Diamba

Diamba is a word for cannabis from western Central Africa. It is heard today in Angola, in Sierra Leone far up the coast, and in Brazil across the ocean. What links those three places is the Atlantic slave trade.

A family of words

Form	Where it is recorded
Diamba	Angola, Sierra Leone, Brazil
Liamba	Angola, Brazil
Riamba	The Kasai, in what is now the DR Congo, where the Bena Riamba took their name from it
Maconha	Brazil; from Kimbundu ma’kaña

Liamba is from Kimbundu, a language of Angola. The geographer Chris Duvall has argued that the earliest and most numerous users of cannabis in the Americas were enslaved people from this region, between modern Gabon and Angola, and that their words for the plant are now used in nearly every place they were taken. He also proposes a Kimbundu connection for Spanish marihuana; that is an etymological argument, rather than a settled origin.

The spellings are not necessarily names for distinct plants. Duvall finds diamba, liamba, riamba and related forms across several Central African languages, with European listeners representing unfamiliar initial sounds differently. Such variation can reflect pronunciation and transcription rather than a change in meaning. He places these names within a wider set resembling chamba, while distinguishing that proposed family from the bangi vocabulary associated with Swahili commerce.

Angola

In Angola the plant is still called diamba or liamba. Its written record is later than its probable arrival: Duvall identifies an 1803 administrative complaint about cultivation for smoking, while reconstructing earlier movements from regional trade and language geography. The date of a surviving observation is not a date of introduction.

Nineteenth-century accounts place cannabis among ordinary garden crops. One observer in northern Angola described small family plots with manioc, maize and vegetables, including only two liamba plants. That is a particular contemporary description, not a standard planting rule. It shows why a valued crop could be widespread without covering large fields. The explorer David Livingstone noted in 1857 that under the Portuguese, “the use of it by a slave is considered a crime”, while it was used freely among the peoples of the interior. Another traveller recorded that although slaves were forbidden it, diamba was sold openly in the market at Luanda and grown round the huts of almost every village.

Portugal banned it outright in 1913, aiming at colonial troops and hoping to push farmers towards tobacco. It remains the most common illegal drug in the country, grown in almost every province.

Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone’s word for cannabis is diamba, and the plant took root there well before it was common elsewhere in West Africa. Clarke’s botanical report of 1851 gives a contemporary account. The seeds, it says, were brought to the colony by “Congoes captured by one of our cruisers”: apparently Central Africans taken from a slave ship by a British warship. By then cannabis had been “long in use” in the interior. Clarke described cultivation among several communities, rather than only the people he grouped as “Congoes”. His labels reflect colonial classifications, not necessarily a single language or ethnic identity.

He also distinguished Maconie, a preparation using flowers and seeds, from Makiah, made from leaves. These were names within a local market and practice; they should not be treated as exact synonyms for every form of diamba. The journal editor’s suggestion of transmission from Egypt or Arabia was speculation, separate from Clarke’s reported account of seeds carried by displaced Central Africans.

It found local uses. Midwives gave it in childbirth, and fishermen took it to get through their work. Sierra Leonean sailors and dockers then carried the habit along the coast, to Ghana and the Gambia.

British colonial drug controls adopted in 1926 made growing and possessing cannabis offences. It did not go away. A doctor told the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2003 that it was so commonly used “that I don’t think people consider it a crime any more”.

Brazil

In Brazil the Central African words arrived with the enslaved. The first law, Rio de Janeiro’s ordinance of 1830, used another of them, pango. A century later the federal narcotics decree of 1938 spelled out what it meant by Indian hemp: the varieties “commonly called maconha, diamba and liamba”.

The statute listed three African names for one plant.

What the word shows

Europeans carried hemp around the Atlantic for fibre. The vocabulary of smoking it is another matter. In these three countries the names are Central African, and they lie along the routes of the slave trade: from Angola to Brazil, and from a captured ship to Sierra Leone.^{[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]}