Kif and the sebsi

The sebsi is Morocco’s cannabis pipe: a long thin stem of wood with a clay bowl no bigger than a thimble. It belongs to a way of smoking that is slow, sociable and mild, and that is older than the hashish trade for which the country is now known.

The pipe

A sebsi has two parts. The stem is hardwood and may be as long as 46 centimetres. The bowl, called a skuff or shkaff, is narrow, made of clay, and fitted with a fine metal screen. It holds very little, about 25 milligrams, far less than the chillum of India and Jamaica, and gives a small serving at a low temperature.

What goes in it is kif: the best parts of the plant, chopped very fine and mixed with tobacco or other herbs. Traditionally the cannabis was the unpollinated female flower and the tobacco a local black one.

Smoked and eaten

Before the expansion of export hashish production, cannabis in Morocco supplied domestic smoking and edible preparations. Its use was not confined to the household: cafés, markets and particular religious communities also belonged to that history.

Form	What it is
Kif in the sebsi	Chopped flower and tobacco, a pinch at a time
Majoun	A sweet paste or ball of cannabis with honey, nuts and dried fruit. The name is Arabic for “kneaded”. A report of 1957 mentions versions with opium and datura seed as well
In food	Mixed into ordinary dishes

Roger Joseph described the pipe as sibsa in his Rif field study published in 1975: a walnut-wood stem that could be dismantled into two connecting sections, fitted with a baked-clay bowl. Rural traders supplied cafés at weekly markets, where small portions of the chopped mixture were sold in empty matchboxes. These observations document the local preparation and social setting rather than a modern tourist presentation.

Joseph also cautioned against treating this Rif custom as inherently mystical. In the communities he studied, smoking was associated especially with middle-aged and older men, and prominent local religious brotherhoods often disapproved. His account should not be generalised to every Moroccan community or every period. Duvall describes a contrasting case in the Heddawa brotherhood, whose followers incorporated kif into devotional chanting and movement. A specific religious tradition can coexist with secular café smoking and religious opposition elsewhere.

Large-scale hashish production is a later development than the herbal kif tradition. Duvall notes that an often-cited 1921 account actually concerns Algeria; extending that date to Moroccan manufacture is an inference. By Paul Bowles’s account, resin was still rarely sold in Morocco in 1961. These observations qualify stories that assign a single inventor or introduction date to the country’s hashish industry.

A habit the state once sold

The sebsi and its kif were legal for most of their history. Sultan Hassan I regulated the trade in 1890 and gave certain tribes of the Rif the right to grow. From 1906 a monopoly company sold kif alongside tobacco, and continued to under the French and Spanish protectorates. A Spanish decree of 1935 limited growing to Ketama, Beni Seddat and Beni Khaled, and the French zone pursued kif sold outside the monopoly: in 1949 it seized 7.6 tonnes, most of it near the Spanish border.

Zone	End of legal kif
French zone	1954, by a dahir banning all dealings in cannabis
Spanish zone	Still licensed in 1954, with a five-kilogram limit on possession; ended by the national ban
The whole kingdom	1956, after independence

What is left of it

The law has not changed for the smoker: kif has been illegal since 1956, and the reform of 2021 licenses growing for medicine and industry only. But growing in the Rif and the Jebala was never suppressed, and the old way of smoking has survived with it.

The custom now shares the mountains with an export industry and with tourism. Ketama has become a destination for visitors who come for the hashish, and tours of the farms are sold by word of mouth. In 2009 a senior politician proposed that cannabis be recognised as a traditional Moroccan herbal remedy and not as a dangerous drug, an argument that leans on exactly this history.^{[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]}