The elder's morning pipe

In Zululand and the rural Eastern Cape, smoking dagga, also called insangu, was a deeply established custom among older men, with rules of its own. When South Africa prohibited cannabis nationally in 1922, some officials argued that criminalising these men’s customary practice would be unjust and impractical. The resulting compromise concerned enforcement, while the prohibition remained in law.

The postcard Old Zulu Man and His Pipe, published by T. D. Ravenscroft, illustrates a traditional pipe and its setting. The substance in this particular pipe is unverified; the photograph is not evidence of cannabis consumption.

The record here is thin and one-sided. Nearly everything known about the custom in these years comes from colonial officials, magistrates and employers, as gathered by the historian Thembisa Waetjen.

The custom

Cannabis was in wide use among the Khoisan and Bantu-speaking peoples of southern Africa before Europeans settled at the Cape. In isiZulu and siSwati it is insangu; the settlers called it dagga. Rural Africans used it for pleasure, as medicine and for religious purposes, and through the nineteenth century the colonial governments did not treat that as a problem. Among the Basotho it was used to ease childbirth.

Custom limited it by age and sex. Smoking belonged to grown men. In the 1900s chiefs and magistrates in Zululand were asking the government to forbid it to the young, as custom already did.

The phrase that gives this entry its name is an official’s. Native affairs officers, arguing against the ban of 1922, wrote that in parts of Zululand and the eastern Cape an older man’s morning pipe was “a custom so deep-rooted as almost to amount to a religious rite”.

Who wanted it stopped

The pressure to ban did not come from the countryside.

Year	Who	What they said
1870, 1887	Natal’s planters and doctors	Cannabis made Indian indentured workers unfit for labour. The law forbade it to Indians only
1905	A Cape doctor	Linked “Indian hemp” to crimes against women
1907	John Dube, editor of Ilanga lase Natal, later a founder of the African National Congress	Listed insangu with beer, spirits and polygamy among the customs holding Africans back, and criticised the government for hesitating to suppress it
1911	The Sunday Times	Under the headline “Drugged and Dazed”, claimed that dagga made smokers lecherous and bloodthirsty and endangered white women

Dube matters in this list. The case against the custom was made by mission-educated African reformers as well as by settlers.

Who saw no harm

Those who dealt with smokers daily mostly disagreed. The Transvaal’s Native Labour Bureau asked mine inspectors and pass officers in 1908 about dagga among African miners. They answered that use was moderate and unproblematic, and several warned that restrictions would keep men from coming to the Rand. A second survey in 1911, at the height of the newspaper panic, got the same answer; miners seem to have used it as medicine for the lung disease of the mines. In the Transvaal storekeepers sold it to miners “openly and normally”.

The ban and the compromise

In 1922 regulations under the customs act prohibited growing, selling, possessing and using dagga throughout the Union. The burden of proof lay on the accused, which a legal scholar has contrasted with the liquor laws of the time and taken as a sign of whom the rule was meant for.

The native affairs officials lost the argument over the law and won one over its enforcement. A month after it was gazetted, the secretary for public health wrote that the police were expected to use judgement and to avoid drastic attempts to enforce the letter of the law in remote places where moderate smoking mattered little to public order.

Afterwards

By 1923, the Native Affairs Department and the South African Police had tacitly agreed to avoid interfering with dagga customs under traditional African authorities, according to historians Lebohang Seganoe and Thembisa Waetjen. Enforcement concentrated on towns and cities for decades. This was an informal accommodation, not a legal exemption for rural cannabis use.

The accommodation did not last as policy. Eradication of plantations began in the 1950s, and by the end of the 1980s crops in the old “dagga belt” of the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal were sprayed with herbicide from helicopters. The crop remained, as one report puts it, a cash crop that “sustains entire communities in the rural Eastern Cape”.

In 2018 the Constitutional Court ruled that an adult may use and grow cannabis in private. The old man’s morning pipe is lawful again, ninety-six years after the officials asked that it be left in peace.^[1][2][3][4]