Dos Santos publishes the first sub-Saharan account of cannabis at the Zambezi

In 1609, the Dominican João dos Santos published an account of south-eastern Africa containing the first known description of cannabis south of the Sahara: at the mouth of the Zambezi, Africans pounded bangue, boiled it with maize flour, and drank the resulting porridge — living on it, he wrote, for days without other food or drink.^[1][2]

Washed down, not smoked

Duvall places the observation in the 1580s, on a coast where Arabs, Persians and Swahilis had traded long before the Portuguese arrived in 1498.^[1] What matters is the method: the drug was eaten and drunk, not smoked.^[1] The porridge worked like the region’s pombe beers — a food that intoxicated — and users reportedly sustained themselves on it alone for days.^[1][2]

This was oral cannabis, taken as nourishment as much as indulgence. It sits at the opposite end of the spectrum from the water pipes and dry smoking that dominate later African accounts, and it reminds us that the plant’s first recorded use here was culinary.^[1]

The account is almost alone. Duvall notes few other records of edible cannabis in sub-Saharan Africa, all published around 1900 — and compares the Zambezi porridge to what the English sailor Robert Knox learned in Ceylon in the 1660s, washing down dried leaves with water.^[1] Though bhang cognates circulated widely, South Asian knowledge of how to use the drug largely did not cross with the word; only Zanzibar kept Arabian-Sea-style consumption.^[1] Meanwhile eastern Africa had already been smoking since at least the 1300s.^[1]

A coast of traders

The Zambezi mouth in the late sixteenth century was a meeting point of trading worlds — Swahili, Arab, Persian and, newly, Portuguese.^[1] Bangue surfacing here first fits the setting: ports concentrate novelties, and the crews and merchants passing through them carried habits as well as goods.^[1]

Nearly two centuries later, an English sailor would describe bang smoked through a cow’s horn at Delagoa Bay — smoking had arrived by then. The longer journey from porridge to pipe continues on Mozambique’s page.^[1]