An English sailor describes bang smoked through a cow's horn at Delagoa Bay

William White, an officer of the East India Company ship Lion, which called at Delagoa Bay in today's Mozambique in 1798, found the men of the villages sitting round fires "smoaking tobacco and bang". They smoked the bang in a small bowl on a four-foot bamboo stem set into a cow's horn half full of water, drawing the smoke through a gap between the horn and the bend of the arm. "This makes them cough exceedingly," he wrote, "and they do it in a very affected manner, but they enjoy it vastly." His journal, published in 1800, includes an engraving of a smoker.^[1]

In the cultural atlas

TraditionsThe smoker's coughIn nineteenth-century Africa the cough that followed a pipe of cannabis was often a performance. Travellers called it affected; Zulu smokers sang praises between coughs, and a lake island was said to have been found by hearing one.

Listed for context. No score change is recorded for Mozambique here.

References

Journal of a Voyage Performed in the Lion Extra Indiaman, from Madras to Columbo, and Da Lagoa Bay, on the Eastern Coast of Africa … in the Year 1798William White · John Stockdale · 1800 · pp. 33–35 and plate facing p. 34archived

Checked. The date and the event were compared with a source that was read.