A history and social anthropology of the African origins of Jamaica's cannabis

Toby Leon Moorsom

Chapter 15 in Intellectual Property and Cannabis, 2025, pp 322-358 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter argues that the intellectual content of Jamaica's original cannabis strains derives from the African continent and the labour of Maroon peoples of Jamaica. First, using a theoretical framework of culture and resistance advanced by Williams (1977, 1985) and Hall (1998), and drawing on Marx's theory of primitive accumulation, this chapter demonstrates how the processes of decriminalisation have accelerated the dispossession of Maroon and Rastafarian peoples of the intellectual property of their forebears. The chapter challenges the dominant mythology tying the plant's Jamaican history with the arrival of East Indians post-emancipation, 1848. Second, it presents evidence of its hidden history, linking it culturally and materially to Africa. Third, it argues the plant formed part of a wider ethnobotanical pharmacology maintained in Maroon territories, yet also likely travelled via sub-dominant regional trade flows. The criminalisation of ganja served to devalue African labour to keep the wage rate on plantations low. It was also linked to processes of demonisation and debasement of African knowledge and identity, the criminalisation of Obeah, suppression of labour resistance, and to disrupt the appeal of the Rastafarian counter-cultural movement. Consistent with Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), it appears the legal framework built around cannabis entrenched the structural inequalities of the slave-plantation economy beyond the age of empire.

Keywords: Maroon; Rastafari; African knowledge; Bioprospecting; Reparative justice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035329380
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