Editor’s Note: Over the next few weeks, we’re going to feature a series of articles discussing drug use in Africa. These articles originally appeared on The Conversation, but we’re republishing them here as well. Today’s article comes from Assistant Professor of History, University of California, Santa Barbara.
The history of cannabis in South Africa contains two particular trajectories that were sometimes in direct contradiction with one another.
The one, the 100-year-old effort to prohibit its use. The other, a history of colonial governments and administrators trying to develop cannabis in order to make money out of it.
These two paths began to develop in earnest after 1916.