Abstract
In 2018, Kenneth Okoth, a member of Parliament for the Kibra Constituency in Kenya, introduced a Marijuana Control Bill in parliament. Okoth’s bill sought to legalise the growth and use of cannabis, establish a system for the registration and licensing of cannabis growers and users, promote the use of cannabis for medicinal purposes, and increase public awareness of cannabis. This last point is critical in that Okoth understood that public knowledge of cannabis was shallow at the very moment when the country was debating prohibition, and he considered public awareness a critical component of this debate. Undoubtedly, the shallowness stems from a dearth of scholarship on cannabis in Kenya and East Africa. This study attempts to close the gap on the historiography of cannabis in Kenya. It historicises cannabis before the country’s independence in 1963, revealing that the British colonial government sanctioned cannabis for medicinal use but prohibited it for recreational purposes among Africans. The essay grounds the history of cannabis in Kenya within a longer history of making and re-making citizens and contributes to a more complex understanding of how bodies, goods, and ideas move across time and space.
Highlights
Okoth’s bill sought to legalise the growth and use of cannabis, establish a system for the registration and licensing of cannabis growers and users, promote the use of cannabis for medicinal purposes, and increase public awareness of cannabis. This last point is critical in that Okoth understood that public knowledge of cannabis was shallow at the very moment when the country was debating prohibition, and he considered public awareness a critical component of this debate
The essay grounds the history of cannabis in Kenya within a longer history of making and re-making citizens and contributes to a more complex understanding of how bodies, goods, and ideas move across time and space
By the thirteenth century cannabis had established a foothold in the northern Kenya/southern Ethiopia region, Du Toit sees it as the “suggested” period “for the introduction of cannabis into Africa”[4] and credits Arab traders for introducing it to the Horn of Africa
Summary
“It is impossible to understand human history without accounting for the centrality of drug taking as a fundamental human impulse”.2. 5. BM Du Toit, “Man and cannabis in Africa: A study of diffusion”, African Economic History 1, 1976, p. Duvall states that “a few” cannabis “grains” were present in central Kenya as early as 1 500 CE,[10] and that “maritime trade carried the plant from western India to the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa, arriving in Kenya by 700 CE”.11. Cannabis in Kenya traces its roots to south Asia.[15] It diffused globally along several routes but arrived in East Africa through the Arabian Peninsula. Du Toit concludes that no ethnographic evidence exists to support cannabis’s presence before WWII in West Africa Warf has challenged this assumption (Fig. 1 above), and Duvall hints that psychoactive cannabis (indica, which exhibits psychoactive chemistry) was present in nineteenth-century West Africa.[17]. Cannabis orally, Africans smoked it using pipes that were first invented in Africa before spreading across the globe.[27]
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