The diamba circles

In the interior of Maranhão, in the north of Brazil, smokers of diamba held informal gatherings, later called clubes de diambistas. They met, usually on Saturdays, at the house of the oldest of them or of whoever had most influence over the rest, sat in a circle and passed round a shared pipe of the herb. Between puffs they talked and sang verses, with a refrain that the circle answered together. Some used a marica, a traditional water pipe made with a gourd.

Much of the surviving written record of these rodas de diambistas, diamba smokers’ circles, comes through observers who campaigned against cannabis. The best-known account, written in 1918, was quoted again and again over the next forty years as evidence that cannabis was a danger to Brazil.

The photograph above is identified by historian Jorge Emanuel Luz de Souza as a gathering in Propriá, Sergipe, reproduced from Iglésias’s contribution to the 1958 Ministry of Health collection. Its photographer and exact date are unknown. It is not a photograph of the Maranhão session that Iglésias described.

A Saturday session

The agronomist Francisco de Assis Iglésias observed gatherings in the Mearim Valley near Pedreiras, Maranhão, during research associated with a 1912 scientific expedition. He described them in his essay “Sobre o vício da diamba” (“On the diamba vice”), published in 1918. His account adopted the moralising framework of contemporary prohibitionist medicine, treating the gatherings as evidence of a harmful “vice”. According to the historian Jean Marcel Carvalho França, who reprints the passage, Iglésias wrote that the smokers gathered at an elder’s house, “forming a kind of club, where, generally on Saturdays, they celebrate their sessions”. After a few puffs from a sort of pipe, some lay prostrate, some sang, ran and shouted, and some, he claimed, turned aggressive.

What the smokers themselves said survives only in the verses he wrote down. França prints several stanzas. They open:

Ô diamba, sarambamba! Quando eu fumo a diamba, Fico com a cabeça tonta, E com as minhas pernas zamba. Fica zamba, mano? Dizô! Dizô!

Roughly: “Oh diamba, sarambamba! When I smoke diamba my head goes dizzy and my legs go crooked. Crooked, brother?” — and the circle answers “Dizô! Dizô!”. Later stanzas tell of a man named Jacinto killed by diamba “for being a good smoker”, of a woman quarrelling with her husband over a bit of biju, and of the houses of Aunt Chica and Aunt Rosa, each ending with the same question and refrain.

Such verses were called loas: remembered or improvised stanzas answered by a chorus, or by another singer taking up a challenge. They mixed everyday life, humour and social relationships; Souza also reads some as commentary on local political authority and police surveillance.

What the doctors made of it

Writer	Year	What França records
Rodrigues Dória	1915	Cannabis used in sorcerers’ brews, candomblés, catimbós, sambas and batuques
Francisco de Assis Iglésias	1918	The Saturday circle in Maranhão and its verses; a call for “energetic measures”
Alberto Deodato	1922	A short story, “Sombras agrestes”, set in a diamba circle and ending in a knife
Maconha: coletânea de trabalhos brasileiros	1953	31 studies since 1915 republished by the national narcotics commission

Iglésias was struck, França notes, that “despite so many years separating us from slavery”, the habit still came with words from the African coast. For him and his colleagues that was the point: they called the practice diambismo and treated it as an inheritance from the enslaved, a vice that had spread from the northern coast inland and then south. The anthropologist Harry Hutchinson, surveying the Brazilian literature in 1975, compared a “Club de Diambistas” that met weekly to the Club des Hashischins of Paris, and noted that nobody had explained it.

From circle to crime

Cannabis had been banned piecemeal in Brazil since Rio de Janeiro’s ordinance of 1830; São Luís, the capital of Maranhão, prohibited selling and smoking it in 1886. The national ban came later, and Iglésias’s 1918 appeal did not bring it at once: França notes that the 1921 law on poisonous drugs did not yet mention cannabis. A federal decree of 1932 added cannabis to the prohibited drugs, and the 1938 narcotics decree named maconha and diamba and set five years in prison for growing the plant. In 1953 the national narcotics commission republished 31 of the old studies as its case against maconha.

Souza reinterprets the circles as spaces of Afro-Brazilian cultural expression, sociability and informal collective organisation. Shared pipes, verses and responses helped sustain relationships and group conventions. He also cautions that clube de diambistas may have been an outside label: there is no confirmation that participants themselves called their meetings “clubs”.^[1][2][3][4]