The smoker's cough

Anyone who has watched people share a strong pipe knows the cough. In much of nineteenth-century Africa it was more than a side effect. Smokers coughed loudly, together and at length, and several observers suspected they were doing it on purpose. The geographer Chris Duvall, who gathered the accounts, notes that coughing is “amusingly prominent” in the historical record, and that it was probably sometimes a performance.

The record is almost entirely written by outsiders, many of them irritated, some amused. Read together, their complaints describe a social habit: a cough that announced, to anyone in earshot, that a group was smoking.

What the visitors heard

Year	Place	Observer, as quoted
1798	Delagoa Bay, Mozambique	The horn pipe “makes them cough exceedingly, and they do it in a very affected manner, but they enjoy it vastly” (William White)
1850s	Unyamwezi, Tanzania	The noise is “probably not wholly natural”, a way of “renowning it” (Richard Burton)
1870s	Angola	Smokers cough “as if their lungs were coming out of their mouths” (J. J. Monteiro)
1874	Lower Congo	“Mostly the cough is an affectation” (Burton, who had smoked it himself)
1880s	Congo Basin	The more the white man laughs, “the more the black’s cough grows” (a Belgian)

William White, an officer of the ship Lion, gave the earliest of these in his journal of 1798. At Delagoa Bay the men sat in circles round a fire, smoking tobacco and bang through a four-foot bamboo set in a cow’s horn of water, and drew the smoke through a gap between the horn and the crook of the arm. The engraving in his book shows exactly that.

Renowning it

Richard Burton, travelling through what is now Tanzania in the 1850s, gave the fullest explanation. The “grotesque sounds”, he thought, were “a fashion of ‘renowning it’”: an announcement to the public that “the fast youths are smoking bhang”. Twenty years later, on the lower Congo in today’s DR Congo, he went further and said that, having used it himself “for months together”, he had concluded that the cough was mostly put on.

French visitors to the Nyamwezi complained of “savage explosions of the voice” that could last all night, and others in Zambia that “the hemp smokers keep us awake an hour or two”. A Belgian found an entire group squatting and coughing “an extremely comic spectacle”, and noticed that the cough grew louder the more he laughed.

A cough worth hearing

Some of the evidence comes from the smokers’ side. Duvall notes that Nyamwezi speakers had specific words for cannabis coughing. An oral history recorded at Lake Malawi, in today’s Malawi, before 1922, tells that people discovered an island was inhabited by “hearing the cough of a man who was smoking hemp”. In the late 1800s Zulu smokers in South Africa sang praise songs between coughs. A century earlier the traveller Anders Sparrman concluded that for San smokers the fits of coughing were probably “a very desirable consequence” of the pipe.

In Angola the same period produced the sharpest complaint quoted above, and further inland, in today’s DR Congo, the Bena Riamba, whom German explorers met in 1881, made cannabis smoking the centre of a whole movement.

After the bans

The habit described here belonged to open, shared smoking. Colonial laws, such as South Africa’s national ban of 1922 and Tanganyika’s Dangerous Drugs Ordinance of 1935, made a loud public cough a risk rather than a boast. The accounts collected by Duvall stop with the colonial period; none of the sources read for this entry describes the custom today. The sound itself did survive in one place, as Duvall points out in a footnote: it opens Black Sabbath’s 1971 song “Sweet Leaf”.^[1][2]