After arriving from South Asia approximately a thousand years ago, cannabis quickly spread throughout the African continent. European accounts of cannabis in Africa—often fictionalized and reliant upon racial stereotypes—shaped widespread myths about the plant and were used to depict the continent as a cultural backwater and Africans as predisposed to drug use. These myths continue to influence contemporary thinking about cannabis. In The African Roots of Marijuana, Chris S. Duvall corrects common misconceptions while providing an authoritative history of cannabis as it flowed into, throughout, and out of Africa. Duvall shows how preexisting smoking cultures in Africa transformed the plant into a fast-acting and easily dosed drug and how it later became linked with global capitalism and the slave trade. People often used cannabis to cope with oppressive working conditions under colonialism, as a recreational drug, and in religious and political movements. This expansive look at Africa's importance to the development of human knowledge about marijuana will challenge everything readers thought they knew about one of the world's most ubiquitous plants.
- Cover
- Contents
- Part I. Introduction: Pay Attention to African Cannabis
- 1. Cannabis and Africa
- 2. Race and Plant Evolution
- Part II: Evidence: How Cannabis Came to Africa, What Happened to It There, and How It Crossed the Atlantic
- 3. Roots of African Cannabis Cultures
- 4. Cannabis Colonizes the Continent
- 5. A Convenient Crop
- 6. Society Overturned: The Bena Riamba
- 7. Cannabis Crosses the Atlantic
- Part III: Discussion and Conclusions: What Carried Cannabis?
- 8. Working under the Influence
- 9. Buying and Banning
- 10. Rethinking Marijuana
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Index
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Audio
Adobe DRM
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