Zamal on Réunion

Réunion, a French island in the Indian Ocean, was settled from the late seventeenth century by Europeans, by enslaved Africans and Malagasy, and after slavery by indentured labourers, most of them from south India. Cannabis, called zamal, was present by 1770, when it was pressed in a herbarium. The French drug observatory says it came with slavery and indenture, and that people from Africa, Madagascar, the Comoros, China and India treated themselves with plants including zamal, following the knowledge of the places they came from.

The fullest account of what each community did with it is by the physician and anthropologist Jean Benoist, who studied the island in the early 1970s. It is an outsider’s account, written when many of the customs were already fading, and it is the source of most of what follows. Benoist himself stressed that the plant, though widely known, was rarely used.

At the feasts of the ancestors

The people of Malagasy descent on Réunion had married widely into the Creole population and did not form a separate community. Some still gathered for magical rites and, more and more rarely, for annual feasts with the sacrifice of cattle. At those feasts, Benoist wrote, cannabis cigarettes were smoked together.

Benoist recorded a Creole stereotype that cannabis made Malagasy people violent; this was a social judgement, not a demonstrated effect. He also noted that and the Creole phrase for losing one’s temper is son zamal y monte, “his zamal is rising”. In the few districts where people of Malagasy descent were numerous, Benoist found the use regular, though hidden, and a source of supply for passing travellers.

A cigarette for the god

The Indian community, mostly descended from Tamil labourers, kept an active religious life in temples across the island, attended by people of every origin. Its gods were those of Tamil village religion: Mariamman, Madurai Veeran, Karuppuswami and the Muni. In some ceremonies the priest-healer is possessed, and only then does cannabis appear.

In Benoist’s account, the spirit speaking through the priest demands candia, a cigarette offered to the deity. An assistant quickly puts one to three cigarettes into the priest’s mouth, and he smokes them very fast. Usually they are tobacco. Only when the priest is possessed by Madurai Veeran or by a Muni is the cigarette made of zamal, and then it is called ciga. Smoking zamal is as natural for the gods as tobacco is for people, Benoist explained, so the possessed priest must show no effect at all. His apparent indifference was understood by participants as proof that the god was in him, a test like walking on fire or dancing on the blade of a cutlass.

That sacred role, and the fear that went with it, kept most Tamils away from the plant outside the temple. A few young men might finish a ciga the priest had begun. Benoist remembered old men from the Calcutta region who had smoked for pleasure in a small coconut water pipe, but that habit had gone.

In the garden and the farmyard

The plant was kept in house gardens and among the cane, as protection and as medicine.

Use	How
Keeping off evil spirits	Grown in the garden
Infants’ vomiting	The roots, boiled
Fever	An infusion of the leaves
Insect pests	A few plants among the squashes
Chickens	Leaves crushed into their drinking water against infection
Dogs and fighting cocks	Leaves in the food, said to make them fierce
“Zamal cigars”	Old yellowing leaves mixed with tobacco, washed in water boiled with citron, soaked in honey and alcohol, dried in a press for a month, then pounded and smoked in a pipe

By Benoist’s time most of this had stopped. Strict laws, he wrote, had made healers wary of the plant, and they had replaced it in their infusions with less dangerous herbs. Cigarettes had replaced the pipe mixture, which a few country people, white and Creole, had made.

From custom to market

After Réunion became a French department in 1946, money, schools and migrants changed the island. Benoist saw two new kinds of use: Comorian labourers in the shanty towns around Le Port and Saint-Denis, and lycée pupils and young people from mainland France smoking on the beaches. The authorities, he wrote, chose discretion, judging that the habit was no threat to society. By then the rituals had shrunk to something “purely symbolic”.

French law treats the island like the mainland: the 1970 drug law made any use a crime. The observatory’s report for 2021 found cannabis grown locally and sold through small networks of acquaintances, never made into resin. Many islanders believed that a plant or two for one’s own use was legal, which it is not. Zamal was the third most common reason for treatment at addiction centres, after alcohol and tobacco, and good local zamal was becoming scarce as imported hybrid strains spread.^[1][2][3][4]