Nyamwezi men end the day smoking bhang in communal huts

In 1859, Richard Burton described the iwanza of Unyamwezi — the communal hut peculiar to the Nyamwezi country — and with it one of the finest early portraits of African cannabis sociability.^[1][2]

The public house

The hut had charms on the lintel, spears smoking in the rafters and a huge standing bedframe; travellers entered by right, and villagers spent their days — and, often even though married, their nights — “gambling, eating, drinking pombe, smoking bhang and tobacco, chatting, and sleeping like a litter of puppies destitute of clothing”.^[2] Men and boys would not be seen eating with women and mothers; the day held two meals, a breakfast often skipped for economy and a dinner, and the evening belonged to the hut.^[2]

A botany of names

Burton paused for a botanical sidebar that maps the plant’s whole western Indian Ocean world: Cannabis Indica, “the bang of Persia, the bhang of India, and the benj of Arabia”, the fasukh of the north and the dakha of southern Africa.^[2] It grew, he wrote, before every cottage door.^[2] Arabs smoked the sun-dried leaf with tobacco; Africans without — in huge waterpipes whose bowls held a quarter of a pound.^[2]

The cough as advertisement

Then the famous detail. Like Sindh’s jungle bhang, this variety “contracting the muscle of the throat, produces a violent whooping-cough, ending in a kind of scream, after a few long puffs, when the smoke is inhaled”.^[2] And if one man set the example the others were sure to follow — even the boys could be heard practising.^[2] These grotesque sounds, Burton wrote, were “not wholly natural”: they were a fashion of renown, “an announcement to the public that the fast youths are smoking bhang”.^[2]

The cough entered the language. Nyamwezi kept specific terms for aspects of cannabis use, including the hemp-smoker’s cough — evidence, as Duvall notes, of long familiarity.^[1] A Belgian traveller corroborated the evening smoking thirty years later, in 1890.^[1]

From the iwanza to the cough that advertised it, Burton’s evening captures cannabis fully woven into Nyamwezi social life — a thread that runs through Tanzania’s later history.^[1]