The earth pipe

An earth pipe was made from the ground itself. A smoker could mould a small clay bowl and duct on the surface, still attached to the earth, or dig a bowl pit and bore an underground tunnel to a separate mouth-hole. The smoker often had to lie flat, prone on the ground, to draw from that hole. When smoking ended, the shaped earth could simply be left behind.

Some historical observers explicitly connected these pipes with dagga, or hemp. The Field Museum’s 1930 account describes hemp smoking among people it calls Bechuana (Tswana), and reports Balfour’s identification of hemp in several bowls’ charred contents. That association does not establish that every earth pipe was used exclusively for cannabis.

Earth pipes were used, in the words of the geographer Chris Duvall, “from the Cape to the Congo” into the 1900s. He thinks they were probably the oldest African pipes of all. European visitors found them absurd; Duvall’s verdict is that “its genius, though, is simplicity”.

How one was made

John Edward Philips reproduces both forms after Henry Balfour in Figure 2 of African Smoking and Pipes (1983): Figure 2b shows a smoker drawing from the moulded type; Figure 2c diagrams the dug type. The unusual feature is the material: the pipe is shaped earth, used where it is made. Earth pipes were not necessarily water pipes. Some accounts describe water in a connecting duct, or held in the smoker’s mouth; others describe a bowl and dry passage alone.

The anthropologist Brian du Toit collects the descriptions. The oldest he quotes is from Campbell, writing in 1822 about the Batapin, as he spells the name, in today’s Botswana. They “dug a hole in the ground the shape of a basin”, made “a round passage, down one side and up the other”, arched it over with clay, filled one end with “wild hemp” and “putting their mouths close to the other they sucked out the smoke”.

A later account, by Moszcik in 1910 and quoted by the ethnologist Balfour in 1922, adds water:

Step	What was done
1	Two pits about 8 cm deep are dug, a span apart
2	Moistened straws or rushes are laid in a groove joining their bottoms
3	The earth is pressed back over the groove, and the straws are pulled out, leaving a duct
4	A hollow tube is set in one pit as a mouthpiece, to keep earth out of the mouth
5	Hemp is put in the other pit and lit, and a little water is poured into the duct
6	The smoker lies flat or kneels and inhales through the water

Some did without even that. According to Shaw, whom du Toit cites, the Heichware (a San group) and the Gonaqua (a Khoi group) carried a pipe stick and shaped a small pipe in wet sand wherever they found it.

Where it was used

Du Toit records earth pipes among the Batapin, the Tswana and the Matabele, among the Swazi of Swaziland, in the eastern Zambezi region, and among the Ngoni, a people of Zulu origin who moved north into today’s Malawi. These accounts place the practice across parts of southern and central Africa. Duvall also describes its use in South Africa by porters and miners who wanted nothing more to carry.

The idea travelled further than Africa. According to Duvall, earth pipes were reported in Central Asia in 1922, and Indian soldiers fighting in Europe in the First World War made them in the trenches.

The pipe that cannot be found

Because the pipe was the earth itself, abandonment left little or no durable apparatus to recover. Philips notes that these temporary pipes had not been recovered archaeologically. The same lack of portable equipment made the practice especially elusive under prohibition and policing: a smoker could leave without carrying a pipe that could become evidence.

Balfour, quoted by du Toit, called the earth pipe a response to times “when portable pipes are lacking, or when hemp smoking has to be practiced surreptitiously”. Prohibition gave it that second use. South Africa banned dagga nationally in 1922, as did Swaziland. Du Toit writes that the custom “was forced underground, resulting in new kinds of ground pipes”; Duvall notes that secret smokers made earth pipes “to dispense with incriminating paraphernalia”.

Improvised pipes multiplied. In 1911 the Illustrated London News described a ground pipe built around a glass bottle with its neck and bottom broken off, and a later report describes one made of cement and glass tubing found on a building site in Bloemfontein. Police raids in Cape Town turned up pipes made from a pickle jar and a coconut shell.

Today

South Africa’s Constitutional Court allowed private use and growing in 2018. Botswana’s 2025 Cannabis Act licenses medical and industrial cannabis but not recreational use. The earth pipe itself survives in ethnographies; none of the sources read for this entry describes it as a living custom.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}