Mbanje

Mbanje is the common Shona word for cannabis in Zimbabwe, where the plant is a traditional crop of long standing. Towards the eastern border the word gives way to suruma, the name used in Mozambique. Both words now sit beside the official vocabulary of licences and medical cannabis.

Two names, one border

Word	Where
Mbanje	Zimbabwe generally
Suruma	Eastern Zimbabwe, near the border, and throughout Mozambique
Dagga	The South African word, used by colonial officials in Rhodesia

The VaShona dictionary records mbanje as a noun in Karanga, Manyika and Zezuru, with translations including cannabis, marijuana and hemp. The name belongs to everyday language as well as official controls.

The botanical photograph was taken by Bart Wursten at Ndundu Lodge in the Vumba Mountains on 9 March 2008. Its record places the plant in a disturbed garden area and explicitly says “not planted”: it appeared spontaneously. This documents cannabis in eastern Zimbabwe’s vegetation, near Mozambique, rather than proving deliberate cultivation at the lodge.

How long it has been there

Cannabis cultivation and use have a long regional history, but the archaeological claim needs care. Duvall discusses pipe bowls from Zimbabwe estimated to date to the thirteenth century through archaeological context. A pipe establishes smoking technology; without identified residues it does not establish that cannabis was smoked in it. He presents circulation under the Kingdom of Zimbabwe as a reconstruction, rather than a securely dated first cannabis find.

Suruma also reaches beyond a single modern border. Duvall compares it with Malagasy soróma and records related vocabulary from Mozambique and northern Tanzania. These names suggest historical exchange, but he leaves the exact direction and timing unresolved.

For Mozambique the usual account is that the plant came from India, with Arab traders or with the Portuguese. The earliest written notice is from the 1580s, when the Dominican missionary João dos Santos recorded that people there used it to suppress hunger.

In the Binga district of north-western Zimbabwe smoking remains a social custom, and the plant has traditional medical uses.

What the colonial surveys saw

In the 1950s the United Nations asked colonial governments to describe cannabis in their territories.

Southern Rhodesia, 1955. The plant, “known as dagga or mbanje”, was grown in small patches in gardens and near homesteads. In 1952, 285 people were prosecuted for it, 282 of them Africans. Courts usually sent traffickers to prison and let smokers pay a fine. The law, the Pharmacy, Poisons and Dangerous Drugs Act of 1952, allowed a fine of up to £1,000 or ten years.

Mozambique, 1957. Growing, importing, selling and consuming were prohibited under an order of 1914 and the pharmacy regulations of 1941. The penalties were set by race: a fine for most offenders, and for African inhabitants up to 120 days of correctional imprisonment. The plant grew wild throughout the territory, and hidden plots were burned.

The law now

Zimbabwe’s medicinal licensing system did not give traditional small-scale growers a general exemption from cannabis prohibition. In April 2018 the country became the second in Africa to allow growing for medicine and science, and the new rules were reported as licences to cultivate mbanje.

The 2018 regulations required licences, site plans, security measures and records. The original producer-licence application fee was 50,000 dollars; that is a historical figure, not a statement of today’s fees. Members of parliament protested that this would “lock out poor farmers” in places such as Binga, “who have been growing marijuana illegally”. The distinction was consequential: a licensed medicinal business could produce cannabis within the scheme, while a farmer growing the same plant outside its permissions remained exposed to criminal enforcement. In 2020 hemp was given rules of its own.

In Mozambique suruma remains simply illegal. In 2024 the president called for studies on legalising it.^{[1][2][3][4][5][6][7]}