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.
