p. 2.

119 Ibid.

120 TEBA WNLA 53 Pad 1 Acting Manager to Rose Deep LMTD to Native Recruiting Corporation [NRC] ‘Native No 1554/751189 Joao Tangalimine Shangaan from P.E.A.’, 26 June 1933.

121 TEBA WNLA 53 Pad 1 Secretary of African Affairs to WNLA General Manager, ‘Indian Hemp’, 25 June 1956.

122 SAB NTS 8194 3/345 the Protector N.A.D. Krugersdorp to the District G.N.L., ‘General Minute No 5/1911’, 18 January 1911.

123 TEBA WNLA 53 Pad 1 Compound Managers and Inspectors to the General Manager of WNLA, ‘Indian Hemp’, 10 July 1956, pp. 1–2.

124 TEBA WNLA 53 Pad 1 WNLA District Manager to WNLA General Manager, ‘Arrests at Komatipoort: Natives in Possession of Dagga’, 22 July 1933; Acting Manager for Rose Deep LMTD Mines to NRC ‘Native No 1554/751189 Joao Tangalimine, a Shangaan from P.E. A’, 26 June 1933; WNLA District Manager to WNLA General Manager, ‘Natives in Possession of Dagga, prohibited migrants’, 26 July 1933.

125 TEBA WNLA 53 Pad 1 Transvaal Chamber of Mines Secretaries to Director of Native Labour, Department of Native Affairs (JHB) ‘Dagga offence probably committed more out of ignorance’, 6 July 1933.

126 TEBA WNLA 53 Pad 1 Transvaal Chamber of Mines to the Commissioner for Immigration and Asiatic Affairs ‘Native to be handed back to the Mines after serving term in Prison’, 7 July 1933.

127 TEBA WNLA 53 Pad 1 WNLA District Manager to WNLA General Manager, ‘Natives in Possession of Dagga’, 11 August 1936.

128 TEBA WNLA 53 Pad 1 Transvaal Chamber of Mines Secretaries to the Commissioner for Immigration and Asiatic Affairs, ‘Portuguese Natives in Possession of Dagga’, 2 September 1933.

129 Ibid.

130 TEBA WNLA 53 Pad 1 Transvaal Chamber of Mines Secretaries to the Commissioner for Immigration and Asiatic Affairs, ‘arrangements to enable Portuguese natives convicted of being is possession of dagga to enter their contract’, 15 November 1933: Commissioner for Immigration and Asiatic Affairs to Transvaal Chamber of Mines Secretaries, ‘Portuguese East Africa convicted re dagga’, 11 November 1933.

131 TEBA WNLA 53 Pad 1 Chamber of Mines Secretaries to the Deputy Commissioner of the Police ‘Portuguese Possession of Dagga’, 1933.

132 TEBA WNLA 53 Pad 1 Commissioner for Immigration and Asiatic Affairs to the Secretaries of the Chamber of Mines, ‘Completion of work contract for a dagga offender’, 11 November 1933.

133 J. Derrida, Dissemination (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 61–122. See H. Keane, ‘Drugs that Work: Pharmaceuticals and Performance Self-Management’, in S. Fraser and D. Moore (eds), The Drug Effect: Health, Crime and Society (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 106–21; A. Persson, ‘Incorporating Pharmakon: HIV, Medicine, and Body Shape Change’ Body & Society, 10, 4 (2004), pp. 45–67; Ghiabi, ‘Ontological Journeys’, pp. 3–4.

134 Waetjen, ‘Apartheid’s 1971 Drug Law’; P.I. Nkosi, R. Devey and T. Waetjen, ‘Cannabis Policing in Mid-Twentieth Century South Africa’, Historia, 65, 1 (2020), pp. 61–86.