Matekoane

Matekoane is the Sesotho word for cannabis. Basotho farming communities have cultivated it for generations as a household cash crop, with much of the harvest sold across the border into South Africa. Since 2017 Lesotho has also licensed commercial medical cultivation, creating a different market from the one traditional growers have long supplied.

The names

Name	Note
Matekoane	The usual Sesotho word
Khomo ea fatše	Literally “the cow of the ground”, a name recorded in farmers’ oral testimony
Likata, kakana	Other names in use
Dagga	The South African word, used in the colonial laws

An old crop

The plant’s history in Lesotho is usually begun around 1550, when the Koena are said to have traded cannabis to the San in exchange for land. By the nineteenth century it was a staple crop of the kingdom. Across the border, the Basotho are recorded as using it to ease childbirth.

It is still grown almost everywhere, including in the capital, and most of all in the central mountains and the western foothills.

Under colonial law

Basutoland was a British protectorate, and its drug law followed South Africa’s.

Year	Measure
1922	The Opium and Habit-forming Drugs Proclamation covered the cannabis plant, in the year South Africa banned dagga
1945	The Paramount Chief ordered all chiefs to destroy cannabis in their areas. His rules forbade anyone to “grow, possess or use dagga”
1955	A United Nations survey found seizures up from 68 kg in 1946 to 6,545 kg in 1951

The 1955 survey describes the trade as it has been ever since: small patches hidden among the food crops, grown mainly for sale in South Africa, with chiefs and headmen held answerable for rooting it out.

Fields and household livelihoods

Independent Lesotho kept the ban, in the Dangerous Medicines Act of 1973 and the Drugs of Abuse Act of 2008. The crop grew regardless. In the 2000s an estimated 70% of the cannabis in South Africa came from Lesotho, and one joint police operation in 2006 seized 47 tons. Enforcement has not eliminated the rural trade. National production totals remain difficult to establish, and a seizure figure cannot measure the entire crop.

Bloomer’s field research describes rain-fed cultivation, saved seed, and intercropping with maize and beans. Harvesting can involve extended families or paid labour. His December 2015 photograph documents a hillside field during drought, with green plants overlooking dry mountain country.

The household field and the licensed commercial greenhouse represent different ways of organising work, land and access to a market.

Two markets for the same plant

In 2017 Lesotho became the first African country to issue commercial medical cannabis cultivation licences. The new industry attracted international investment; it did not generally bring existing smallholders into the legal market.

Bloomer identifies costly licences as a barrier and questions whether investment would benefit rural households already dependent on cannabis. Traditional hillside cultivation and internationally financed production consequently coexist under unequal conditions.

A 2024 study by Regina Thetsane, based on interviews with three cannabis-company managers, likewise identifies regulatory difficulties and limited opportunities for small, medium and micro enterprises. Its small interview sample supplies an industry perspective, rather than a census of growers. For the Lesotho profile, commercial licensing remains distinct from permission for unlicensed personal cultivation or recreational supply.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}