Zamal carries a Malagasy name to Réunion with enslaved labour

Jean Benoist’s 1975 chapter describes Réunion as a polyethnic French department in the Indian Ocean — descendants of African slaves and south-Indian indentured labourers, Chinese and Europeans — where cannabis, called zamal, is grown in cane fields and gardens and used ritually, medicinally and, increasingly, as a narcotic among literary circles and young people.^[1] The man-plant relationship differs completely between the ritual and narcotic uses.^[1]

A Malagasy name without a Malagasy word

The introduction of cannabis to Réunion is apparently quite ancient, but precisely undocumented.^[1] The name zamal seems to be of Malagasy origin, yet it is not found in present-day Malagasy vocabulary.^[1] Benoist’s clue is R. Drury’s Vocabulaire de la langue de Madagascar, published in 1729 for western Madagascar, which records the word jamala — at a time when the peopling of Réunion, previously a desert, had only just begun.^[1] Zamal was probably introduced with the slaves brought in from Madagascar, became current on Réunion, and seems to have been rediffused to Madagascar through immigration from Réunion.^[1] Nearby Mauritius never adopted it: Mauritians say ganja, and the plant’s traditional functions there belong exclusively to the Indian domain, while on Réunion African and Indian currents meet.^[1]

Ritual: the gods ask for it

Among the Malagasy-descended population, reduced by intermarriage to scattered groups, annual feasts marked by cow sacrifice bring people together and cannabis cigarettes are smoked communally.^[1] In Creole eyes this leads to violence and gives the Malagasy a reputation for brutality; the expression son zamal y monte — his zamal is rising — means he is getting angry.^[1] Where the Malagasy-origin population is relatively numerous, clandestine but regular zamal use also supplies other ethnic groups passing through.^[1]

The Tamil Indian cults work differently.^[1] The priest-healer is possessed during specific ceremonies, and only after possession does cannabis intervene: the spirit’s first words acclaim candia, and an assistant places one to three tobacco cigarettes in the priest’s mouth, which he smokes at a very rapid rate.^[1] Only in certain possessions — by Madurai-veran or Mini — is the cigarette actually made from zamal, and then it is called ciga.^[1] The vocabulary shift, making candia any cigarette offered to gods or spirits and ciga one containing zamal, encodes the expected effect.^[1] The priest must feel nothing and show no drug effect: indifference is the sign of possession, proving by immunity to a god-accessible drug that he has entered their universe and can mediate.^[1] As an ordeal comparable to fire-walking or the knife dance, ritual use strictly limits secular use — though some young men finish the ciga the priest began — while giving the plant a place in home gardens and the pharmacopoeia.^[1]

Secular: coconut pipes, pressed cigars, poets

Outside ceremony, zamal served therapeutic and magical functions — scaring off evil spirits, healers’ infusions, boiled roots for infants’ vomiting, leaf infusions for fever — until rigorous laws made healers cautious and less dangerous plants replaced it.^[1] Veterinary uses lingered: leaves pulverised in chickens’ drinking water against disease, pounded into dogs’ food to make them vicious, tiny onion-and-leaf balls fed to fighting cocks.^[1]

Human secular use seems always to have been limited: known by all, tried by many adolescents in the fields, never a major problem.^[1] Old Indians from the Calcutta region once smoked zamal in a small coconut filled with water, a usage now gone; most Tamils regard the drug with reticence, insisting it makes Creoles and Malagasy wicked but not the more level-headed Malbars.^[1] Countryside smokers prepared cigars from mature yellow leaves mixed with tobacco, washed in citron-boiled water, drenched in honey and alcohol, pressed for a month, then pounded and smoked in ordinary pipes — until cigarettes replaced them.^[1] Separately, Réunion writers touched by Baudelaire, Gautier and Magre, impressed by the Indian ceremonies, formed small groups joining poetic exaltation to drug use; Leblond’s Sortileges and Albany’s Zamal glorified it in the French poets’ mystical manner, a current lasting until around 1950.^[1]

New modes: workers, students, police quiet

Departmentalisation in 1946 brought money, schooling, urbanisation and newcomers, and discreetly then overtly new modes of use along two trends: a Comorian sub-proletariat collecting countryside cannabis with Mauritian vendors, part exported clandestinely to Mauritius, and educated youth — continental students, lycéens smoking on beaches, musicians, prostitutes — with great variation from occasional to habitual use.^[1] The authorities chose quiet trials and sanctions, judging the phenomenon no social menace — rightly, in Benoist’s view, since exaggerating the conflict would backfire.^[1] The 1971 police-committed orchestra-initiated group was refused admission and quit under surveillance; the harder 1973 woman-led community was briefly hospitalised and sent home still smoking daily.^[1] Benoist closes by refusing to isolate cannabis at all: alcoholism is more widespread on Réunion than in most countries in the world, and the island’s real unmade choice between two accessible, cheap intoxicants — and the legislation that favours alcohol — still needs studying.^[1]