Zamal

Zamal is what cannabis is called on Réunion, the French island east of Madagascar. Poets have used the word, and so does the French national drug observatory in its reports on the island. French dictionaries give it as a regional word, taken from Réunion Creole.

Mauritius, the next island, does not use it. There, Benoist noted, cannabis is ganja, a word from India. The difference between the two words is a short history of who came to each island, and from where.

From Madagascar, perhaps

The anthropologist Jean Benoist, writing in the early 1970s, judged that the word looks Malagasy but is not found in the Malagasy of his day. He relied on the linguist Robert Chaudenson, whose study of Réunion Creole noted a form jamala in Robert Drury’s vocabulary of the language of western Madagascar, published in 1729. That was when Réunion, empty until the late seventeenth century, was only beginning to be settled.

Benoist’s conclusion was that the plant probably came to Réunion with enslaved people from Madagascar, and the word with it. In Madagascar itself the plant had been banned by the Merina kingdom in 1787. The word then became the island’s ordinary term, and seems to have travelled back to Madagascar with migrants from Réunion. Zamal is now counted among the Malagasy words for cannabis, beside rangani.

The Paris museum’s Commerson specimen, MNHN-P-P00108129, records Cannabis sativa collected on Île Bourbon, the island’s former name. This is botanical evidence of the plant’s early presence, not evidence that the sheet was labelled zamal. The precise introduction of cannabis to Réunion remains uncertain.

Words around the plant

Word	Meaning	Recorded by
jamala	Hemp, in western Madagascar	Drury, 1729, via Chaudenson
amale	What a man was said to have smoked before a crime in 1830	A parish historian, via Benoist
zamal	Cannabis	Everywhere on the island
son zamal y monte	“His zamal is rising”: he is losing his temper	Benoist
candia	Any cigarette offered to the gods in Tamil ceremonies, from ganja	Benoist
ciga	A candia that really contains zamal	Benoist
chimique	A synthetic cannabinoid dissolved in alcohol and mixed with tobacco; some users prefer it to zamal as quicker and stronger	OFDT, 2022

Zamal is primarily a regional name for cannabis, although it can also distinguish local varieties from imported ones. It should not be reduced to the name of a single genetically distinct strain.

The temper idiom carries a prejudice. Benoist found that Creoles thought zamal made the Malagasy violent, and that people of Tamil descent said the same of Creoles and Malagasy, but not of themselves. The rituals behind candia and ciga are described in zamal on Réunion.

A word on a book cover

In 1951 the poet Jean Albany published a collection in Paris under the title Zamal. Literary historians read it as a break with the exotic picture of the island written for French readers: it turned France into the “other”, explored the island’s history, its slavery and its plants, and let Creole into the poems.

Benoist placed the title in a longer line. Some of the island’s writers, influenced by Baudelaire, Gautier and the poet Maurice Magre, and impressed by the part the plant played in Indian ceremonies, had made zamal a symbol of escape from Western rationality. He thought that strain lasted until about 1950.

The word and the law

Réunion has been a French department since 1946, and French drug law applies there as in the rest of France. The law does not say zamal; it says cannabis. The law of 1970 made private use a crime in Réunion as in Paris.

The French drug observatory’s report on the island for 2021 uses the Creole word throughout. It records that many islanders believe it is legal to keep one or two plants for one’s own use, which it is not, and that zamal has come to mean the local plant in particular, as against imported hybrid strains sold as “skunk”. Local zamal of good quality had become scarce and cost about €5 a gram, ten times its price a decade earlier; the hybrids sold for about €10.^{[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]}