Rongony

Rongony is the Malagasy word for cannabis. Dictionaries give it as the name of the plant grown for its fibre, and of the leaves and flowers that are smoked. It is the word the island’s own laws used: from 1915 to 1997 the offence on Madagascar was the use of chanvre indien dit rongony, “Indian hemp called rongony”.^[1][2][3]

Where the word comes from is not settled in the sources read here. What can be traced is the range of things it names, its older neighbours, and how each government in turn wrote it into the law.

Fibre, remedy and smoke

The Malagasy dictionaries collected by Malagasy Word define rongony as a plant with fibres that can be woven, whose seeds some people smoke; the Dictionnaire des noms malgaches de végétaux says it is “the name given to the plant cultivated as a textile”. The Malagasy–English dictionary translates it simply as “the hemp plant”, the Malagasy–French one as chanvre.^[2] The Malagasy Wiktionary adds a remedy for a disease of pigs, and an example sentence that warns smoking rongony makes a person foolish and wild.^[4]

The same plant had other names. Maosy and katrinia are given for it, and the English Wiktionary lists jamala and daina as synonyms.^[4][2][1] The geographer Chris Duvall, who traced cannabis across Africa, counts a varied historical vocabulary on the island and finds ahetsmanga, jamala, jía and soróma the most telling of the old names.^[5]

Name	What the sources say
rongony	The usual name; the fibre plant and the drug
jamala	Recorded by Robert Drury for western Madagascar in 1729; the likely source of Réunion’s zamal
maosy, katrinia	Other names for the plant
daina	Listed as a synonym
ahetsmanga, jía, soróma	Historical names Duvall singles out

How long it has been grown

The plant drug is first described on the island in Étienne de Flacourt’s history of 1661, and Duvall points to pollen far older than any text.^[5] The name jamala travelled with people taken from Madagascar to work on Réunion: Jean Benoist found it in Drury’s 1729 vocabulary and traced Réunion’s word for cannabis to it.^[6]

A word in the statute book

The kingdom of Imerina is said to have banned smoking it while still allowing the plant for cloth and rope, under Andrianampoinimerina, conventionally in 1787. The French colony went further. A decree of 9 October 1915 prohibited preparing, selling and consuming smoking cannabis “known as rongony” throughout Madagascar.

Independent Madagascar kept the word. In 1960 President Philibert Tsiranana’s government raised the penalties to as much as five years in an ordinance on the consumption of rongony. When the 1997 drug law replaced it, the statute switched to the treaty language, “the cannabis plant”, and its Article 148 repealed “ordinance no. 60-073 of 28 July 1960 on the repression of the consumption of Indian hemp called rongony”.^[3]

The word today

The law no longer uses the word, but people do. Rongony is grown on a large scale in the north and south of the island, for the home market and for the Comoros, Mayotte, Mauritius and the Seychelles. A 2021 study estimated that the commune of Antsahabe alone produces at least 200 tonnes a year.^[7] In everyday speech the name of the fibre plant is also the name of the drug the laws were written against.