Cannabis use in Sub-Saharan Africa is a deeply rooted historical practice, which continues to thrive despite the widespread criminalisation and harsh penalisation laws applied to illicit drugs.
Evidence of cannabis use in the region can be archeologically dated to the 14th Century in Ethiopia where clay smoking pipes containing traces of cannabinoids have been found, though it is likely that the practice dates much further back into antiquity given the multiple millennia old traditional cannabis use in Egypt at the north of the continent.
Africa’s drug landscape
Today, cannabis laws in Sub-Saharan Africa are a patchwork of confusing legislation. South Africa has decriminalised cannabis for personal use while creating a separate medical cannabis industry framework, while Zimbabwe allows cultivation for medical and scientific purposes and export. A number of other countries, such as Ghana and Lesotho, make similar concessions for industrial and scientific uses of the plant. But the majority of the region’s 49 countries continue to uphold laws with harsh penalties for personal cannabis possession and use.
Beyond cannabis, an entire market of traditional African ethnobotanical plants is opening up to the global stage; the visionary iboga shrub has become a major economic opportunity for the African nation of Gabon and the indigenous Bwiti people who have stewarded over it since antiquity. The South African succulent Kanna plant that has traditionally been used by the Khoisan people for endurance and social connection is now trending in the West, with dozens of companies offering this psychoactive plant across Europe and North America.
Among residents of Sub-Saharan Africa, the annual per capita income is under USD $2,000 annually, presenting an extremely challenging socioeconomic climate of limited income opportunities. Against this backdrop, the indigenous Pygmy populations in Central Africa occupy the lowest tier of the socioeconomic hierarchy.
The Pygmy cannabis industry
“Pygmy” is a generalised term to describe various indigenous peoples of Central Africa, ranging from the Batwa Pygmies in Uganda to the Bambuti and Efe peoples in the Congo basin and beyond. While some consider the term outdated, it is still widely used within the countries themselves and there is no term that has been introduced to replace it.
These communities lived in harmony with the lush rainforests of the region until they were evicted in the 1980s by the governments of Congo, Rwanda, Uganda and others through the establishment of National Parks on their land.
With Pygmy communities facing life in modern society for the first time, they faced intense social marginalisation from other ethnic groups, falling into a life in the rural periphery. In this context, cannabis cultivation and sale has become a viable economic lifeline afforded to the Pygmy peoples.
According to National Geographic, which reported in 2017 on the economic opportunity that cannabis created for Bambuti Pygmy communities in the North Kivu region, they highlighted that the illegal trade can earn Pygmy families up to USD $100 weekly in a region where many survive on less than USD $1 a day.
The dire economic circumstances and virtually non-existent employment opportunities for the community often make the very real risks of incarceration and constant harassment associated with the illicit cannabis trade palatable enough to withstand for people involved in the trade.
According to those interviewed by National Geographic, many of the clients of the Pygmy cannabis sellers are members of the same armed forces that detain and imprison them for cannabis sales. If the soldiers haven’t been paid in a while, they often extract bribes from the Pygmy cannabis vendors to hold them over until payday, at which point they may return and buy a fresh bundle of weed.
Being excluded from participating in their ancestral way of life and pushed away from access to the forest resources that have sustained the community since time immemorial has created a wildly unfair and inhumane scenario for the Pygmy communities across Sub-Saharan Africa. Several regional conflicts, like the Congo Civil Wars running (with interruptions) from 1996 to 2003, generated a sociopolitical environment rich for exploitation by oil companies, poachers, and roving militias with varying agendas. With Pygmy communities kept out of many modern industries, the cannabis trade remains one of the few viable and lucrative options to explore, even if its prohibition is enforced.
“The cannabis and exotic herbal supplement industry is quite different from your average agricultural industry where bottom of the line pricing is in place thanks to major agribusiness interests. With cannabis and herbal supplements, there is a major profit potential for communities that lean into the trade,” says Robert Lattig, who has been working directly with indigenous ethnobotanical cultivators and vendors on the ground in Africa for the better part of a decade with his company Healing Herbals.
“Our Kanna partners in South Africa earn considerably more than the average wages available to them with other industries, and the same is true for many other people operating in analogous ethnobotanical niches,” Lattig continues.
Hospitable tourism
In November of 2025, I was staying at a hotel in Uganda with a Batwa Pygmy community nearby, who had resided in the surrounding forests until their state-sponsored eviction in the 1980s. As our guide to the community explained, “the government wanted the forests to be for the animals and plants”.
The Pygmies were thrust into the bottom tier of an already socioeconomically challenged social hierarchy with few marketable skills. In Uganda, they are ostracised. Many Pygmy community members in the area today travel by foot to Rwanda to work as domestic servants or other low-paying jobs. As such, tourism has become another valuable economic lifeline.
In multiple regions across Uganda, independent guides and operators connected to the Pygmy communities organise trips to their villages to learn about their culture and experience traditional dances, tours of the village school, and related activities. I arranged with a local guide to visit a Batwa Pygmy community in their village on a hilltop, hoping to be able to learn something about their relationship to cannabis.
After a hospitable two hour visit and tour of the local village, we began to head back down the hill to our boat tied up to a mooring on a nearby lake. On the way back down to the boat, a splinter group of Pygmy teenagers split off from the main village and approached my guide and me.
“You want to try the cannabis here?” the guide asked me while serving as both a translator and weed broker.
The youths had a sizeable bundle of dried local cannabis wrapped up in a sheet of white paper with twine tying it together in a cylinder. They unbundled the herb, which looked like wild bush weed far removed from the high flying craft cultivation scene of my native California, and tore off a thin strip of the white paper it was in to roll up a joint.
The rotation formed organically, with three or four of the young men forming a loose circle around me and hitting the classic puff-puff-pass as though this practice were writ into some invisible and international law that transcends cultures and countries. I took my turn with the local cannabis and exhaled upon a draft of wind that swept the smoke out from the hilltop we stood upon and into the dramatic lake views surrounding us.
As drug policy across the Global North shifts to favour various regulated cannabis and various psychoactive plants and fungi, the economic opportunity for the most marginalised people in the world is clearly documented and could be a major benefit to the populations most in need of a socioeconomic boost. Until governments step in to create opportunities for these communities to take advantage of the natural resources growing in their backyard and in step with centuries of tradition, the rogue market will continue to attract and benefit people who are hard pressed to find meaningful economic opportunity elsewhere.
