A botanical journal reports established diamba cultivation in Sierra Leone

In 1851, Sierra Leone’s colonial surgeon and apothecary R. O. Clarke published a short account of diamba in Hooker’s Journal of Botany.^[1] The report described an established crop and social practice.^[1] Its publication records when that knowledge entered this botanical journal, rather than when cannabis first arrived in the colony.^[1]

Seeds carried by displaced people

Clarke attributed the introduction of seeds to Central Africans removed from a slave ship by a British cruiser.^[1] He reported cultivation among their descendants and several other communities, including people he called Maroons, Settlers and Creoles.^[1]

The label “Congoes” in his account requires qualification.^[2] Duvall explains that such labels could group together captives embarked from western Central African ports.^[2] They did not necessarily identify a single language or pre-existing ethnic community.^[2]

British interception also did not mean freedom from further control.^[2] Duvall places these movements within a wider history in which formerly enslaved people remained subject to decisions about their residence and labour.^[2]

More than a name for a plant

Clarke distinguished a preparation using flowers and seeds, called Maconie, from a leaf preparation called Makiah.^[1] He also described cultivation, drying, sale and gatherings at people’s houses where a pipe was passed around.^[1]

Those details make the document evidence of agricultural and social knowledge, rather than merely a passing mention of an unfamiliar intoxicant.^[1] They also show why a general name for cannabis can conceal distinctions between preparations.^[1]

Duvall compares related vocabulary around the Atlantic.^[2] His argument combines words with documented population movements; a resemblance alone cannot identify the person who carried a seed or date a particular introduction.^[2]

The author and the editor disagreed

The report contains more than one voice.^[1] Clarke called the plant Cannabis sativa, while the journal’s editorial introduction compared it with Indian preparations and speculated about transmission from Egypt or Arabia.^[1] The editor’s suggested route was not a demonstrated migration history.^[1]

Clarke’s own attribution of the plant as indigenous to Central Africa is likewise a nineteenth-century claim, not the modern account of its botanical origin.^[1] His moralising descriptions and medicinal claims need the same historical attribution.^[1]

The document strengthens the history of diamba in Sierra Leone, while leaving its earliest local chronology unresolved.^[3] The colony’s later 1926 drug controls reached practices already documented decades before.^[3]