An 1869 health report finds São Tomé smoking liamba for pleasure and medicine

In 1869 the physician M. Ferreira Ribeiro compiled the province’s public-health report, printed at Lisbon’s Imprensa Nacional in 1871, and cannabis is in it twice: once in the mouth, once in the medicine chest.^[1]

Smoked with pleasure

Surveying island diet — turtle, mutton, goat, green roast maize, feast pork — Ribeiro pauses on something worth noting: the pleasure with which the islanders smoke tobacco and the leaves of a plant they call liamba, taking contentment with aguardente as well.^[1] The observation is social, not clinical: liamba leaves belong to everyday enjoyment, beside food, drink and tobacco, two decades before any drug law touched the islands.^[1] The report’s botany is meanwhile frank about ignorance — no flora of the island had ever been properly examined, Lopes de Lima confessing in 1844 that São Tomé, the one overseas possession he never visited, defeated him — and Ribeiro pleads for the study not to be forgotten again.^[1]

Diamba, riamba, cânhamo

The medicine chest removes all doubt about what liamba was.^[1] Among the commonest medicinal drugs of the island Ribeiro lists “a liamba (diamba ou riamba, cânhamo)”: liamba glossed outright as diamba or riamba, hemp.^[1] It sits in a working pharmacopoeia — São Tomé balsam on wounds, caballine aloes, cannafistula, palma-christi, tamarinds, mallows, ginger, cola, sweet cane, fever leaves for the libo, guegue leaves for bruises and swellings, quime decoctions, snake-alfavaca, Santa Maria herb for maculo — the ordinary materia medica of an island without modern medicine.^[1] The triple synonym, recorded in an official Portuguese report, fixes the plant’s identity in the Atlantic trade zone’s own vocabulary: the diamba/riamba names travelled with the Bantu-speaking labourers the cocoa islands imported, and officials wrote them down.^[1]

Sold beside the quarters

Twenty years later the trade followed the labour.^[1] In the 1890s Portuguese Angolans sold “notable quantities” of cannabis to Angolan labourers in São Tomé — although the plant grew prolifically right by the labourers’ quarters.^[2] That paradox, preserved by Duvall, says something the 1869 report already implies: supply was never the point.^[1][2] Liamba moved through people, not fields — through Angolan networks of growers, sellers and smokers that officials could describe but never quite govern, down to the 1958 cannabis order and beyond.^[1]