Chamba

Chamba is cannabis in Malawi. The word is known well beyond the country because of what it names: a local variety sold abroad as Malawi Gold, with a reputation among smokers that has brought tourists to the lake and made an illegal plant one of the country’s best-known products.

One of the three C’s

Malawians have a saying about their exports, the three “big C’s”.

Word	What it is
Chambo	The tilapia of the lake
Chombe	Tea
Chamba	Cannabis

The joke rests on a fact. The illegal trade in chamba has been put at 0.2% of the country’s economy, and it fetches the grower more than tobacco, Malawi’s largest legal export.

Growing and packing

Chamba is grown mainly in remote parts of the central and northern regions: in the Likwawa hills of Mzimba, and in Nkhotakota, whose crop from near the Lupache river is held to be the best. Fields are small and out of the way, on hillsides, in the bush, or planted in among other crops.

The work is divided. Women do most of the cultivation and men most of the selling. The flowering tops are bound tightly in banana or maize leaves into a hard bundle called a cob, mfani or bola in Chichewa, and it is by the cob that chamba is sold.

Duvall places these packets within a broader African history. His sources describe cannabis wrapped in leaves in Angola, banana leaves in western Tanzania and cornhusks in southern Africa. In a Chichewa dictionary published in 1892, he identifies packet terms mfani and mpaka. These comparisons qualify the idea of an entirely unique Malawian technique without erasing local names and practices.

Packaging and curing should also be distinguished. Duvall discusses fermentation in cornhusk packets in the lower Zambezi Valley, but a historical reference to a compressed or leaf-wrapped parcel does not by itself establish that it was fermented. His account of different subjective effects is not a basis for assigning a uniform potency or chemical profile to all cobs.

A United Nations report of the late 1990s guessed that as much as 156,000 hectares might be under the crop. Most of it leaves the country, through Mozambique and Zimbabwe to South Africa, and to Kenya and Tanzania. The grower gets about a fifth of the final price.

Uses

Cannabis is recorded as widely used across the population, as an intoxicant and as a medicine for fevers, malaria, dysentery and snakebite. People along the lake say it helps them relax and concentrate, and students are said to take it before examinations. Malawi’s Rastafari use it as a sacrament, and have gone to court for the right to do so; a doctoral study found that they face constant police harassment.

The law

Year	Measure
1936	Colonial Nyasaland’s Noxious Weeds Act made growing cannabis illegal. With the Dangerous Drugs Act of 1956 it remained the law until 2020
2000	A deputy agriculture minister proposed legal hemp as a replacement for tobacco. The idea was explored and dropped
2015	An independent MP, Boniface Kadzamira, campaigned in parliament for legal hemp
2020	Parliament legalised growing and processing for medicine and industry
2024	An amendment brought the local variety into the licensed system

The 2024 debate turned on the word. The amendment was needed, its sponsors said, to regulate “a locally produced variety”, that is, chamba. The leader of the house was careful to add that growing chamba without a licence, or being found with it, remains an offence, and that the bill “does not legalise smoking”.

So the name now covers two things: a crop the state hopes will replace tobacco, and a habit that is still a crime.^[1][2][3]